Winning the Web at 1,500 Subscribers – How I Did It Overnight
August 7, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
You may have noticed that the Feedburner stats on Winning the Web increased by over 50% in the past week – from 950 to 1500. I know that there’s been a Feedburner hack going around the past week, but this is not what I used to jump forward. In fact, I highly recommend that you DO NOT use the trick for your blog. Not only will Google/Feedburner plug the hole now that everyone knows about it, but it’s cheesy and will put a dent in your reputation. Trust me, most smart people can figure out whether or not you’re bluffing your stats.
To illustrate, artificially jacking up your blog’s Feedburner stats is like wearing a muscle suit. You might look big and strong on the outside (obviously fake), but at the end of the day, you won’t be able to hold your weight against the real deal bloggers.
So how did I legitimately gain over 500 RSS subscribers to my blog overnight?
Aweber blog broadcast. It turns out that Aweber, the service I use to send out my email newsletters (separate from RSS subscriptions), has a feature that enables bloggers to send out a roundup of all their posts at a certain date or after a certain number of posts. As I have it set up now, an email goes out to all of my newsletter leads whenever I’ve written 10 new posts. In essence, I’m combining Feedburner’s RSS features and Aweber’s email services. It’s a great combination that has had a huge impact on my subscription levels.
I’ve managed to build up over 500 subscribers to the email newsletter, mainly from promoting my past contests and having the signup box at the top of the blog. If you aren’t marketing your sites using email yet, I suggest you sign up for Aweber and get started.
So that’s how I did it in case anyone was wondering. It was my strategy going into the Blogging Idol competition, but it looks like I fell 8 subscribers short of winning it all.
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Let’s see if I get it… So you have two mail subscriptions: the feedburner one, that sends one email a day with the previous day’s posts and the Aweber one that sends an email every ten posts? That’s the trick???
Are you serious?
By no means is it a “trick” – just more ways to reach out to the readership. People subscribe to the Feedburner RSS feed to keep updated on the blog posts. The Aweber email list is something completely different where I send out relevant messages and special articles from time to time. Doing a RSS blog broadcast on Aweber just combines the two in my subscriber count and thus pushes me over the hump.
In the end no matter what you do, you always need good content to keep people coming back for more.
You actually managed to get those newsletter subscribers subscribe to your RSS as well, by sending them a roundup of every 10 posts you write. Did you encourage them to subscribe to RSS in that email or did you just send the posts? If you did encourage them, how? A simple link, a specific incentive?
I just send them 10 posts in an email, but that’s an excellent strategy you bring up. Encouraging them to sign up for the actual RSS feed as well may help increase numbers even more.
I did it on a personal blog this week as well, I hope It’ll give me a few more subscribers
How many people do you have on your email list?
currently, i only have 25 on a personal blog
That’s a neat strategy. Congrats on the growing success!
Thanks! Hopefully many more coming as well.
Just sending them the 10 posts automatically makes them a RSS reader? Or do they actually have to go and subscribe?
I have about 23k in my aweber, but it’s spread across separate “groups”. How many groups do you have?
Yep, sending the 10 posts automatically makes them an RSS reader according to Feedburner. It works well because it combines 2 different outlets of marketing into 1 count.
You should definitely take advantage of your list of 23k leads. I only have 1 group in Aweber so far.
Nope, nope, you cheated. I know your tactics! CHEATER!!!
Lol… on a serious note, that was definitely an interesting move you did and you almost took the Blogging Idol contest with it! I’m not going to lie, when I first saw it I had my doubts until I read how you did it.
Nice strategy!
Jay
You’ve figured me out..
I think it’s a legit strategy mainly because there isn’t as much overlap between Aweber and Feedburner as I had initially thought. My philosophy is that the more methods of reaching out to readers the better.
Interesting strategy, but it still does not make sense fully to me. I like how you leverage email though.
Which part of it is confusing you? Aweber is a different service than Feedburner and the “blog broadcast” feature allows you to send out emails of the latest RSS posts – thus adding to the subscriber count.
Email is known to have the highest response rate out of any other form of online marketing. Definitely a tool you should be using!
Thats a neat addition to what you could already be doing to increase rss subscribers… great job!
Thanks! Anything you can do to increase readership and improve your reputation/social proof is a good thing.
Deception, whether it be black hat SEO or jacking up your feedburner stats is never a good long term business strategy. You’ve shown it IS possible with the right strategy and a little hard work. CONGRATULATIONS!
I would definitely have to agree with you there. Black hat tactics work – there’s no denying that. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pull off, so why not use that same time and effort to build something long-term and worthwhile?
I also use the aweber feature, I’ve also found it to increase the responses to my blog, as those looking for great content know where to find it.
Yep, that’s exactly what I was going for – to try and put the blog in as many places possible. Even if you have a ton of RSS subscribers, sending out emails will do wonders for your response rate.
you know actually gyutae, i was thinking that you are gonna win the competition when i started to saw the massive streak…
Yeah, he beat me out by 8 subscribers… it was a close race, but I’ll have something even better for next time.
At this rate you are going, you should catch up with john chow before the year is up. :>)
John Chow is a long way ahead, but I think that’s a good goal to aim for, don’t you think?
I never knew about the hack but I don’t see the point in using it.
The point is basically to trick readers into subscribing to your blog. If you see a blog with over 20,000 subscribers, you’re more inclined to subscribe yourself because of the social proof effect. People are more inclined to do what’s proven and popular.
Brilliant tip to pump up subscribers. I’m sure the number is still growing. Congrats!
Thanks for the continued support, Irish. Let’s hope that number grows even more. I say to 3,000 before the year is up!
I have noticed many bloggers are using aweber to improve their businesses. I should give it a try, it seems pretty good.