I have been administrating a lot of high traffic blogs since a few years, but I've never been able to get too many RSS subscribers and I don't understand what I do wrong. I'll let you know what I did, what I'd like to do and it would be great to talk about it and exchange out experience. What I did I placed big buttons in the sidebar I placed texts and buttons above and below the articles I placed email forms above, below the articles and in the sidebar I placed the subscribe buttons in the header I made a page where I explain what RSS is and linked it from underneath the RSS buttons. What I am planning to do A subscribe popup which explains them that it's free, I send no spam and offer them both options ( RSS and email ) Offering them something free if they subscribe by email, but I didn't know what, because of the niches ( tech, auto etc. )
If you are getting great traffic from search engines then that's well enough. My believe is that RSS readers are not much importance unless you are really targeting to do a very big online business !