When it comes to finding out how much your blog is worth, there are several metrics that you can consider. For better or for worse, most people look at things like Google PageRank, Alexa rankings, Technorati authority, and so forth. One metric that really shows how valuable and popular your blog happens to be, however, is the number of people who are subscribed to your RSS feed.

For this reason, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to your feed, even if the feed itself isn’t exactly monetized. This way, people are always kept up to date on the latest and greatest your blog has to offer, and it also ensures that they keep your blog on their mind. Contrast this to a simple bookmark that can easily be lost in the mix and never seen again.

By and large, people subscribe to feeds using some sort of aggregator — Bloglines and Google Reader are among the most popular — but there are countless users who do not use such services. In order to capture this more mainstream audience, you should offer subscription via email. After all, everyone on the Internet may not use Google Reader, but they most definitely have an email address. On my own blog, I have recently swapped out the email subscription link in the sidebar to an actual subscription form. The results have not been immediate, but at least I know that it’s there.

The next step would be to promote email subscription. Hint: a contest is a brewing at Beyond the Rhetoric. I’ll let you all know how well it performs.