Blogs Don’t Really Need Subscribers.

I will never understand the hype about getting readers to subscribe to our blogs. Why the hell do blogs need subscribers? Give me a real live visitor anytime. Subscribing to blogs is not the same as subscribing to a magazine. We subscribe to magazines because we worry we might miss an issue if we buy from new-stands. In fact that is the main reason why people subscribe to anything. They worry they will miss out something. But blog?

Bloggers encourage their readers to subscribe. They say something like, “subscribe to my feeds so you will not miss my next update” What? You mean you are going offline? Or are you planning to turn your blog into a subscription base site? Else how can anyone of your visitors miss you next big update?

Feed Readers were invented for the benefit of blog readers. Like the Newsagent that I used to read on the various topics that I have subscribed, these Feed Readers does the same thing. The subscriber gets to read their favorite blogs all in one place without having to surf all over the Net. Blog subscribers are normally serious blog readers but subscribing to your blog doesn’t mean they read your blogs daily. For all I know, they might just browse over your topic of the day and keep scrolling down without actually opening your post.

Somewhere along the line, people started to get obsessed with their number of blog subscribers. A high subscription base augurs well for the blogger in terms of their ego. It became a gauge for the blog’s popularity. Ways and means were created to increase their subscription base so that they have a respectable number to show in their sidebar. Why the obsession, I will never know, but BloggingExperiment.com is really going all out to lure subscribers by having a contest with mind blowing prizes.

Now I am not linking to BloggingExperiment’s contest with their required anchor text needed to qualify for the contest. The prizes are great but I don’t plan to enter because of the “twist” needed before they are going to give away anything to the winner. What is the “twist”? Here is the “twist”

The Twist:
However, there is one twist: For the prize to be awarded, Feedburner must report at least 150 subscribers to this site when the contest ends at 12 p.m. CST (I believe that’s GMT -6 but double check me on that) on September 1st. If it’s at 149, there’s no winner. Now wait, before you start writing an angry comment or email, realize that’s less than 6 new subscribers per day and it’s been growing at pretty good clip without me promoting a contest.

The prizes gets even better if BloggingExperiment can hit more than their target.

Why am I against this twist? You guys go and read what Darren Rowse has to say in his post titled, Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate? September 1st is a weekend, if you haven’t check your calendar.

II am really surprised with BloggingExperiment’s obsession over their number of subscribers. In all fairness, they have a great blog and it is only a matter of time before they get their deserved subscribers. The blog is less than 2 month’s old and they already have 68 subscribers at this time of writing, so why the hurry to get subscribers. I think they should channel their effort into getting more visitors instead, buthen what do i know, their experiment is to make “from $0 to a full time income in only one year” and they have 322 days left. Whether the experiment succeed or fail will depend totally on their definition of what “full time income” means.

No, I am not against people subscribing to blogs. It’s good for blogs to have a loyal pool of subscribers, but frankly speaking, I hope these loyal subscribers will be loyal visitors instead. If Blog Stats and Feed Stats were given as a choice, give me Blog Stats any day. I will rather have 500 daily visitors than to have 500 subscribers who doesn’t visit and maybe doesn’t even read what I wrote.