It’s all about growth. Today I took a look at the lifehack.org feed stats at Feedburner (I love metric), I realize lifehack.org has came from a long way since 2005.

It took around 1.5 years to grow from 0 to 12,000 subscribers, but I am pretty happy with the progress. Put a ruler from the start of the graph to the end of the graph, it’s a straight line which shows a pretty steady growth:

That’s the beauty of RSS feed. If a web site adds value to its readers, and its feed gives enough materials for user to read, readers will keep the RSS subscription and keep coming back for more.

Let me share number of ways which I learned during these two years on RSS feeds. You could grow your RSS subscriptions from 0 to 12,000 as well.

Full Feed instead of Partial Feed. RSS feed is a way of notification, but it is not attractive enough to be just notifying readers for new posts. The feed entry needs to give something readers can read. You must give some special privileges to the regular readers. Save their time by reading your posts on the feed. I love full feed, and I am holding back myself on subscribing to partial feeds.

Invite readers to subscribe your feed. Promote it in your site. Provide an easy way to subscribe the feed. Having the small little feed icon on the location bar in the browser does not cut it.

Content is still the king for RSS feed. Similar to the first point, what’s your reason to subscribe a RSS feed? I subscribe a feed because usually on my initial visit on the site, I found out the site’s content is great and I am planning to come back for more. I wanted to keep track of the site for more good content. Content is still the king. No attractive content, no subscription.

RSS is the way to keep regular readers coming back for more. Frankly except number of regular sites I visit by URL (under 3 sites), I rely on my feed readers to notify me on new posts. RSS is here for generating and keeping regular readers, often it’s not for attracting newcomers.

Offer alternatives to subscribe the RSS feed. There are people who do not use a feed reader. Don’t exclude them. Give them an alternative. Use an email subscription for RSS service such as Feedblitz so that they can subscribe the feed with their email account.

Use tools to spice up the feed. Just like a web site, it needs some quick shortcuts and options for people access your site. Add an easy way to share the post entry. Put a link to your comment area. Create a link to their favorite online bookmarking system. Drop a link to digg the feed entry. Feedburner could help you with all of those.