Will You Be My RSS Friend?
Do you have a lot of friends on Facebook? Want to use them to help increase your RSS subscription base? Well, you can. Among the many features Facebook offers is the ability to import your RSS feed. Facebook calls them “Notes.” How does this affect the RSS count?
The FeedBurner chicklet shows the number of people that accessed your feed yesterday. Today’s number will be available tomorrow. If you click the link to my full feed RSS, you will increase the feed count by one (assuming you’re not already a feed reader). By making your RSS accessible from locations other than your blog, not only do you increase the chance of more people finding it but it also increases the FeedBurner RSS counter. Currently I have 327 friends in my Facebook network (how they found me, I really don’t know). If each friend access their Facebook account once per day, it would mean 327 RSS readers because Facebook pulled my feed for them.
Leveraging Facebook with Blog Friends
To leverage Facebook further you can install the Blog Friends application. This app allows you to share your feed with your friends and your friends’ friends. The app allows you to spread you feed beyond your own network of friends. It also allows you to see blogs that your friends and your friends’ friend are reading. The key here is that each time Facebook pulls your RSS for one of your friends or one of your friends’ friends, the RSS count goes up.
If you have a massive Facebook network, this can be a very good way to increase traffic to your blog and increase the number on that FeedBurner Chicklet.
Four RSS Text Ads Spot Available
I still have four RSS Text Ads positions available. You can see what the ads look like by checking the blog through a RSS reader like Google Reader (or Facebook). The price is $200 per month which works out to a CPM of only 50 cents. That’s an extremely good value and if you want to take advantage of it, you better get your order in before it’s gone.
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Sounds great! I need to work on building up RSS Feed readers.
Good tips! I guess I need a facebook account now.
I Need More Friends!
Facebook’s my favorite personal social network but I don’t think I would mix business and pleasure like that! I have a good size group of personal friends - not quite enough for increasing traffic on my blog site though…I need more friends…for blog networking purposes. Maybe I can create another Facebook account for the sole purpose of blog networking! Good tip John Chow!:razz:
- Raymond (MONEY BLUE BOOK)
Yeah it’s an interesting conundrum. Do you separate business and friends?
I know the answer from the evil masses on this website would probably be a resounding YES but I’m always a little bit reluctant.
Still, it’s a great way to increase RSS numbers though.
It’s only business if they buy something from you. You only feel bad in business if you’re not giving value for money. As long as you’re honest and capable then there should be no problems about doing business with friends. I have plenty of friends who I’ve known for 20+ years who are interested in making money online. I don’t feel bad about sharing some info with them in the pub so I’m not going to feel bad about letting them know about my blog.
Sharing some info is okey, providing services (web hosting for example) is a totally different story. Used to have a friend who decided to host his website on my server…and than later, wanted extra BW without being charged, and extra diskspace…it kinda becomes a pain.
Anyway the idea about facebook is nice, i never had actually time to signup with facebook (yeah i know it takes 1 second to signup but takes much more to work it around), but it is definitively a good way to increase RSS readers.
The Feedburner Chicklet has been down today, it’s not showing on a lot of blogs I read.
Sounds great! Unfortunately I don’t want everyone on my facebook to know about my blogs. LOL
I don’t even have a facebook account yet
John, you said you don’t know how you have 327 friends on Facebook.
You invited them yourself: http://www.johnchow.com/would-you-like-to-be-my-friend/
That was long time ago and it got me 100 friends. I don’t know how people keep finding me. Most won’t look through the old postings.
They will now!
Thats pretty easy, just search for john chow
That sounds like a great suggestion. I have several friends on facebook, but I am too lazy to tell them all about my blog. Plus that application you just suggested sounds very useful.
Amazing Idea, I just incorporated this into my Facebook account.
I love it John, awesome stuff.
I noticed you purchasd pofclone.com…..what do u think of it?
cheers
I think Michael Kwan mentioned this tip a while back, I tried it myself but took it off because too many friends from middle/high school started asking me to make webpages for them haha.
I was the one who told Kawn about it!
Kwan. K-W-A-N DAMMIT!
build it and they WILL come
Id rather not use my friends to inflate my feed numbers, I guess Im not that evil.
Are you saying that everyone in your facebook account are you real life friends?
I wouldn’t use facebook for anything else
All real life for me… otherwise it would just be another Myspace
99% of the people on my facebook I know IRL. But I think my blog will interest a great many of them,so I’m okay with pushing it to my notes
Yep! Every single person in my facebook account is a real life friend.
Otherwise what’s the point? (apart from to raise your feed numbers!
)
I am
On facebook, remember to restrict your friends’ access to your profile so that they cannot see your email address. I think there are quite a few email spammers trolling facebook for email addresses. They will ask to be your friends.
Good tip - I’d go further and don’t list phone numbers, date of birth etc. Identity theft is the biggest growing crime globally and it’s easy to piece together bits from sites like Facebook.
This gives me other ideas how to get the feedburner count up muhaha
Ha nice cheat!
I’ve got lots of facebook friends. Let the inflated numbers begin!
I’ve never used facebook but I do use MySpace to market my blogs and sites. I just wrote an article about how to use MySpace to boost traffic and credibility for your blog.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between MySpace and Facebook. I know MySpace has been around for much longer but Facebook seems to be experiencing fantastic growth.
I’m also interested to see the difference in the user profiles of the two - I have this impression that younger people use MySpace but I’d love to know if this is correct or not.
Wow, that is good info… Another good way would be to use Flickr. That’s what I use…(without any good results but probably because I am lazy…)
But I do feel Stumbleupon is the best way to go… I get probably 50% of all my traffic from there whenever I make a new website. Like I just made this new website called, MaKePoNo.com, Stumbleupon got me 260 unique visitors right off the bat in about 2 hours…
You can also go with Netscape too. They let you have unlimited # of friends. But ROI on Netscape is not as good. The users come and leave. I have like 20,000 friends on Netscape but probably as good as 100 friends on Digg… that’s my 2 cents from guerilla internet marketing…
I am considering using Facebook, I have signed up but still haven’t used it yet because I am so busy with Myspace. Mypace is one of the best and easiest.
Myspace is going down. Look for News shares to go plummeting too!
btw. I’ve bought the rss text link. wohoo..!
Look out for Enwikopedia’s EVIL link bait contest in your RSS
nice trick..i will give it a try…but i do not have much friend on face book..hehe…most people are still using friendster here
Nice idea. I’ve bookmarked this post… it’s something I need to comeback to. I don’t want my Facebook full of bloggers, so I’m probably going to end up starting a new Facebook profile just for my blogger friends.
nice…i have facebook account but dont know what to do with facebook.now you show the benefit
Last I remember reading in the developers section of Facebook was that Facebook itself pulls the RSS feed periodically and adds it to their own database. It doesn’t pull from your feed every time someone looks at it or it is displayed.
Looking over my Feedburner stats, Facebook is seen to be looking at my RSS feed once every hour (which is what I read was how often it checks for updates when you have you ‘import’ it into your profile.
I have over 100 friends on Facebook (people I can actually talk to face to face ;)) and if by what John said is true my Feedburner stats would be a lot higher than they report. On average about 60+ of my friends check their Facebook accounts daily and my counter isn’t near that number.
I also have the Blog Friends add-on for Facebook and I like it, just kind of like a built-in RSS feed reader.
I’m not saying what John has posted is a lie.. but my experience just shows it doesn’t work that way for me
Might be different for other people.
If you want to monetize your RSS feeds, try pheedo.com. It is easy to join and often has top advertisers, like Intel and Microsoft, but not all the time.
Great tip!
Thank you for this great tip John. Some folks may think that combining friends & your website is bad. But on the other hand, if they are your friends don’t you think they would take an interest in your blog anyway?
Don’t fully understand this or the point in facebook but I’m going along with it anyway
I’ve been tempted to incorporate Facebook, but have resisted because I would need to use my real name. No, I’m not a criminal. I just write under a pen name to avoid any PERCEIVED conflict of interest between my blog and the job that pays my mortgage and grocery bills.
Does someone in my shoes create an alter ego Facebook personality?
hak
What a great way to get more readers, had not thought of using Facebook in that way, now off to set it up
Just wondering… are you supposed to put the link to your feed in the Facebook blog application (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnChowDotCom), or just the link of your blog (e.g. http://www.johnchow.com). For now I’ve put just the link to my blog, but it doesn’t seem to have changed my RSS subscribers total at all…
[...] John Chow has a great article on using Facebook to increase RSS subscription numbers. [...]
Most of my friends don’t even really understand how much money there is to make online, let alone read blogs, so I’m not sure how much it would help to improve my RSS count. Great idea though.
Side note: I really love that blog friends logo. Great design.
thanx a lot!! i open my facebook account just now.. hope this one working for my blog!!!
Good luck and get “adding friends” furiously!