Every blogger wants to get more readers for their blog and do it by asking their readers to ‘subscribe‘. But did you know that you could lose readers by using this word?

I never thought about it until I read this post on CopyBlogger that made me realize that ‘Subscriptions generally cost money’.

By asking your readers to subscribe, some might get the feeling that you are asking for money.

To know if its true, I asked a few people (who did not know much about blogging) what they understood by the words ‘Subscribe via RSS’ and ‘Subscribe via Email’.

Their responses were:

for ‘Subscribe via RSS’ - “what is RSS?”, “RSS? what’s that?”, “I don’t know what RSS is”

for ‘Subscribe via Email’ - “you are asking me money for sending something via Email?”, “What are you asking money for?”, “I am not sure.The site visitors have to pay?”

They had no idea what RSS was (which I already knew), but the interesting response was to ‘Subscribe via Email’ - all of them thought that I was asking my visitors money for sending something via Email!

Another interesting thing was when I asked one of them to click the ’subscribe via email’ button at DigitGeek. He was taken to the FeedBurner Email Subscription Request page and had no idea what to do next. He looked confused and said that if he ever landed on such a page, he would just close it and visit another site!

Make it clear to your site visitors

So how do we make it clear to our visitors that we don’t charge money for subscribing? By removing the word ’subscribe’ ofcourse!

At DigitGeek I replaced the ’subscribe via RSS’ button with a small RSS icon linking to the FeedBurner feed as the people who know about RSS will only need this.

I also replaced the ‘Subscribe via Email’ button with ‘Get FREE daily updates via Email’ and put an email form below to subscribe via email. The email form should reduce a bit of confusion.

It depends on your niche

The number of readers who misunderstand what you mean when you ask them to subscribe depends on your niche. Like for example, blogs on ‘blogging and make money online’ will have readers who are bloggers themselves and so most will not be confused with the word ’subscribe’.

Educate your readers about RSS

Also it is a good idea to educate your readers about RSS by putting up a page explaining about it and then linking to it next to your ’subscribe via RSS’ link. You may have already seen this on Problogger and other blogs.

Are you using the word ‘subscribe‘ on your blog? If so, what will you replace it with?