How I Nearly Doubled My Feedburner Subscribers in 1 Day…

Is there a simple, almost effortless way someone could double their Feedburner subscribers in 1 day? There is, because I did it. It’s not a hoax. It’s not a bot or an auto-clicker. It’s real readers who have subscribed.

Yesterday I made one simple 5 minute change and presto! 2,200 more readers…

Check out this graph:

If you are a blogger or webmaster, you use your statistics as a good indication on how you are doing in the universe. The higher the number in your Feedburner Chicklet, the “better” you are doing as a blogger. The more readers in that chicklet, the more “social proof” that your blog is worth subscribing to. What that means is if a new reader lands on your blog are they more influenced to join if you’ve got 25 readers or 2,500?

Some people might choose the 25 yes, but like iPods, the more people who already own an iPod, talk about iPods, blog about iPods, etc. The more iPods that get sold.

Well, I discovered one of the investments I made in this blog and my business a few years ago has paid off in a nice way. It allowed me to effectively double the number of readers that appear in the Feedburner daily reader count. No tricks, no scripting – real readers of this blog.

So how did I do it? Read on to find out…

The Newsletter

When I first started blogging back in 2005, many of the other successful bloggers suggested that you have a newsletter. I went ahead and signed up for Aweber’s newsletter service. You might remember me talking about Aweber here in the past. I recommended them for their easy to use system and their advanced “split testing” algorithms.

Split testing is when you test one “sign up” form against another to see which one gets more sign ups.

However, I was always a bit disappointed that I couldn’t seem to fit the newsletter into the flow of the blog. By increasing the newsletter readers, my RSS count didn’t go up. There wasn’t an Aweber chicklet like Feedburner has. It also seemed some of the forms, although powerful, didn’t want to play well with the stylesheet of my blog.

Anyway, in the background, I still continued building the number of subscribers to this newsletter. There’s a sign up at the very bottom of every post.

When people sign up, they get goal setting and motivational articles above and beyond what’s here on the blog. They also get blog updates – much like RSS – delivered to their inboxes as well as some bonus materials and software I send out when I feel like it.

It has steadily grown over the years to over 2,000 readers. I think thats great considering I haven’t been marketing the newsletter much at all.

Anyway, in the back of my mind, the voices of Brian Clark from Copyblogger and John Jantsch from duct tape marketing kept echoing “Success is in the list…it’s in the list.” Yet in the front of my mind the issues such as “it just doesn’t fit…it doesn’t fit.” echoed. But continue on I did anyway…

Today, one big bonus of the list proved true because I effectively doubled my reader numbers in 1 day and lived to tell about it.

It’s in the list…

Although it appears my reader counts shot up by over 2,000, fact is, they were readers the whole time. They were instead my newsletter/RSS via email readers. You see, a few weeks ago, Aweber introduced a new feature where you can link your Aweber RSS readers to your Feedburner RSS readers.

This is great news. Where the current Feedburner RSS to email software is good, Aweber’s offers far more versitile functions, it looks better and gives better control for both publishers and readers.

How to link your Aweber account and Feedburner account:

1. In the Aweber control panel select Blog Broadcast

Blog broadcast is located under the messages tab.

2. Click the Create Blog Broadcast button

3. Fill out the form

The most important part to linking your Aweber RSS readers to your Feedburner readers is choosing your FeedBurner link for the RSS Feed URL.

4. You’re done!

Wait about 24 hours for Aweber to sniff out your RSS feed and send the results to Feedburner. Now all that’s left is to create great content to send to your subscribers.

If you already have a list with Aweber, then it’s just 5 minutes to get your blog broadcast set up with your Feedburner feed.

If you don’t have a newsletter with Aweber, I still recommend them as the best. Plus, some of your readers won’t understand RSS, but everyone has email. Give your readers the opportunity to read your content the way they want to read it and you’ll reap the rewards accordingly.

If you have any questions about the instructions above, post a comment and I’ll give you a hand.

P.S. The links above are affiliate links. I put them in there for the people who want to support this site. You don’t have to use them if you don’t want to. But if you sign up for an account with Aweber, please consider supporting this site by clicking my links. Thanks!

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