The RSS Test
May 30, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzTwo days ago I reached a new all-time RSS high of 624, and am now averaging around 600 subscribers. This has been a slow but steady growth, and hopefully it will continue to rise. My goal right now is to average 1,000 subscribers.
I want to raise this for several reasons. While it’s great boasting material, the main purpose of raising my RSS subscribership is to attract more advertisers. In particular, and as a perfect example, let’s look at ReviewMe.
ReviewMe rates all of it’s publishers on a 5-star rating scale. Apart from looking good to advertisers, blogs are also displayed in descending order in the marketplace. In my category, there are only two 5-star blogs, but there are quite a few 4-star blogs, and an extreme amount of 3-star blogs.
Since there are 3 categories that make up the ranking: Alexa, Technorati, and RSS, I need 2/3 of them to be 4 stars in order for my overall average ranking to go up a star. So, I have to increase one of those categories by one.
I don’t think I’ll get 5-stars for Technorati unless I’m at least top 1,000, and that won’t be happening for a while. My Alexa rating has stayed around the same for quite a while, and there is no hope of dropping my Alexa rank unless some of you are kind enough to install the Alexa toolbar, or until I wait for more daily traffic to hit my blog.
So, my best hope lies within the RSS ranking. Notice that ReviewMe states “Est. RSS”. I wonder how they factor a person’s RSS. Not everybody has Feedburner, so how do they determine this? I’d be curious in knowing exactly how they factor it. But for now I’m going to assume they know the exact number of everybody’s RSS subscribership, and will guess that 1,000 will give me 4-stars.
Once I have four-stars I stand a lot better chance of getting more ReviewMe offers. It also looks good to other advertisers who may wish to purchase my top 728×90 leaderboard banner for instance.
Anyhow, this is why I want to increase my RSS subscribership. Now I’d like to ask a favour of you. If you don’t already subscribe to my RSS feed, please do so now. I want to see if there is any noticable increase as a result from simply asking people to sign-up to it. I’ve been averaging around 600 for a little while now so I’ll base any increase on this number.
To subscribe, simply click on my Feedburner image at the top right of my blog, or click here, and then click the Subscribe to this feed link at the top. Or, you can use a popular RSS reader/aggregator (Here’s a Wikipedia article for those of you who don’t know what that is). Google Reader is a popular one.
So subscribe to my feed, please! Let’s see how high I can get! Here’s my RSS link again:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/tylercruz
Thanks in advance.
17 Responses to “The RSS Test”
Great idea! While I don’t know how many RSS people you need to increase your review me rank, it can’t hurt just to ask for some RSS ads. I wonder what percentage of people even use RSS readers? It can’t be too high, because I can’t really think of any friends of mine who use it.
Well, since TechCrunch has 419,000 RSS subscribers, I think it’s safe to say that quite a few people use RSS readers 😉
Tyler, you know that you can set your own rate on reviewme, right? Not sure why you care if you are 4 stars etc or not …
You want people to subscribe to your RSS so you can more easily post bullshit reviews that you are paid for?
If you want to increase your Alexa ranking, there is a cheat to do it. You just have to redirect from their site to yours. It’s basically cheating, but when the ranking is so flawed anyway …
– Get yourself another header on this site, the current one sucks. (With poorly blended photos)
– Change your tacky tagline.
Completely agree. Very unstylish and ugly header area. Also, please brush up on your writing skills. Thanks.
basically, I read this every day to feel good about myself. not because you inspire me, Tyler, but because you’re a terribly pathetic individual.
What happened to the Affiliate updates? Have you still been working on Aff Marketing?
yeh srsly have a $50 header contest or something
Not really on this subject (huh, whuts a header?) but I posted the URL for an
MSNBC article on the new STARCRAFT in the Games area of Movie Vault. Theres
an interview of Rob Pardo.
The people that are bashing Tyler are obviously jealous of his success. Keep it up Tyler, hope you make it to 1,000 subscribers!
I wonder how many of your subscribers like you or dislike you. It seems 50/50 from the recent comments. But, in the end, bad press = good press!
It’s usually the extremes at either end that take the time to post replies. You’d expect the majority of lurkers to enjoy the blog especially as they’d simply go elsewhere if they didn’t like what was being published.
I think the setup of the comments is different to some of the other big blogs (they’re not pre moderated?) which skews things.
I seem to remember the negative comments from a few (funnily enough the bad comments here seem to be from the same people who were trying to cause problems in the past) was the reason for the switch to registered visitor comments only in the first place.
Done and done. I should’ve been subscribing a while ago. You’ve got good stuff here, Tyler. Rest well knowing that your shit-talkers likely aren’t as successful as you are.
I’ve subscribed.
Visited your blog after receiving your e-mail – will be replying later tonight.
Just out of interest, why do you keep the crappy comments from your bashers?
I’ve often wondered how ReviewMe get their RSS stats – I have a low figure recorded at FeedBurner, but ReviewMe doesn’t give me any stars at all…
If you want to try and artificially cause a small short term improvement for RSS stats, check out Jon Lee’s post over here – http://www.jonlee.ca/an-evil-way-to-increase-rss-stats