Trying to get in good with Google can be a smart strategy for getting traffic pointed toward your blog, but search engine optimization can only get you so far and it can result in some rather inconsistent traffic. If you’re hoping that your blog will get as popular as Shoemoney, Problogger, and John Chow, the key to success is to increase your number of RSS subscribers. When people subscribe to your feed, they are motivated to return to your blog on a daily basis, checking up on your latest content and contributing to your online community.

In terms of tactics, you can try many different things to get people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Over at Beyond the Rhetoric, I’m trying to get people to subscribe via email by giving away a free video game. People love contests that are easy to enter, so this is one strategy that you may try to employ on your own blog.

There’s also the Stripe Ad that I’ve mentioned in this space in the past, but one of the cooler plug-ins that might help increase your subscriber base is the What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress plug-in. What this does is place a text box underneath the title of your blog post, asking readers to subscribe. You can use the plug-in for other purposes as well, but the call to action (RSS subscription) is its primary purpose. You can see it in action at Bloggrrl.com.

You don’t want to bombard your readers with too many messages, but the What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in could be a viable option for increasing your number of subscribers.