A relatively new development in blogging is RSS landing pages. In a nutshell, landing pages are web pages that the user “lands on” from search engines, ppc campaigns, and links.
An RSS landing page should give the user some concise reasons why they should subscribe to your feed. In addition, they should also contain links to your feed, as well as buttons for some of the popular feed readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. RSS landing pages may also contain an HTML version of your Feed, and even an option for e-mail subscriptions.
The ultimate goal of your landing page should be to get the user to become a valuable reader. It can be pretty easy to get more readers if your content is good, but some bloggers give RSS subscribers something extra in an attempt to win over even more subscribers.
To get the users to see the page you can do a variety of things, the most effective of which are running PPC campaigns and making the content keyword rich so search engines will “file your page” under the correct keywords. And also, don’t forget about linking to your landing page from somewhere on your site. Something I have been noticing more and more is bloggers adding their landing page as a link on their navigation menu.
Some bloggers even go a step further by creating a separate landing page for an e-mail newsletter which is nothing more than old posts from their blog.
Landing pages are incredibly simple, yet highly effective. It should be noted that some people call these types of pages “blog landing pages”, however, I think RSS is a better description. After all, the ultimate goal is to get them to become a valuable reader.
Edit: Rephrased “entire goal is to get them to subscribe to your feed”
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
February 26th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
“The entire goal of your landing page should be to get the user to subscribe to your feed”
not sure i agree. that is a very transactional approach.
the conversion is getting the user to read the content and be interested in more content like it. i could even argue the conversion should be getting the reader to read an additional post. as long as there is a text link to subscribe to the feed after the post you’re set. the rest of overthinking. I think.
so a blog lp is more like a category page than a product page imo. i refer to this as “content merchandising.”
February 26th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
“The entire goal of your landing page should be to get the user to subscribe to your feed”
not sure i agree. that is a very transactional approach.
the conversion is getting the user to read the content and be interested in more content like it. i could even argue the conversion should be getting the reader to read an additional post. as long as there is a text link to subscribe to the feed after the post you’re set. the rest of overthinking. I think.
so a blog lp is more like a category page than a product page imo. i refer to this as “content merchandising.”
February 26th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I should have phrased it as more like “The ultimate goal is to get the user to become a valuable reader”, instead of making it seem like “hah another sucker signed up for our feed”
Just fixed it up and added an edit note at the post’s footer.