Behold, A Blogging Sower Went Forth To Sow Links

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One of the more well known parables of the New Testament is the parable of the sower. In it, Jesus tells a story of a certain sower:

3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:

5 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

6 And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

The parable is about who would accept the Gospel and who wouldn’t, but I think it’s just as applicable to blogging. In the parable, there are three kinds of people: those who flat out reject the gospel, those who accept but because of persecution or tribulation later give up on it, and those who accept and become faithful followers.

In the world of blogging, readers can be divided into three similar groups: those who never read your blog; those who read it once, but never come back; and those who read it and become blog subscribers. In the end, we all want blog subscribers. Not only do RSS subscribers read your content consistently, they’re more apt to share what you write with others. Thus, in the long run, more RSS subscribers mean more readers.

What can the parable of the sower teach us about getting RSS subscribers?

If you noticed in the story, the sower wasn’t very methodical about where he cast his seed. He was just throwing it around everywhere. Some of it landed in good soil and some of it landed among rocks and thorns.

We should be like the sower. Instead of seed, we have links to our blog. Our field is not only the entire internet, but also the real world. We should be “sowing” our links everywhere. If sowing links is like sowing seed, then only a third of the people who check your link out will become subscribers to your blog. 2/3 of the people who see your link won’t be coming back. If you want to increase the number of RSS subscribers, you have to increase the number of that 1/3 of potential subscribers.

Let’s do some math:

Let’s say you have 1 link floating out there in cyberspace and 100 people see it. 66 of those people won’t become subscribers, but 33 will.

Let’s increase the number of links to 10. Each link is seen by 100 people, so we have 1000 people who are aware of your blog. Now you’ve increased the pool of potential subscribers to 333! Of course 666 of those 1000 people won’t be coming back, but who cares! You’ve got 333 possible RSS subscribers.

Of course, the math is very simplified. It doesn’t work exactly like that in the real world, but I think it shows the principle. The more you expose your link, the more you increase your chance of getting regular readers.

So, How Can I Sow My Links

The number of different ways you can sow your links is only limited by your imagination and creativity. Here’s a short list of ways you could possibly sow your links:

• Put your blog site as your e-mail signature
• Comment in forums and put site address as your signature
• Comment on other people’s blogs and make sure to put your site in the “Website” box in the comment form
• Include your blog address on your business cards
• Just tell people you meet your blog address

I’ve been putting several of these into practice. The sowing technique I found surprisingly fruitful is commenting in forums. I’ve received a nice increase in traffic to The Frugal Law Student ever since I started posting regularly in forums. I have well over 100 comments on one forum, so that’s 100 sown links.

The Harvest

At the end of the parable of the sower, Jesus talks about how those who accept his message bear different amounts of fruit:

23 But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

The same goes with RSS subscribers. Some will just subscribe to your blog and read it regularly, which is great! We want regular readers. However, some of your new subscribers possibly could bring new readers to your blog by a hundredfold or sixty by sharing your blog with people they know.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start sowing those links!

[tags]blogging tips, parable of the sower, RSS, [/tags]

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14 Comments

1. daniel on 08.06.2007 at 15:22 (Reply)

   RSS is the best, and I say that as someone who came to the RSS party very late. I’m not sure why I was such a late adobter of RSS. I think maybe something about the phrase “subscribe to RSS feed” just didn’t sound like something I’d want to do. It sounded like something geeks and news junkies would want to do.
   Then one day I was on one of the websites I visit and I saw a button that said “Add to Google”. That sounded like something I might want to do. I like google. I have a personalized google home page. So, I clicked, and a few clicks later, I had Google Reader setup. Easy. I love it. Now I can’t get along without out. I keep track of about 50 sites from the one site and my list keeps growing. I cherry pick the articles that catch my eye and mark the rest as “Mark all as read.” Which brings me to a couple questions, if you don’t mind my asking. I notice that you and the other bloggers on my reader list use feedburner.

   How does feedburner tell you when someone like me adds you to my reader? (How does it do that?)

   If I read one of your articles in google reader without every opening your site, does feedburner capture that as a page read?

   And does feedburner know the difference between when I do a “Mark all as read” and when I actually open entries and read them?

   Just wondering.

   Regards
   daniel

2. Brett McKay on 08.06.2007 at 21:38 (Reply)

   Daniel-
   Thanks for stopping by and commenting! I think the concept of RSS feeds is difficult to comprehend. I was a late bloomer myself in regards to feeds. If I found a blog I liked, I would just visit it again. But as soon as I found out I could read articles from all my favorite blogs in one convenient place, I was hooked. I think I’m a little too addicted, though. I’ve lost count of the number of feeds I’m subscribed to.

   Now to your questions…

   These were really good. I didn’t know the answers right off the bat, so I had to do some research.

   Q: How does Feedburner know when someone has subscribed?
   A: I found two different answers. First, many web-based aggregators such as Google Reader report the number of subscribers for whom they are requesting the feed in the user-agent string. So, if use Google Reader, Googl Reader will report to Feedburner that x number of people are subscribing to my blog. The other answer is that Feedburner keeps track of the number of times my Feed is requested. So, every time someone clicks on my feed button to subscribe, it sends a message to Feedburner saying someone has requested my blog and it’s counted.

   Q: If I read one of your articles in Google reader without every opening your site, does Feedburner capture that as a page read?
   A: No. You’ll have to read the article in your reader for it to be marked as read.

   Q:Does Feedburner know the difference between when I do a “Mark all as read” and when I actually open entries and read them?
   A: Yeah. I have a stat page on Feedburner that shows me when someone has clicked and opened an entry. If you don’t click on anything, but just marked it as read, nothing is counted.

   I hope that made sense. Again, thanks for asking those great questions. I learned something new!

   Take care and I hope to see you around here more often!

3. Liz Strauss on 12.06.2007 at 06:17 (Reply)

   Brett,
   I think this is magnificent. You came at the idea from a new point and put tremendous value here. Your advice at the end is such a bonus. Bravo!

4. Brett McKay on 12.06.2007 at 08:02 (Reply)

   Liz,
   Thanks for stopping by! It was fun taking a well known story and imbuing new meaning into it. I need to do similar writing exercises more often. Not only are they fun to write, they’re fun to read as well. Take care!

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13. Lillie Ammann on 17.06.2007 at 10:50 (Reply)

    This is a great analogy and great advice. I also have a question about RSS feeds. I read feeds in Internet Explorer 7 - I never click on the feed button on the blog itself, just in my IE toolbar. Does Feedburner count me as a subscriber?

14. Kyriacos on 14.01.2008 at 01:37 (Reply)

    Interesting…

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