So I ended up with 34 RSS subscribers after 3 weeks of having the blog live instead of 4. I was supposed to end up with 100 but I had the handicap of letting one week of the month go unused plus I got sick near the end, enough with the excuses though.

Let’s just see what are the most important points learned as part of this experiment.

Offering Incentives To Subscribe

I started off the blog with a few posts here and there, to attract a few casual first looks, it went OK for the beginning but nothing much to write about. Since I had well over $80 in budget left, from $100, I decided to hold an all out competition to gain some RSS subscribers {which seems to work very well}.

First, I went and registered myself on Entrecard in order to get some starting traffic. My ad spots were quickly filled in, as they are with most new blogs on Entrecard. The traffic was as expected, highly bouncy. So even though it was not of the most benefit by itself it did well enough with the cross promotion running at the time which was the competition. The trick there was to link to the competition page and not the main blog homepage.

The attention span on the internet is said to be from 10 – 30 seconds. With Entrecard users I would say it’s around 2 seconds.

I managed to get a few linkbacks as well, but I wanted more. Then I went ahead and got in touch with a bunch of contest blogs letting them know about the competition. Sure enough, they linked back. The traffic however was negligible, with 5 contest blogs linking back I don’t think they even sent 100 visitors…combined!  So if you think by getting featured on contest blogs you might be benefited, think again.

Social Media Traffic

The importance of social media traffic has been documented well and enough on the web already. Basically, it’s  very important.

I was very surprised to find out that the blog got stumbled, not once but twice! Even though I will admit the content was not what I’m usually used to putting out. I had hoped that perhaps it would turn into more subscribers, sadly stumblers are known to…well stumble on {I firmly believe in stumble upon traffic more than I do any other social site}. Some did stick around to try their hand at winning my cash prize though.

I didn’t do any of my own social site submitting as I was under an alias the whole time I used that blog, what a pain that was!

Adding myself to a few MyBlogLog communities did bring a few visits here and there. A lot of them were from Entrecard, who left at the drop of a click. I actually think I built up a small community on MBL faster there than I did for this blog. I still cannot think of anything to use MBL for rather than to show people where I’ve been around the net.

I mean, does it really matter?

End Results

The blog had a total of 646 visitors with 920 pageviews from the 9th to the 29th of February. I didn’t start tracking RSS subscribers till the 19th of February. The highest amount of RSS readers were as stated above, 34. So Zach, you win the challenge experiment. You get 10,000 brownie points. Which can be redeemed for a pocket full of kryptonite.

Oh! Here’s the blog I started by the way.

BlogFeld – This Blogging Is Making Me Thirsty!

I’m putting it up for sale, anyone interested? It’s predicted to be a PR 3. Email me your best offer.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.