Increase Your RSS Subscriptions Automatically

Everywhere you turn these days it seems somebody is showing off their RSS feed. Some are displaying massive feed buttons. Some are proudly displaying their subscriber count. Some are even engaging in friendly competitions to see who can get the most subscribers. It seems that your RSS subscription count is yet another bragging badge these days.

Putting aside egos and fun for a moment, there are some valid reason why you would want to increase your RSS subscriptions. For instance, increasing your RSS subscriptions can give you new opportunities to network with other bloggers. Increasing your subscription count is also a very effective way to maintain contact with your visitors, thus turning them into repeat visitors.

There have been a large number of articles and techniques published on how to increase your subscriber count. There are services available the make subscribing to your feed compatible with virtually every feed reader. There are plugins that prompt users to subscribe to your feed. There's even been some buzz lately on new services that promote your feed.

With all that has been published about getting more RSS subscribers, one thing I haven't seen yet is in-text links that prompt users to subscribe. I mention this because in-text links are a very effective form of advertising. It is also a very effective way to get subscribers to your feed. To see an example of this method in action, just look at every instance of the word "RSS" on this page. Every instance is a link to my feed. This is done automatically without me needing to type the actual hyperlink each time. I simply type in RSS and the link is created automatically.

Now, in all fairness, I have not searched exhaustively on this subject. I spent a little time searching for a pre-made solution, but after a few minutes, I decided it would just be easier, and quicker to come up with a quick and dirty hack myself. What I came up with is a simple php str_replace() code snippet that you add to your theme's functions.php file. This small snippet of code automatically searches through the body text of your posts and automatically converts every instance of the letters RSS with a hyperlinked variation.

Here is the code you need to add to your theme's functions.php file:

//String Replace RSS with Feed Link
function replace_content($content)
{
$content = str_replace('RSS', '<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/JmorrisOnline" title="Subscribe to My RSS Feed!" onMouseOver="window.status=\'Subscribe to My RSS Feed!\'; return true" rel="nofollow">RSS</a>',$content);
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','replace_content');

With this simple technique, you can easily increase the exposure of your feed subscription link, thus increasing your subscriber potential. This post serves as a working, if not annoyingly so, example of how this technique works. Keep in mind that most posts do not have as many mentions of RSS, so consider this example a bit of an extreme one.

A side benefit to this technique is that, with a little "out of the box" thinking, you could easily adapt this technique to affiliate marketing. For example, by replacing every instance of the word "hosting" with your affiliate link for your hosting provider.

NOTES:

1. In case you were wondering how I was able to type the letters RSS without them becoming a hyperlink, I used the ASCII decimal equivalents to generate the letters, like so:

   &#082;&#083;&#083;

2. If you want to add a nice feed icon next to your link, add class="rsslink" to the link function, then add following CSS in your theme's stylesheet:

   .rsslink {
   background-image:url(/path/to/your/images/feedicon.gif); /*adjust for the path to your feed icon */
   background-position:left center;
   background-repeat:no-repeat;
   padding:0 0 0 12px;
   }

   Don't forget to grab this icon ->

I hope you've found this short tutorial helpful. And don't forget, subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date on the latest posts from my blog.

You have read my two cents. Now have your say!
Do you know of an existing (free) plugin for Wordpress that automatically links every instance of a word to a specified link?
Do you find in-text links to be an effective form of marketing?
Did you figure out that I'm trying to get you to subscribe to my RSS feed?