Okay, I’m not sure if it’s an evil way to do it, but I kind of stumbled across this strategy and it seems to work reasonably well. Many of you have heard of Facebook, a social networking site, but did you know that you can use it to inflate your RSS readership? No, I’m not telling you to go spam other people’s walls with links back to your blog — they surely wouldn’t appreciate that — but I am going to describe a way that promotes your site in a much friendlier way.
Did you know that you can import your RSS feed into Facebook, effectively sharing it with everyone on your friends list? This will show up in the “news feed” as a “note” from you. Obviously, the one major downside to this — much like providing a full feed RSS — is that people may more inclined to just read your blog entries on Facebook rather than visiting your site. There are advantages too, and this has already been discussed ad nauseum, so I’m not going ot get into that.
Getting back on track, in order to import an RSS feed, go through these following steps:
- Log into your Facebook account (duh)
- Click on “Notes” in the left sidebar
- Click on “My Notes” near the top
- Checking the right sidebar, you’ll see something like “Import Settings”. Click.
- Enter the address of your RSS feed
- Show appreciation to Michael for showing you the way.
After you’ve gone through these steps, each and every one of your blog entries will be imported into Facebook, complete with any embedded images (but without ads).
So, how is this an evil way to increase your RSS subscriber count? Well, it turns out that the people on your friends list who view these notes count as subscribers. Since going through this process about a week ago, I’ve gained about 20 additional RSS subscribers. Checking my Feedburner account, I found that a good proportion of these were from the Facebook “reader.” I’m not exactly sure how this system works, because I have way more than just 10 Facebook “friends”, but it does seem to be working to a certain extent.
If you’ve already got a huge readership, an extra 10-20 subscribers won’t make that much of a difference to you, but if you’re just starting out and still have fewer than 50 subscribers, this will certainly help your rankings and — as a result — help you make money online. After all, services like ReviewMe base your rate, in part, on your RSS popularity.
Since when did you start becoming evil?
Since you started paving the way
The root of all evil calls YOU evil! Haha!
LOL Michael, it is really evil .. good tip ๐
I think this a great tip – evil or not!
I was just about to sat that this reeks of John Chow’s Evilโข ๐
Dude, you’ve got to keep this kind of thing on the DL! ๐ First John outs the Top Commentator thing and now this lol. What is the world coming too?
Awesome tip… Now to look for a facebook account for sale.
Can I ask why the hell review me shows 0 rss subscribers for my blog? Am I doing something wrong here or do they just take their sweet time updating?
it’s really weird, I have doubled my RSS subscribers according to feedburner but when I went and updated at ReviewMe, it dropped me down. I have no idea where they are pulling their data from but I wish it would catch up the feedburner.
Michael,
i discovered what you are talking about a while ago and it did actually help me gain a few visitors to my blog. Facebook allowed me to find and connect with people i havent seen for 6-7 years and once i added them as contacts some of them started seeing my blog posts and though it interesting (because they are finance students) and are now regular visitors to my blog.
This is definitely an interesting article however I prefer to keep my blogging and business life away from my personal life, therefore I wouldn’t add my blog feed to social sites such as FaceBook.
– Martin Reed
That’s a very valid point. Most of my family already reads my blog but I’ll definitely have to keep that in mind when confirming or adding new friends… thanks for bringing that up, CBB!
Very cool tip Michael. I rarely login to my Facebook account, but will be nice to annoy all my friends on there… maybe even get them to start making some money! haha
Hmmm you are defenitly a payed writer of JC..we can see it now
Too bad I deleted my facebook account as it seemed totally useless. All it did was remind me why I do not talk to some people anymore ๐
But maybe I will have to open it back up to try this out. Thanks for the tip.
I just did this for my blog, to bad you cant enter more than 1 RSS feed!
Alright, I caved. I reactivated my account to see if this works. Damn soul-stealing facebook ๐
I am in the process of setting up a facebook account just for this purpose..
I have to see how this works out
This is an awesome idea.
Good idea, but then I would have to interface with facebookians! And I thought MySpace was bad enough…
Ah, this is pretty sweet. Thanks for the tip. ๐
I’ve been doing this for a while without realizing the benefits. I hate it when I’m evil and don’t even realize it!
hmm… simple and evil.. I like it. Thanks for sharing
Hi, there!..c435ea923640f11dfbcc3e3fed566098
Wow man this is a great way to increase your rss subscribers i must give it a try and i will blog about it too!
Great post! Thanks for sharing this information. I didn’t realize that you could dynamically have posts show up on the Facebook newsfeed… ๐