How To Increase Your RSS Subscribers While Making Your Them Hate You

Posted by chris.whiteley

February 3, 2009

liar

I am continually trying to find new ways to draw people to my blog and subscribe to my RSS feed. I am sure that is what most of us want. We all have different motivations, but we all want the same results: A buttload of subscribers. Most of us want more readers so we can gain a bit of fame, as well as make some cash from advertising. I like to follow a simple equation here:

Whiteley Enterprises + a high subscriber count= Selling advertising. Which to me equates to increasing the amount of fluid in my liquor cabinet.

I have been stewing on this method of getting more subscribers for quite some time, but I never really wanted to implement it as I kind of respect and enjoy the company of my readers. So I am not going to screw with you guys just to satisfy my ego and cravings for booze.

The theory:

When you first start a blog it is tough to get people to subscribe to your blog, and if you display your Feedburner chicklet of 3 subscribers people will generally discount your blog as being new, and not worth subscribing to. This is the main reason why people don’t show their subscriber count until they reach around 100 subscribers. Once you have hit this mark it is much easier to have people subscribe to your blog, as people will see that others have found your blog worthy to subscribe to, so they will subscribe as well.

So it kind of snowballs, the higher your subscriber count is, the easier it is to gain new subscribers. So it is that first hump that is tough to get over, but once you have a ton of subscribers you can pretty easily get more.

The Method:

Like I said earlier I had been toying with this for a while, and I am not going to do it on my blog because I have a solid foundation of readers that I don’t want to offend. There are a few ways to that you can make it look like you have more subscribers than you actually have:

Steal someone elses feedburner code
Use the Feedburner Hack

Of course both of those methods may have either been fixed, or are in the process of being fixed ( I haven’t fully researched either method but feel free to do so and share). My idea was to create a simple gif image that showed an inflated number of subscribers. It’s not entirely honest, but it could give those new blogs an extra push to becoming more popular. OF course if you show an inflated RSS count and manage to deliver cruddy content, then people will eventually figure it out. Then they will laugh and point at you as if you were that kid in school that wet themselves. Nobody likes a blog wetter.

I have cooked up a few images that you can use to show a false number of subscribers on your blog. I would be curious to see how much of an effect that this would have on someones blog. So if anyone is using, or plans on using this method leave a link to your blog in the comments below so we can follow your progress. Just save the image below and crop out the image that you would like to use. Or if you would like a custom one made with different colours and reader numbers please use the contact form ad let me know the background and text colour (in hexidecimal) as well as the number of subscribers and I can make one for you.

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