Here's an update on last month's post, Five Feeds. My subscription list is now down to 44 and I couldn't be happier! I no longer dread opening my newsreader and can finally keep up with the volume of material. Better still, I now give that material the attention it deserves, rather than obsessively skimming in order to get through the posts.
My tool of choice, NetNewsWire, provides a clever tool that shows you which of your feeds hasn't updated in a number of days [view example]. This is very handy. I found it interesting that only 2 of my 44 feeds hadn't updated at least once in the last 10 days. This gave me the idea for, what else, a list!
Top 5 Ways to Keep Subscribers
1. Send the full text of your posts.
2. Update your blog every 7-10 days.
3. Don't include ads. I'll post more about my week experiment soon.
4. Provide interesting, original content that can't be found elsewhere
OR
5. Provide the extremely valuable service of a human aggregator, someone who knows a subject inside and out, follows the relevant sites and blogs obsessively, and provides a summation for her readers.
Thanks for the list Bill. My personal view is that we are getting to the point where there are too many generalist human aggregators and that we need to find more specialist ones.
From my own perspective though, it seems to be easier to find the human aggregators, it's far more difficult to find the people providing original content.
Posted by: Graham Chastney | June 20, 2005 at 03:58 AM