How I Broke 33,000 RSS Readers
Wow! It was only 18 days ago that John Chow dot Com broke 31,000 RSS readers. Today, the blog hit another record by breaking the 33,000 mark. Right now, the Feedburner counter is showing 33,385 readers. That’s an average daily growth rate of 130 new readers per day.
When I broke 31K RSS, I gave a very effective method to grow your RSS by using a free eBook and Aweber. For this milestone, I going to show you a highly effective way to get first time commentators to subscribe to your RSS via Aweber.
OptIn Comments by Ian Fernando
OptIn Comments works seamlessly with Wordpress and Aweber. When a reader makes a comment on your blog for the very first time, OptIn Comment will email that reader a thank you letter and ask if he would like to subscriber to your newsletter or RSS list. For example, if you’re a new reader and you made a comment to any of my posts, you will receive this message in your inbox once your comment was approved.
Hello [Commentator name]
Thank you for commenting on John Chow dot Com. I would like to offer you my free eBook, Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com as a gift for making the comment. To receive the book, simple sign up to my newsletter by clicking the link below.
Thank you and I look forward to reading more comments from you.
John Chow
You can customize the message anyway you like. Once the reader clicks the link, it send them the eBook and adds them to the newsletter list. Conversion is very high because a reader who makes a comment on your blog is a lot more likely to subscribe to your blog. OptIn Comment has been helping me get an average of 25 new sign ups per day.
OptIn Comments is not a free Wordpress plugin. Ian charges $97.00 for it. However, if you’re a John Chow dot Com reader, you can get it today for only $57.00. It’s definitely worth it if you’re already using Aweber.
Comment Relish by Justin Shattuck
Like OptIn Comments, Comment Relish is a free Wordpress plugin that will send an e-mail message to new commentators. While free is a very good price, there are a couple of weaknesses with the plugin.
The first weakness is it doesn’t integrate with Aweber. You can use the plugin to send a thank you email to first time commentators and ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. However, without the Aweber integration, conversion won’t be as high. But, it will be higher than not sending a thank you note.
The second, and more serious weakness with Comment Relish is its coding. The plugin checks new commentators against all previous commentators. It does this by comparing email addresses. If your blog has a lot of comments, the plugin can overload your Wordpress database because of too many queries. If you’re on a share host, then the host may threaten to disable your account.
Comment Relish maybe worth a try for smaller blogs with few comments. However, once you get to a decent size, you’ll have to use a more robust solution like OptIn Comments.
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Looks like your rss count is growing like a weed, John. Maybe I sould give opt in comments a go.
Reply to this commentWay to go John. I guess 34,000 is only 5 days away?
Reply to this commentIf Ian dropped the price to $29.95, I’d buy it.
Reply to this commentYour right is an affordable price….
Reply to this commentWow it is growing really fast. Congratulations….
Reply to this commentMine is growing pretty fast too but not as fast as yours. I have gone from around 35 subscribers to 200 subscribers in 1 month. Not a bad increase I thought
hmm Ryan thats really cool, you keep it up man. Looks like ur trick is working lol.
Reply to this commentYep Opt In comment is awesome dude..do tell me if there is any other plugin simial to Opt In and costs less..
Reply to this commentAmazing John. You keep on improving, and I can tell you I am using the RSS more and more due to me not liking this new theme at all.
Reply to this commentActually your subscriber count is below 33,000 right now.. Maybe the recession has hit your subscribers as well..
Reply to this commentOpt-in comments looks really neat to increase email subscribers greatly. Thanks for the discount! I don’t really like Comment Relish that much, because as you said, it overloads the database once your blog starts getting some comments…
Does Opt-in comments overload the database? Can I use it on a shared host?
Reply to this commentOptIn Comments hasn’t overloaded my database and it’s huge! Yes, it can be used on shared hosts.
Reply to this commentGreat information. I use comment relish, but Opt-in comments looks like it could be beneficial here shortly.
Reply to this commentCongratulations John, submitted to StumbleUpon for you!
Reply to this commentCongratulations for new record John!
Reply to this commentbecause of you and shoe i signed up for Aweber. and am actually taking a webinar as i write to start off. I really liked the idea of offering an Ebook. I do have a question though. Where do you get the image of the book next to your subscription entry? I would like to offer an ebook but it seems a little bit more tangible to have something that they can see.
Reply to this commentNate did that for me. There are many designs that will design eBook covers. Check eLance.com
Reply to this commentNo offense, but do we really need to know “how” you increased your reader count every 1000 or 2000 readers? I mean do you switch your tactics every 1000 readers just for fun? I bet you just have a popular blog that increases in readers every day, and you didn’t do much but keep writing on your blog
Reply to this commentThen don’t read it?
Reply to this commentwhy wouldnt they read it…i just took notice of this shitty site when i saw the email. lol im a subscriber but the fool didnt give me an ebook option lol
Reply to this commentCongragulations from Grandma….I guess this will only happen to me in my dreams.
Dorothy from grammology
Reply to this commentgrammology.com
John, what does your growth curve look like? Does the rate of growth increase as you get more subscribers? It seems like it have a kind of snowball effect - more subscribers means more people talking about you, which leads to more visitors, which leads to more susbcribers, et etc.
Reply to this commentOn a side note to that question; I’m still a little curious as to what the percentages are for valued readers. I’d assume your click through rate from feeds rises with the increase but how well does it compare?
Reply to this commentEvery time I’ve seen people using comment relish lately, it’s sending an email for every single comment, whether the visitor is new or not. Same thing on our blog. What a pain! OptIn comments might be worth the money just for fixing that one problem.
Reply to this commentoptin comments only emails every unique email address or commenter - so it will never bother your dedicated reader once they become frequent readers and participate in the posts.
Reply to this commentIt probably does that because you don’t have the wp_cr_emailed table created.
Reply to this commentIf that’s the case you can create it manually and everything will be ok.
Unfortunately, I’m not a WP user. So, I don’t need these plugins at the moment. have you the same way to blogger user?
Reply to this commentCongrats John , your blog seems to be growing faster each day. The plugin is priced high, users would pay up $20 for this plugin.
Reply to this commentthe reason for the price is because of the quick growth and the ability to capture the user at that mind stage - active user. Also since growing your list very important and is considered an “ATM” - once you captured your list you can promote to them over and over again. plugin is very powerful to use and definitely can help increase in rss readership and potential income from dedicated readers/users
Reply to this commentWell done John, that’s not a news any more as you keep breaking through all the milestones.
Reply to this commentcongrats man.
Reply to this commentThats a really fast growing rate
I just wanna say.. congratulation on this
Reply to this commentCongrats John, the quality you provide is directly proportional to your success. You have proven this.
Reply to this commentHello john, You’re really good , I quezz you’ll hit 50000 readership by the end of this year…..
Reply to this commentInteresting when I get some time tonight I’ll have a look at Comment Relish see if I can improve on it.
Reply to this commenttesting this plugin
Reply to this commentNote that this plugin is actually against the terms of service of Aweber.. And all requests will come from the same IP, at which point they will probably ban your IP and the plugin will become useless.
Reply to this commentI wonder how you can answer all comments and why you let spammers share spams link like this spammer: cehczjk
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Reply to this commentgood work John!!!
Reply to this commentvery nice post john i just start preparing my ebook now love to have that much reader
Reply to this commentGood for you, John. Looks like I might have to check out that plugin after all because the other one IS a resource hog.
Reply to this comment33.000?! i can only make 8 reader at the time. Gosh John, its been a while sine my last visit here, and you do a lot of improvement especially that car pic, i like that
Reply to this commentWow, nice growth.
Reply to this commentAmazing..you ARE A BLOG KING!!!
Reply to this commentUh, oh! You lost 1,000 readers, you’re not over 33,000 anymore. What happened?
Reply to this commentwaa. you really did that. No wonder you really good guys. I hope i will get more readers..
Reply to this commentJohn, congratulations for the new milestone. I had just reached my 15th rss reader the other day. It is still a long way to go for me
Reply to this commentJohn great achievement ,I will be one of these days.
Reply to this commentCheers http://www.egruve.com
Good info and inspirational. But in my case, i don’t really even have more than 1 steady reader..lol I know i should write more and i am working on that. Keep the info coming! Great post.
Reply to this commentGreat tips for that. I’ve never thought of that. I used to think that installing a plugin on my blog doesn’t contribute much to me and my blog readers. Now, I see it differently. Thanks for the great insight!
Reply to this commentif you want to use the comment relish plugin make sure to check this post:
Reply to this commenthttp://patchlog.com/wordpress/more-optimization-for-comment-relish-plugin/
You can find an improved version there. This version will not have the “database overloading ” problem mentioned in the post.
That was a really good tips of you.As an Internet Marketer i nver tought about that before…
Reply to this commentthanks
Reply to this commentJohn how much is your monthly hosting fee of your site?I also want to set up my blog to earn money but i have limited budget only and don’t know what to write.
Reply to this commentThe hosting is sponsored by BlueFur. If it wasn’t sponsor it would cost $500 per month.
Reply to this commentAwesome. That is a good growth rate for the blog.
Reply to this commentThat would be in my dreams having 33,000
Reply to this commentRSS readers. You rock JC.
that’s fantastic… well done.
Reply to this commentSending a thank you noteis a wonderful idea! And a great way to let people who were interested enough to intereact by leaving a comment subscribe to your RSS.
Reply to this commentGood wp-plugins. Congratulations for you new record.
Reply to this commentI was wondering why my Feedburner RSS count keeps fluctuating in reader count. Maybe they have a bug…lol
Reply to this commentClass pleased me, I am one of 33000
Reply to this commentCongratulations on the milestone. It is a record that is hard to beat but you deserve it.
Diana @ http://www.DianaTan.net
Reply to this commentI did got an email when I commented and I did subscribed to your blog. Its a nice and cool idea.
Reply to this commentThank you Sir for sharing your trick to get reader, I will try it
Reply to this commentIs it too expensive for me to get readers, any other tips and tricks
Reply to this commentHi Mr. John Chow I wanna be your next reader sir,
Reply to this commentHey John.. You just added another 2k+ readers again! Wonder how you do it..
Reply to this commentWell John, of course you were able to break your record. Quality posters like yourself are hard to come by.
Reply to this commentlolz.. everyone is wondering how john chow is doing it. there are too many noobs here. just take a look at jimkarter.com blog and watch how some prick managed to trick rss readers to 7k in a in just a few weeks from 200 readers. RSS feeds can be tricked.. its easy.
johnchow with alexa ranking of only 30k? i dont think so. cmon guys theres too much BS here.
Reply to this commentWow… this is something unbelievable…. you rock JC
Reply to this commentgood tips, btw, how to do that, i don’t understand, what plugin do you use?
Reply to this comment