First thing was to find some expert opinion and I found a nice list of 50 tips to increase your RSS subscribers by my old mate Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips who is nearing 50,000 subscribers so looks like a safe bet on this issue. In an effort to not overload you with information I have provided a summary of the tips below as well as my opinion on each (in brackets). What will now happen is a series of experiments using one tip at a time and comparing the results. I will let you look over the list first and post my first experiment tomorrow.

1. Have a big RSS icon (Will replace my set up with a very standard Icon and make it bigger)

2. Display the RSS icon above the fold (Happens on every page other than the home page. May be worth testing)

3. Display the RSS icon on every page of your blog (done)

4. Use words.

5. Write a post asking for people to subscribe (Have Done with limited success. May repeat)

6. Use the FeedSmith plugin. (done)

7. Offer email subscriptions. (Will definitely Try)

8. Use an email subscription form. (see above)

9. Encourage readers to subscribe at the bottom of every post. (I do it at the top of every post in a less than ambiguous fashion. Will amend, then test).

10. As few steps as possible. (At the moment it is one step, may reduce to zero steps and see how it goes)

11. Use icons to offer subscription on the most popular RSS readers.

12. Have clear focus on your blog. (No chance the blog reflects my mind which is….Squirrel!)

13. Publish new posts frequently and consistently. (Not going to happen to improve my self-confidence. If I am able and the content is decent may try and increase frequency of post)

14. Don’t exaggerate. (Me? Never)

15. Write valuable content. (Done with bells on)

16. Write unique content. (No-one is quite like me or you or you or you…)

17. Don’t ramble or go off topic. (Do not read the above comment on 16, or 12, or 22…)

18. Use your RSS feed link when commenting on other blogs.

19. Run a contest. (Seems a bit superficial…perfect!)

20. Offer random prizes to your subscribers. (I will stop emailing you if you subscribe…hmm probably not)

21. Write guest posts. (Been There, failed that)

22. Welcome the new readers. (My face is on every page what more of a welcome could they possibly want)

23. Go popular on social bookmarking sites. (Its so easy to do and all. This will probably be my next series but not for RSS, for more visitors)

24. Explain to your readers what is RSS. (Hmm, may need wikipedia)

25. Have a special “Subscribe” page with all the info and links there.

26. Create a landing page on your blog to convert visitors in subscribers. (no)

27. Send traffic to that page using PPC. (No)

28. Write an ebook and ask people to subscribe in order to download it. (too much effort)

29. Launch an email newsletter with Aweber. (very Good Idea, although the results may be inflated considering I already have several thousand subscribers)

30. Offer a full feed. (So chips with the hamburger. Got it)

31. Clutter your website with ads. (probably need to read the whole post for this not to sound stupid)

32. Don’t clutter your RSS feed with ads. (Done)

33. Use social proof. (Most likely my first experiment. Stay tuned (by subscribing to my fed perhaps??(Can you do more than one bracketed comment at a time)))

34. Offer breaking news.

35. Mention that subscribing to your blog is free.

36. Use pop-ups to encourage subscription to your newsletter. (Not gonna happen)

37. Use an animated RSS feed icon to draw attention. (Good Idea)

38. Use feed directories. (No)

39. Email first time commentators encouraging them to subscribe. (seems slightly desperate. Perfect)

40. Make sure the feed auto-discovery feature is working.

41. Offer a comments feed. (seriously does anyone subscribe to this? And more importantly if they do why?)

42. Offer category feeds. (Probably a good way to keep my feeds on topic, on the rare occasion I post about the same topic more than once)

43. Run periodic checks on your feeds.

44. Recover unverified email subscribers.

45. Leverage an existing blog or audience.

46. Use cross feed promotion.

47. Use testimonials on your “Subscribe” page. (Not sure if my testimonials would reflect awfully positive and not sure if you can use your own testimonial, is that taboo?)

48. Get friends to recommend your site and RSS feed on their blog. (Friends…of course..I will ask them *Chirping Crickets*)

49. Do something funny or weird while asking for people to subscribe. (I could stand on my head but no-one would probably see it)

50. Start a long series so people subscribe to keep update with it. (Hmmm, where have I done this before?)

Because of my planning and filing systems which involve me trying to remember things off the top of my head and searching through scribbled A4 pages through the trash I completely forgot about the experiment I started. To be fair (or to make a poor excuse) the guest post was published 4 months after I submitted it. The original details and ideas behind the experiment can be found here.

So I can here you all say “with your amazing abilities as a writer and wonderful personality, not to mention your sporting accomplishments and devilish good looks, how many times did your server crash?”. Well the short answer to that is that it didn’t crash not even once. Obviously I suspect there was some sort of catastrophic world-wide communications failure that meant my post went by almost unnoticed, but still I thought it would be interested to look at the stats.

Results

• Published: May 12
• Traffic: 27 visitors
• Pages: 2.7
• Time on Site: 3:21
• Bounce Rate: 37.04%

Conclusion

Well for a site that has 40,000+ RSS readers, 27 visitors is extremely disappointing. However considering the article took me probably half hour to do and that the visitors bounce rate was lower and the time spent on my site were much higher than normal, suggests that guest post is a step in the right direction to try and build the community around the blog.

I guess the question that is most important is not “were the results expected achieved” but rather “was it worth the effort” and in that case definitely. Partly because I got two articles on this site out of the effort, and also learnt some useful lessons along the way, and partly because I may have a few possible long term readers. Also any efforts I make online are never a waste of time because it all becomes a catalog of my achievements and profound knowledge which historians will be able to study centuries from now.

Where to from Here?

Well fear not faithful readers, many of whom probably found this article via the search engines and have no intention of ever returning, but I am already in the process of writing another masterpiece to test out this guest posting gig further. My thinking is that the article I wrote previously, whilst solid in terms of factual and useful information, was poorly constructed and lacked any personality or more importantly any reason to check out my other post here at Scribblescratch. Once a large number of people see my unbelievably likable personality through my uncanny ability to manipulate letters into words and sentences that tell a story, the likes of which has not been seen since Shakespeare, my business decision to get three dedicated servers will finally begin to pay off.

The first thing I had to do was pick a traffic company. I searched the term “buy traffic” in google and chose the company that appeared first in the paid advertisemnts. My thinking was that if they could pay the most for promotion they must be one of the most successful companies and successful companies generally deliver the best product/services. The company was revisitors.com. One thing to be careful of though, was the fact that Revisitors sold subscriptions to paid traffic as opposed to one off services. In hindsight this is probably how they could afford to be first in Googles ads.

The Experiment

My test subject for this experiment was a forex blog I have sitting around gathering dust. It does have some traffic and adsense clicks (very minimal), enough history to compare the results of the paid traffic. For the safety of my adsense accounts (as I have publised my adsense statistics further down) I have decided to not make public the URL of my test subject. So for this site I purchased a package from revisitors which consisted of 2,500 U.S visitors in one week. I chose the visitors to come from the investment category as it was the most relevant category to my niche. The package cost me $22 so that is the amount I need to earn in adsense revenue to break even.

Control

Before we see the results we need to compare them to something. So here are the stats for the site up until I paid for traffic. Over a period of 3 months the stats for the site were:

• Page Impressions: 284
• Clicks: 21
• Click Through rate (CTR): 7.39%
• Page eCPM: $42.32
• Total Revenue: $12.02

Obviously I would not expect that type of CTR for paid traffic but it is important to know what stats real traffic generates so to compare with the paid traffic.

Results

Below are the adsense statistics after I paid for the visitors. These stats are for the first 5 days following my first visitor from revistors:

• Page Impressions: 961
• Clicks: 1
• Click Through rate (CTR): 0.10%
• Page eCPM: $0.41
• Total Revenue: $0.39

Conclusion

Where oh where do I start? Well I guess I should point out I stopped the experiment a couple of days early. The result was fairly obvious at that point and I wanted to cancel my subscription before I forgot. As I mentioned previously I did not expect a high CTR with paid traffic but I did expect something higher than roughly 1 click per thousand visitors. For my $22 investment I got a return of 39 cents so its fairly obvious to see this as an abject failure. Perhaps I could of tried several companies or found a company that specifically deals with forex visitors so it may be a bit soon to make a complete judgement on paid visitors, but gut instinct tells me this result is the norm not the exception.

I probably should start with a disclaimer and re-iterate the fact there are two rather large variables with this experiment. The first is the paid digg provider as there are hundreds of individuals and companies offering this service with (you would assume) vastly different results. The second which pertains to all viral type marketing is the quality of the product available, in my case the quality of my article. If my article is total rubbish, it won’t matter how good the paid digg service is I will never see the front page.

Having said that I found a gentlemen on DP who was a power Digg user and could offer 75 diggs for $20. If my article hits the front page I owe him another $150. In addition he previews the article first (to ensure quality and assess the chances of hitting the front page) before he begins digging it. But before he starts work I had to write the article. Top 10 dumbest blog comments was the end result which was (in my opinion) quite funny and worthy of being Dugg. The top 10 title should also help with the prospects of the article hitting the front page and my service provider agreed and began digging it on a Monday morning (he claims to get better results that way).

Results

• Day 1 – 74 Diggs
  One would have to assume these are purely a result of the service I hired and nothing more.
• Day 2 – 108 Diggs
  Extremely happy with these results. Much of the traffic from Digg (and my own traffic) were digging the article which I can assume means my article was of high quality.
• Day 3 – 131 Diggs
  On track to hit front page if the article continued this strong growth in Diggs.
• Day 4 – 132 Diggs
  Looks like the Digg experiment is dying. Have to see if today is the rule or hopefully just the exception.
• Day 5 – 133 Diggs
  With no more diggs it seems as though this articles 15 minutes of fame is over and with that the experiment is over as well.

So what about the traffic the site received? Well it had an extra 257 visitors over 3 days directly from Digg. Enough to spike my traffic for a few days. But more interestingly is the type of traffic it sent. To say it was disappointing is an understatement. Here are my results from my sites analytics:

• Visitors: 257 (3 days)
• Pages/visit: 1.05 (that’s 1 person out of 20 visiting another page)
• Avg Time on Site: 5 secs
• Bounce Rate: 96.5%

Conclusion

I would have like to see the results had the article hit the front page. Perhaps it would be beneficial also to measure the different results if I had tried the same thing with a premium Digg service. Putting all that aside the results were less than overwhelming. Whilst the extra traffic looks good in my analytics statistics and the blog itself looks a lot more professional with so many diggs for an article the end result was disappointing. If people are on my site for 5 seconds what is the chance they will sign up to my RSS feed, become return visitors or complete a call to action? I have heard it before when referring to Digg traffic, but my own small experiment seems to confirm it as well, the quantity is good but the quality is poor. I think it is imperative that your site hits the front page and get thousands of visitors to have any real success with Digg.

What Is It?

A guest post is quite simply a post published on a blog written by another author for free. The blog gets unique quality content for free and the author gets related traffic, links and the post helps builds the authors credibility online.

The issues Related to It

Generally there are a few simple rules that need to be followed for guest authors to get their content published. The most important being, that the content is unique and will not be republished elsewhere. The second most important rule is that the article or post must be of high quality to be published. The last rule (similar to the first) is that the article should not be similar to another article recently published on the site.

For me the last two rules pose significant troubles. Whilst I believe my posts to be of the highest quality in terms of content, I am not oblivious to the fact that my use of the English language is less than desirable. Hopefully the quality of the information provided will be enough to hide the lack of quality evident in how the information is presented. The last rule is more of a random occurrence issue. I can only write on topics which I know and hope that something similar has not been published recently. Worse case scenario is whilst writing a quality post 2-3 days another post is published on the topic unbeknown to me.

My Experiment

Seeing as this will be my first guest post attempt I thought I would track my results via an experiment. The experiment will consist of two parts.

Part 1: Can I get my article published as a guest post at problogger.com?

Part 2: What gains in terms of traffic will I receiver for having my article published as a guest post at probogger.com?

Update: 30 Jan
So its taken me a few days to write the post. Admittedly I didn’t do anything on a couple of those days but from start to completion it took 4 days. I have contacted Darren at problogger.net to ask permission to guest post. I will now have to wait for a response. In my email to Darren I was personal and made comment that he is a fellow Australian blogger like myself. I’m not trying to be best friends but hopefully stand out enough from the other 1000 emails he would get so that he would give proper consideration to my post.

I have collected the results and decided to create a new post for them. To view the results please check out Guest Post Experiment – Revisited.