Hello again, my social networking friend!

Subscription is something you would usually associate with a prescribed drug you’ve been taking. Either you or your insurance company has to pay for that drug. In other words, someone happens to be paying for something, and you don’t want people to think that your RSS feed is for sale. So whenever a non-savvy internet N0b comes to your site and sees the word subscribe they’ll think you’re trying to get them to pay for something. Depending on what kind of blog you run, you might want to change the text subscribe to something else.

Although it only takes a single intelligent thought to come up with this theory, I didn’t do it on my own. I realized the extent of the word subscribe’s negative effects after reading a post on CopyBlogger. You can find the statistics, (a 254% rise in subscribers) after changing the subscribe text to something else on their post. What you’ll find is a somewhat drawn-out post that tells you what you need to do to increase your subscribers, and a screen shot to back the information up.

My question is, do you really want or need subscribers that don’t even know what subscribe means? Sure any kind of reader can bring a boost to your traffic and is a potential ad clicker. Though, if that person doesn’t know what subscribe means, will they know how to use their newly found RSS feed? So, if that person doesn’t know how to use an RSS feed, how will the feed help you to bring that person back to your blog? Copyblogger doesn’t seem to see a good enough reason to switch their subscribe button to something new either.

So in the end it’s up to you, the webmaster. Do you want to change your subscribe button to say something like, “Get our Feed Sent to You!” for the people who don’t know what subscribe means, and probably don’t know how to use an RSS feed anyways. Or would you leave your subscribe button alone for the more tech-savvy internet browsers. Who knows, maybe the people that know what subscribe means will get their feelings hurt when they think you are downplaying their intelligence.

Maybe changing the button to say “Subscribe for Free” would do just fine. Or, maybe I’m just delving way to deep into this subject.