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.

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 »

As the title might imply, NovaLet is a blogging service that is very simple, without all of the extra bells and whistles of, for example, WordPress or Movable Type. It is not meant to compete with either of these services, however, NovaLet aims to make blogging a simple and fun experience for the user. From the outside, it looks just like a normal blog, tiny orange RSS icon and all, but when logged in, management is like no other blog service you’ve ever used.

Read more »

Travelocity, the company that provides discounted flight booking and information in conjunction with other travel services recently launched a blog called “The Window Seat“. Being a graphic designer working mostly with blogs, I just don’t understand how such a large company could launch a blog that looks this bad. It doesn’t reflect their brand at all, and looks circa 1998. I honestly feel bad for them. If anyone from travelocity comes across this, get in touch, I’ll redesign it for free.

A while back Jason talked about some of the often overlooked advantages to a custom built blogging theme.

But you don’t need to have a blog to get many of the advantages. In fact we use custom WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla themes as a starting point for many of the new sites we launch, despite what CMS platform they are built on.

There are many highly respected, high PageRank, and high TrustRank sites dedicated to sharing these free CMS themes. Beyond that, every site that uses your theme automatically provides you with at least 1 backlink, most likely an entire site-wide grouping of backlinks (the beauty is, you can control this – when you build the template just customize if you want homepage or sitewide, and even the target destination page)

This is the only active method we’ve used to promote the Jetpacked.com blog. In the few months since we launched we’ve received over 5,000 backlinks and a PR5 ranking in Google (with PR 4 on almost all inner pages).

AND better then that, we rank in Google for virtually anything we blog about within a few days.

Other hidden ways to profit:

• Writing ReviewMe.com reviews (after distributing 1 theme you will most likely be able to charge $40-60 per review blog post that you make)
• Your Technorati ranking will skyrocket, every blog that uses your theme is now a blog that links to you. Your blogs value with sites like ReviewMe will increase and your visibility on blog search engines will greatly increase.
• Anything you blog or add pages about will almost overnight start ranking, you can easily post affiliate reviews of products and rank right on par with the product its self (people love jumping over and reading a review before they buy a product). And you can of course promote your own products and rank for competitive keywords in a couple days that you only dreamed about before.
• Your PR5+ ranking will almost instantly be worth $100-200/month by selling text link ads through TLA or by selling direct on your site.

Jason and I are thinking about putting together a package to help a few people take advantage of the huge benefit of distributing themes without needing to lift a finger on their own behalf. I know we moved away from doing client webdesign work (which theme building and distribution is pretty close to), but we’re thinking of doing this on a very small scale with a select group of maybe 10-20 people who are serious about getting the benefit of theme distributing with their website (if there is enough interest).

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value:

Most WordPress blogs like using the default permalink structure with an archive format of something like year/month/day/postname – I understand some sites like to provide an easy structure for navigating their posts by date. But unless your site has hundreds of posts per month it’s not the best idea for a few reasons.

1. From a user stand point: If you blog isn’t updated often, its obvious at a glance. This sends readers away faster then anything else. Remove your post dates completely. Don’t show them in the URL and don’t show them in the post header.
2. From a SE stand point: It’s been rumored and shown that search engines discount the SE rankings for archives. This makes perfect sense. If Google wants the most recent up to date content showing at the top of their SERP’s why would they be ranking archives higher? It isn’t helping you for sure.

When we redesigned Jetpacked.com we did it with this in mind. But our previous structure had been using the standard archive format. So this creates a new issue. How do you convert over to a standard /%postname%/ permalink structure without killing all your currently indexed pages.

Simple, thanks to the permalink redirect plugin. If you’re going from archive format to post name format using the simple plugin will be enough. If you’re doing more complex redirection the creator has a good guide to help you out.

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value: