New Blog Milestone – 14,000 RSS Readers

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Even after the competition with Shoemoney, the blog’s RSS readership continues to grow. Yesterday, it passed 14,000 readers for the first time. Today, it is at a record 14,109.

I want to take this time to answer a few questions about the RSS that I’ve received since the contest. The first concern why the RSS count didn’t go down, since it looked like I was asking people to sub to my RSS by feeds, emails, toolbars, etc. One would assume that after the contest was over, many people would just cancel any additional subscriptions. The reason the RSS didn’t go down is because the majority of the subscriptions are in fact new.

Darren Rowse at Problogger made a post asking if Shoe and I were preaching to the converted or really trying to reach new readers. The answer is we were trying to do both. The buzz generated by the competition brought us many new readers and help convert many current readers to add the blog’s RSS feed to their readers. Having multiple channels to reach your readership is never a bad thing.

The other thing you have to consider is people are generally lazy. Once you get them to subscribe, chances are they won’t go thought the effort to unsubscribe even if they don’t like you. Marketers know this and take advantage of it all the the time. That’s why you see so many “Use it for 30 days free and if you don’t like it, send it back and pay nothing” promotions. They know that most are just too lazy to send it back.

How Did Shoemoney Get Over 7,000 Subscribers In Two Days?

This is the question everybody wants answered. I was kicking Shoe’s ass right up to end. Then he rocketed pass me on the last day to take the win. Many people assumed Shoe hid his real RSS count to throw me off and then put up his true count on the last day. However, that’s not what happen. So how did he do it?

I cannot tell you the exact method Shoe employed because I promised to keep it between us, but basically he found a bug while studying FeedBurner and exploited it. We had no rules for this competition – anything goes and that included being extremely evil. And in this regard, Shoe out-eviled me. He did have this to say in his victory post.

Officially I won the contest, but I think the REAL winner will be revealed over the course of the next few months when all the people who only subscribing for the contest entries.

My RSS count is at 14,109. Shoemoney is at 13,103. Will the REAL winner please stand up? 😈