I noticed today the blog hit a new milestone and broke pass the 29,000 RSS reader mark. Right now, the FeedBurner chicklet is showing 29,177 readers. At this rate of growth, I should pass the 30K reader mark next month. I’ve written many posts in the past on how to increase RSS subscriptions. Here’s a recap on my top four methods plus why RSS is important.

Why RSS Is Important

Building the RSS readership is my number one priority for the blog and it should be your number one priority as well. A RSS reader is far more important than a reader who drops by from a search engine or a link from another site. If you think of your blog as a magazine, your RSS readers are like the magazine subscribers and people who drop by your site from other sources are like newsstand sales.

Magazine subscriptions are far more valuable than newsstand sales. Ad rates are based on how many subscribers a magazine has and not how many issues are sold at the newsstands. Newsstand sales, like traffic from Google and other sources, can be very inconsistent. By contrast, subscriptions are like money in the bank. If you want to see how important subscriptions are to a magazine, let one of your magazine subscriptions run out and watch how hard the magazine will try to get you back.

Having a big RSS reader base protects you from the unpredictable nature of the Internet. Google can like you one day and hate you the next. If most of your traffic comes from Google, then you better start building your RSS readership. The main reason I am unaffected by anything that Google does to me is because of my base of RSS readers.

Make It Easy for The Reader Subscribe

You should never assume that your readers are smart enough to find the URL to your RSS feed. Shoemoney made that mistake when he removed his FeedBurner button. He just assumed that his readers would be smart enough to find his RSS link.

So one day I decided just to remove it. Then I started getting emails that there was no possible way for people to sign up for my feed… I thought to myself, “whatever, people can figure it out if they really want to” (which is the lazy way out).

So yesterday I was looking at my Feedburner stats and pretty surprised to see they look to have completely plateaued at around 16,500 readers since I took the little counter off.

Now that Shoe has realized his mistake and put the FeedBurner button back, his RSS count has passed 18,000. This may sound mean, but you’ll go a lot further if you assume that your readers are the dumbest people on earth and need everything spelled out for them.

That means displaying your RSS button in a very easy to find location and offering multiple ways to subscribes. You might even consider making a page to explain what RSS is and linking to it. You’ll be amazed at the number of people who still don’t know what it is and how it benefits them.

Don’t Display Your Feed Count If It’s Less Than 100

The FeedBurner chicklet that displays the number of subscribers you have serves as social proof but it can also work against you. People in general are like sheep - they never want to be the first to do anything. If your chicklet is displaying a big zero, chances are it will stay a zero. It’s a lot easier for a big blog to get more subscribers because people see this huge RSS number and want to be part of it.

I do not recommend displaying your feed count until you’ve reach at least 100 subscribers. I feel that displaying a feed count of under 100 is a deterrent for people to sign up. Another don’t is don’t to fake a feed count by displaying a chicklet from another blog. This is very easy to detect and will affect your credibility.

Use The FeedSmith Wordpress Plugin

The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin will detect all the ways a reader can access your feed (http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

Without the plugin, readers subscribed to your blog using http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php (or whatever) are not counted. FeedBurner only counts readers subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourBlog. What the plugin does is redirect all feed URLs to your FeedBurner feed URL so everyone is counted. This saves you the need to plead with your readers to update their feed URL. If they’re already getting your posts with the old feed URL, chances are very few will bother to update just so you can increase your feed count.

Turn On Aweber Blog Broadcast

If you’re an Aweber user, you should turn on the Blog Broadcast feature. Not only will this give you additional content for your newsletter, it will add all your newsletter subscribers to your FeedBurner counter because Aweber reports subscription info to FeedBurner.

Even if Aweber doesn’t increase your RSS count, you should sign up for the service anyway. A newsletter is something every successful blog needs and works hand in hand with RSS as a great marketing tool.

Congrats goes out to ZK of WebTrafficROI.com for winning all the cash from the Market Leverage Cashinator. Thanks to Market Leverage and my ability to grab cash money, ZK is now $27 richer!

A big thanks to everyone who entered the contest. I can’t believe I got over 170 comments for only $27. Now, if you want to win a lot more, Market Leverage and I still have the affiliate challenge happening.

We’re giving away an iPod Touch and a $200 ML Amex Reward Card to the contestant who makes the most money using Market Leverage. If you haven’t entered yet, better do so now. You also have a chance to win a Flip Mino just by blogging about it. Deadline for entries is end of this month. Good luck!

Live With John Chow & Yaro Starak

Join myself and fellow blogger Yaro Starak for our first Toronto meetup this Thursday, August 21 at the Live Organic Food Bar, 264 Dupont Street, Toronto, ON. The get together beings at at 7PM.

Live is a raw organic food restaurant. There are some cooked meals too, but everything is vegetarian, which is kinda scary for a hardcore carnivore like myself. There is an Irish Pub down the road we are going to use in the event of rain or if too many people show up.

We would love to see you join us for our Live meet up. Please RSVP here if you plan to come.

Dot Com Pho Toronto

The famous Dot Com Pho comes to Toronto for the very first time. We will be meeting at Vietnam Noodle Star this Saturday, August 23 at 12:30PM. The address is unit 2 - 4188 Finch Ave. East, Scarborough, ON.

If you always wanted to be in a Dot Com Pho video, this is your chance. I might have some prizes to give away too! Please RSVP to Dot Com Pho Toronto here.

I’m looking forward to meeting my Toronto readers at Live or Dot Com Pho or both.

Back in the early days of the Internet, you could just throw up a CPM banner and work on increasing the number of impressions. Google AdSense came along and forced publishers to put a little more focus on increasing the click-thru rate. With the arrival of affiliate marketing, the focus is taken even further. You not only need your visitors to notice and click on the ads, you need them to complete a certain action.

As its name implies, T3leads.com is one such pay-per-lead affiliate program. In its own words, T3leads.com sells “generated leads through a unique auction system that allows our affiliates to make maximum profits.” I like money.

Why Work with T3leads.com?

On the surface, it was hard to find anything that really set this affiliate program apart from the rest of the crowd. On the main page, T3leads.com boasts that it has the highest per lead payouts in the industry, highest traffic conversion rates, real-time reporting, and quick bi-weekly payouts.

I’ll discuss the high payouts and the conversion rates in a moment, but the one major thing that I appreciate about T3leads.com is the the bi-weekly payout schedule. This means that you don’t have to too long to get your money from T3leads.com. Contrast this to other networks that only pay out once every 30, 45, or 60 days. It’s also useful that T3leads.com offers a wide variety of payment options, as shown above.

Control Panel and Creatives

Logging into the control panel, you are immediately faced with news from the network, both in Russian and in English. Despite its Russian slant, T3leads.com says that it only accepts American traffic. That can be a little confining, given the international nature of the Internet.

You are able to navigate through the different sections by way of the menu bar at the top of the screen. The websites tab displays the sites that are currently advertising through T3leads.com, broken down based on category. Common categories include home insurance, debt relief, and payday loans.

Other useful areas in the control panel include the T3forum (accessed under Info), Promo (for banners), and Statistics. There are four different kinds of reports available.

Advertiser and Payout Information

Unlike other affiliate programs, T3 does not appear to make any specific mention about how many each advertiser pays when you send a qualified lead their way. A lead is considered generated when a site visitor fills out an “express application” form. This typically consists of a first and last name, email address, state, and zip code.

Going through the different websites and ad creatives, you won’t find any numbers regarding how much each lead is worth. How am I supposed to know that T3leads.com is offering the best payouts in the industry? That’s a claim that every affiliate network makes and it’s starting to get awfully cliche. That said, there is one sentence on the main page that says we can earn “from $5 up to $150 per lead.”

Digging a little deeper, I found that the payout is based on a number of factors: “Age of the customer, his state, credit score, etc.” Advertisers must bid for the lead, and that’s where the “auction” part of the equation comes into play. Going through the FAQ, I wasn’t able to find any specific information about the T3leads.com referral program. Is it a flat payout for referring a new publisher? A percentage of their earned commissions? Just a pat on the back?

Signing Up with T3leads.com

From a logistics point of view, I don’t have too many complaints about T3leads.com. It looks like nearly any other affiliate network and you have a good selection of payment options, each with a different minimum threshold. All of these come with bi-weekly payouts, assuming you meet the threshold.

Where I do have complaints about T3leads.com is in its transparency. I have no idea how much each lead is generating and there is virtually no information about the individual advertisers. I need to know whether advertiser X is potentially more lucrative than advertiser Y. There is quite a bit of difference between promoting something that pays a $0.01/lead and something that pays $150/lead. What about incentivization? T3leads.com needs to provide publishers with this kind of information.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP WITH T3LEADS.COM

This post was guest blogged by Trevor Mauch of REI Brain, a blog that focuses on real estate investing and education.

Okay, I’ve heard a ton of people writing about the importance of gathering RSS subscribers on your blog in addition to email subscribers. I agree… both are hugely important and each have their own pros and cons.

However, have you ever wondered how many RSS subscribers a website has? Yes, of course many sites have the Feeburner icon that shows you exactly how many people are subscribed to their feed.

For instance, here are some popular RSS feed counts from bloggers you know that list their RSS feed stats on their websites (as of 8/16):

• John Chow: 28,102
• Shoemoney: 16,585
• Problogger: 50,590
• Tyler Cruz: 1,679
• Zac Johnson: 3,623

However, for those of us who are curious… we tend to want to know even more when a website hides their RSS reader count from the world. It’s that whole thing that we feel cooler when we know something that most other poeple don’t know.

Here’s How To Find Hidden Feedburner RSS Readerships

Want to find out what the RSS readership is for ANY website using Feedburner? Simple… head over to Feedcompare.com and give it a go.

For instance, I’ve always been curious (as have a ton of other people) about how many RSS readers Seth Godin has. Seth doesn’t openly publish his feed count… why, I’m not sure. Maybe he wants to be the “purple cow” and stand out by going against the grain (which is a good strategy). Or… maybe it’s the idea that if he doesn’t publish it that people (like me) will wonder… and come to conclusions on how many RSS readers they THINK he has. Who knows… maybe he really doesn’t care about it and hasn’t given it much thought. Anyhow, I was curious so I headed over to feedcompare.com and typed in Seths RSS feed address… here’s what I got:

As of 8/13, Seth has 290,440 RSS subscribers… not too shabby at all… especially for a marketing blog. You’ll see tech, celebrity, or political blogs well up into the high 6 or low 7 figures… but for a marketing blog that is stellar.

However, I was somewhat disappointed because for some reason I was thinking that Seth has much more RSS readers than that… I was expecting upwards of 400k. That’s one reason leaving it a mystery can be a good thing… people will often estimate higher than the actual number giving you a “boost” in the mind of the reader.

How You Can Use This Tool For Your Online Biz

While looking at peoples RSS readership stats is fun (for about 5 minutes)… it’s really just a novelty unless you use it to help you build your own business. Here are a few ways you can use feedcompare.com for good… rather than from a voyeuristic standpoint:

• Track the RSS readership trend of your competitors:
  From this you can see if your competition is growing, staying stagnant, or declining. Then, you can head over to their website and match up the content they post with spikes and valleys in the RSS trend line. Also, if your competition is on a heavy upward trend… study their website to see why… and also leave comments on their blog to drive traffic back to your site.
• Compare your feed and/or the feeds of your competitors:
  With feedcompare.com you can compare up to 4 feeds on the same graph. This is pretty cool if you want to see right there on the screen how you are doing against your competitors. If you both have spikes and/or valleys in readership at the same time… you should then look at the news/market to find out why. Sometimes the spikes/valleys can simply be a glitch in Feedburner… but often you can get great market intelligence out of these anomalies so you can better prepare for the future.
• See what days people are reading your content via RSS the most:
  I think this one is huge… and it is pretty darn interesting too. Just like with email, people tend to read RSS more on some days of the week than others. In email marketing Tuesdays and Thursdays have traditionally been the best times to send out emails because email open rates are better. There are several reasons for this… but in essence, on Tuesday people have had a chance to get back in “work mode” and cleared out their inbox from the weekend… on Thursday people try to get their email inbox cleared out before they head off for the weekend on Friday.

Looking for Trends

I was looking at the RSS stats for Shoemoney and he has the highest RSS readership on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well… with Friday and Saturday being the lowest days. You can see that he has a spike on 7/29 which is a Tuesday. The next spike is on 8/5 which is also a Tuesday, and yet the last spike on the chart (actually it’s not on this one… I accidentally cut it off), is on 8/12… yet another Tuesday. As for the huge valley in the middle… that’s on a Friday.

By reading this you can see that the most important content should be posted on Tuesdays to increase the readership of the content. Knowing your market is a vital part of running a successful blog or website. Head over to feedcompare.com and check out your chart and the charts of your competitors. Then, use that information to get more mileage with your articles and to see what your competitors are doing right. A bit of legwork does magic!