Boosting RSS Subscribers: One Unethical Method & One Great Method
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Shortly after publishing my post about RealRank, Ted Murphy of Izea was kind enough to drop by and comment.
Damn, that man’s alerts work fast!
I argued that the number of RSS subscribers should be included in any metric that is being utilized to describe “Reach” or “Influence”. Ted countered that they are working on how to do so in a way that eliminates the ability to “Game” RSS numbers to improve ranking. Obviously, he’s correct to do so.
Moving forward though, one has to wonder what consitutes “Gaming” RSS numbers, and what is just good old-fashioned marketing? In trying to develop a way to dissect this data, signals will be needed to identify true “Gaming” and distinguish it from aggressive, ethical promotion. To that end, I’ll describe two things I did to grow my RSS numbers, one unethical and one ethical.
Don’t worry, the unethical experiement was short-lived. 
Unethical Gaming of RSS Subscriber Numbers
Before I start, even in this method, there are gray areas and completely innocent scenarios.
The driving force for me to use this method was when I noticed that my RSS numbers grew faster as I gained more subscribers. I was pretty sure there were a lot of people like me - one of the ways I decide if someone has content worth reading is to check their subscription numbers. Social proofing, as it were. More subscriptions meant better content, so I would subscribe.
One of the tactics I saw described by an A-List Blogger was to create multiple RSS Reader accounts and subscribe many times. There are a couple ways to do this: go to each free reader, like Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, maybe set up an e-mail subscription, and subscribe to your blog in each. Many times, this happens innocently as we try new readers and discontinue using old ones without removing the feeds. No big deal, completely innocent.
But you can also go and create 30 email addresses and sign up a couple new accounts each day on Bloglines and subscribe to your blog and you have 30 new subscribers in a couple weeks time without any big one-day spike. I did this.
However, I noticed that if I didn’t log into each Bloglines account and access my feed every day, my numbers dropped in direct proportion; when I did access the feed, they popped right back up.
Frankly, that’s a lot of damn work. It’s great for boosting numbers, but do you really want to be logging into 30 Bloglines accounts every day?
Not me. Experiment technically successful, but not on a practical level. Plus, it “feels” wrong.
Increasing RSS Subscribers by Being a Remora
(or, associate your brand with other great brands)
Ted also published a related post where he used an analogy of Sharks and Remoras in classifying bloggers. I am most assuredly a Remora, rarely breaking any news or teaching you anything you didn’t already know. I just add to the conversation and sometimes a pearl will drop out. Even blind squirrels find a nut once in a while.
But, I discovered a fantastic, ETHICAL way to boost my RSS subscriber numbers by complete accident. The revelation came to me when the Google - Feedburner - Blogger triumvirate made it possible for blogspot Bloggers to get visibility of the entire universe of subscribers last summer.
Back in February, I was testing different feed readers, having grown bored with Bloglines. I came across Netvibes and created a tab of feeds of some quality poker bloggers, and included my own. Then, I saw that it was possible to share this tab across the Netvibes ecosphere, did so without really considering the impact, and promptly forgot about it. I had about 40-50 RSS subscribers on that blog at the time.
Fast forward to July when Feedburner integration for Blogger became a reality, and I discovered I had over 220 subscribers!
Digging into the numbers, I found Netvibes readers consisted half of my readers. Investigating further, I found that the tab I created and forgot was downloaded over 100 times. Since then, I’ve updated the tab two or three times to include more great poker blogs, and removed a couple that were dormant. I believe the cumulative installs is well over 600 the last time I checked, and my total RSS subscriber numbers were just touching 300.
Why the discrepancy in numbers?
First, the tabs are completely customizable once installed, so Netvibes users can add or delete blogs for which they do not care. There is also a certain percentage that set up their feeds, then abandon them for a different reader. Between the deletions/abandons, I estimated I retained about 30% of the downloads in my RSS numbers.
I’ve repeated this experiment several times with different blogs with nearly-consistent results. I create a tab of well-known bloggers or just plain old great writers, and stick my feed somewhere in the middle. In fact, the only tab that was not successful was the one I did for this blog. I don’t know what it says about Netvibes users that they weren’t interested in downloading a tab containing great “make-money” bloggers like Darren Rowse and Shoemoney, but, they sure seem to like Poker Blogs and Florida Bloggers!
In the past I called this my “piggyback” strategy for boosting RSS subscribers, but Ted’s Remora metaphor works also. I still see the majority of my subscribers coming in organically, but Netvibes is certainly the #1 source of subscribers on two of my blogs.
Completely ethical, just a simple marketing strategy of associating my brands with other great brands and letting readers decide for themselves.
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Great post. The RSS gaming you mentioned is one of the things we are worried about actually. It does seem that you have to hit the feed in order to be counted in most cases, but then again there are ways around that.