The Experiment:

There has been a lot of speculation that if you are showing low subscriber count to your feed, people may be less likely to subscribe to it. I figured I would try to either prove or debunk that theory. I manipulated jetpacked.com’s subscriber count to be a few thousand subscribers more than it actually is, and after a little bit over a week, our subscriber count didn’t change much, and even lowered at some points. So through this experience, I wouldn’t listen to the bloggers who tell people not to show your subscriber count right off the bat. It’s all a matter of whether you want to show off or not. If you’re embarrassed to show your low count, then don’t. If you really don’t care, and are confident enough to think people will subscribe to your feed anyway, go for it. The bottom line is, if people like your content, they will subscribe to your feed regardless what the number of current subscribers is.

How to manipulate your feed count:

Part II

Back in April, I wrote an article called “How to manipulate your FeedBurner feed count.” The article described a process that was certainly one clever way to do it. But when I was doing the current experiment, I had to think of a way to manipulate the subscriber count, without actually adding fake subscribers. I didn’t want the count to be false forever. So I found a plugin, the same plugin used to show chicklet free stats. It’s called FeedCount by Francesco Mapelli. In the newest version of the plugin, you can show a subscriber count from one feed, while linking to completely different feed. Like so:

As you can see, I pulled the feed count from the 5thirtyone feed, but still linked to the jetpacked feed. This made it appear like Jetpacked.com usually had over 3000 subscribers, when it usually has around 80 or so. Please keep in mind that this was only for experimentation.
Don’t lie about your feed count, it may make your blog look popular, but it won’t bring more people to your site, or make your content any better.

Forums are a great way to create a niche community and keep visitors coming back to your site time and time again. Lets face it if your forum is the best forum in XYZ niche then you’ve got the best chance of getting your product or service in front of their face and instantly establishing yourself as an expert in the field. Or even advertising monetization on forums can be good if you have a specific niche to target advertisers in.

But the biggest problem with getting a forum started is a catch 22. You need forum posters to get content on your site but people only want to post on active forums that already have forum posters. So how do you get those first posters to start interacting with your site?

There are a few popular methods I’ve seen:

• Posters for Hire – these guys are the freelancers of the forum posting world. $.20 per post and they’ll go talk about whatever junk you want them to on your forum. But usually this content is not good and often times is copied from other related forums in your industry (bad news if that forum owner catches a pattern of it going on)
• Talking to yourself with multiple accounts – it sounds like a pain in the ass, and it is. You’ll start posting and questions, setting up another account, answering the questions then on another account answering the question. After a while you’ll start getting confused about who the person is your logged in as and… yeah who wants to do this exactly?

Well I’m working on a new idea that I think will be a good 3rd option.

Yahoo Answers has a free API and they allow people to scrape their content (and they don’t even require attribution, they just request it). Well what about using this? They have over 30 million answers+questions in their database. There are posts regarding anything you can imagine.

Any niche forum could be jump started by having new threads and answers pulled from Yahoo Answers on a time delay.

Most of their posts are not promotional spam in the least and yahoo monitors for abuse so using this content seems like a great solution.

Here’s another great WordPress theme release with web 2.0 style buttons and category navigation.

Title: InBusiness 2.0

Description: 2 Column, Web 2.0 style buttons and menus, rounded corners, gray, white, green, orange – It also features specially designed web 2.0 style buttons for the RSS Feed and Technorati Favs.

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My MacBook has seen better days. I’ve had to deal with everything from a dead battery, random shut downs, and a broken cd drive. My girlfriend has figured out that if the chord comes out, my laptop turns off. So if she thinks I’m spending too much time on the computer working and not giving her enough attention, she knocks my chord out, therefor turning it off, and losing anything I was working on. It’s definitely not a pleasant situation for me. I’ve decided that I want to destroy my MacBook, but it’s the only thing I have to work on. So I’m going to ask YOU, friends, to donate 10-15 dollars towards a new MacBook Pro for me. When I receive enough to purchase a new MacBook Pro, I will destroy my MacBook along with the only power my girlfriend has over me. (Destruction method by choice of readers via a survey, with video of course.)

Please help me.

In return I will laser etch all the donator’s names($10) or URLs ($15) onto the MacBook Pro. So, help me release the evil hold my girlfriend has on me, and maybe even piss her off a little bit. Get your name on my laptop to let her know who did it.

I’ve gotten a few emails asking how I display the feedburner subscriber stats like I do so I just wanted go ahead and fill in anyone else who is wondering. It is done via a wordpress plugin and a little bit of CSS. Check out Collis’ post at NorthXEast called ” Free Your Subscriber Stats ” for more info on the plugin and the process. If anyone has any trouble with the CSS or anything, shoot me an email and I’ll see if I can help you out.

Content

Content is the answer to making money online. Think of this list as a graph, follow it down.

Content brings:

Traffic

from:

Search Engines

The more content on your site, the more pages, keywords, etc. get indexed in the search engines. When people search for something you’ve covered in your site, it’s a potential hit to your site.

Social sites.

After you write content, submit it to social sites, this will get readers to your site, and hopefully some of them will stick around and subscribe to your RSS feed and maybe even go to your site daily to read.

Here’s a list of social news and bookmarking sites you can submit your content to:

Read more »