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:

  1. Log into your Facebook account (duh)
  2. Click on “Notes” in the left sidebar
  3. Click on “My Notes” near the top
  4. Checking the right sidebar, you’ll see something like “Import Settings”. Click.
  5. Enter the address of your RSS feed
  6. 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.