On the 7th. of November, I started a campaign to increase my blog’s subscribers and left it at that, with no follow ups of whatsoever. It has been 20 days since and I have refrained form looking at my feeds number wanting to let it increase to a respectable level before doing so, so that I will get the thrill of seeing a really bloated figure.
When I started the campaign, the figure was hovering at about 70, on some days, it goes up a bit higher, but never less than 70. I had wanted to wait for a month before checking how it went, but after reading Jonlee’s post explaining What Causes RSS Fluctuations, my itchy fingers got the better of me and I had to take a peep. The figure that greeted me was far from satisfaction, but I consider the 20 day campaign, though not much of one, a small success though I had only managed to garner only about 30 subscribers within that period, which about equivalent to 1.3 subscriber per day.
This result had me asking myself what was wrong and I came to this conclusion.
For Subscribers to Increase, We Have to Increase Our Readership Base First.
That is not a nuclear formula that needs a nuclear scientist to decipher. Taking a look at few of the more popular blogs which has more than 10,000 subscribers, they almost all have the double amount of daily readers or more, so it safe to say the the ratio of subscribers as versus to daily visitors is about 1:2.5 or 3. Which means for every 2.5 or 3 readers they have one subscriber. This brings their overall readership base to about 30,000 per day, which is one hell of an attractive figure.
Coming back to my blog, since my average number readers to this blog is about 250 per day, having a subscriber base of the present 100 is considered normal and not too ugly. That being said, I will, of course like to see more.
2 Unorthodox Way To Increase Your RSS Figures.
The first way can be found at Jonlee’s blog which require you to stick this simple code at your themes header file in between the opening and the closing of the <head> tag
<link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://your Feeds URL” />
This is suppose to force your browser to load your Feeds whenever some one logs in to your blog or something to that nature. I did not fully read up that post to understand how it works but for those who wants to experiment with it by all means go ahead, though Jonlee said it has only a temporary effect.
Another quick way to cheat your audience is by using the feedcount chicklet image of some blogs that has thousands of feeds. In fact you can even show that you have as many subscribers as Problogger.net if you want to.
All you have to do is to right click on Darren Rowse feedcount chicklet and “copy image location” Open your own feed chicklet’s codes and replace your chicklets image location with that of problogger.net and like magic, you will have more than 10,000 subscribers! Just to show you, the first one is my original feedcount as of today, and the second is the manipulated one that of shoemoney.
Mine with Shoemoney’s stats.
Both these chicklets will still lead you to my subscription page, so unless someone right clicks on the image and look at the source of the image, no one will know your dirty secret. LOL
Yeah… my number of subscribers has been growing but still far behind shoemoney! You send some readers my site please.
I don’t see cheating as an option. If your readers find out that, you may end up with almost no readers at all. Besides, people should think in the first place what they want: do they want real readers, or they want only the others to see how many readers they’ve got?
Simonne
I agree with you. It isn’t an option for me too. Nobody should cheat, whether it be their number of readers, subscribers or even their earnings. There are many ways that those with the know-how can find out the truth.
Obviously cheating would not be the way to go. Pretending to have high subscriber numbers would only get you so far anyway without actually having subscribers.
Mike, Jason
I couldn’t agree with you guys more. To cheat ourselves and our readers is a disaster waiting to happen. Once the bubble burst, so does our reputation and credibility.
Doing it the old fashioned way is still the best formula.