A lot of blogs display their RSS feed subscriber count via the FeedBurner “FeedCount” chicklet. And if they have a lot of subscribers, you know they’re pretty popular, and they have pretty good content so you’ll probably subscribe to their feed and boost that number up one more digit. But what happens when you go to a blog, and they have a FeedCount of say, 10 or 20. You don’t feel so inclined to subscribe to that blog do you? Well, I have discovered a way to exploit the FeedBurner Feed Count. Just follow these simple steps, and you’ll be on your way to RSS superstardom.

Before I list the steps:
I’m sorry, I know I am unleashing a monster into the blogosphere. From now on, you won’t be able to tell who’s FeedCount is real or not.

Step 1:
Sign up for a (new) gMail account.

Step 2:
(Assuming you already have a FeedBurner feed)
Use the + feature in your gMail email address to subscribe to your feed however many times you’d like. Go to your feed page, click subscribe by email. Then enter your email address using the + suffix. Here’s an example. Let’s say you registered with gMail as Johnny@gmail.com, you can now use something like Johnny+1@gmail.com. The mail will still get delivered to your inbox, but you can use it as a completely separate address. This can go on forever. (+2@gmail.com, +3@gmail.com). FeedBurner will treat these subscriptions like completely new email subscriptions every time, and they will count for your FeedCount number.

Step 3: (The annoying part)
You will have to manually opt-in and approve all of the subscriptions you created. This could take hours depending on the amount of emails and subscriptions you faked. I guess it’s the price you pay for exploiting the system. After you approve all of the subscriptions, you will see the change in your FeedCount within the next day.

I apologize once again for making this known, but information is information. Maybe FeedBurner will come up with a fix. Also, I did not test this out into a high number, I only did a few dozen subscriptions on a new feed, but I’m pretty sure it will work as many times as you need it to. I did not do this experiment on the Jetpacked.com RSS feed. So feel free to subscribe.