Encouraging people to subscribe to your blog is extremely important in building and maintaining a long term following. Personally, I use Feedburner.com to handle all my feeds as it’s user friendly and I suspect it’s slightly favoured by Google (since Google owns Feedburner.com).

One way that I’ve found helps encourage people to subscribe to your feed is by a) blatantly asking them to subscribe to your feed b) showing them the feed counter of how many subscribers you have.
Part a) above is pretty obvious on my blog, just down the left side of my blog and you’ll see what I mean.

For part b), I’ve tried it on one of my other blogs and I’ve slowly noticed the total number of subscribers increase as the days go by. Have a look for yourself:

For now it's going up... let's hope it continues

I put up the feed counter (which you can see under my ‘subscribe to me’ image on the left) when my total number of subscribers was 20 people. Since then it has risen up to 47 at it’s peak, but it does go up and down, although never below 30 people.

Why does the total number of subscribers go up when they see the feed counter? I think it has something to do with ‘authority’. They deem you to have some sort of credibility if they see that other people care enough to subscribe to your feed, so they might as well do the same.

But I suggest to only put it up when you have 20+ people subscribing to your blog. Showing people a low number could have the exact opposite effect as what I’ve described above. Some people suggest you don’t display your feed counter until it reaches 100 visitors, but you can try it lower and see how it goes.

Offering people something free for subscribing to your blog would probably increase the number even higher than what I was able to manage. Maybe I’ll give it a try for this blog and see what happens?

Cya!

-William Lee