The little “Chicklet ‘o’ Power,” as I affectionately call it, registered over 2,000+ RSS Subscribers this morning.
Can I get a w00t…?!?
Exactly 91 days ago I blogged my excitement of crossing the 1,000 RSS Subscriber count.
This had been one of my many goals for the first year of ChurchCrunch. It had taken 7 months and 13 days to break the 1k barrier and near the end of the post I created a new goal for myself to break the 2,000 mark by the end of the fiscal year (the 365 day experiment).
Looks like we did it.
Before I jump into some of the reasons why I believe this blog has continued to exponentially grow I’d like to just get the challenge and new goal out of the way: I’d like to break 3,000 RSS Readers in the next 49 days, essentially cutting in half the time it took me to break the last 1k.
Think it can be done?
This is a pretty audacious goal and I don’t expect to break it, but why not shoot for the stars while we’re going for the moon, right? It seems historically that we’ve been able to continue breaking this 1k barrier in a half-life-like rhythm; there is obviously a ceiling and limit to this growth.
So, what exactly happened in the last 3 months? Here’s what I think…
RSS Inflation via FriendFeed
Without question the first thing that happened in the last 3 months was a rapid inflation of stats globally, especially if you’re a FriendFeed user. As outlined in their official post, FriendFeed started adding your subscriber count into Feedburner.
There have been many varying reactions where some have said that this has “ruined” the accuracy of Feedburner while others have sat on the opposite side. My personal take on it is this: It is what it is. At the end of the day it’s just a number and I’m not going to whine and complain if it goes up or down. It’s really out of my control.
In any case, here’s a screenshot that shows exactly when this “bump” occured:
Now please note that as a direct result of this I completely changed my FriendFeed strategy. At one time (around December of last year), I took this screenshot of my “insanity” that is FriendFeed:
As you can see, I had every single social network linked up into this badboy (and more that you can’t see).
Why?
Just because I could. Friendfeed was more of a baystation than anything else; a collection of sorts. I didn’t use it directly and never really liked it.
But, with the change in Feedburner calculating RSS Readers through it I instantly cleaned it up; I wanted it to serve those that are using it and make sure they were getting the best content that I produced (my blogs and twitter).
It now looks like the shot to the right:
Obviously a little cleaner and certainly more useful for the people who have decided to use the service. As a result, my traffic from Friendfeed increased and effectiveness of the platform was leveraged wisely.
(I’d suggest you do the same.)
So at this point I’m pretty excited about it and hope to use it more in the future.
Goals Make a Difference
The second thing that I believe contributed to the continued growth of readers is the fact that I have explicit goals for this blog. Having explicit ones encourages me (forces me) to innovate and continue pushing for excellence. Having goals also sets the stage for strategy development and continued improvement.
Goals make a huge difference for me and everything I do. Not everything is possible to be qualified, but most things are able to be quantified. I try to have some of both in my calculations and goals.
One of the former is “development of community.” For all intents and purposes, this is relatively hard to discern and to see if it’s being met or growing, but I have that as one of my goals. One of the latter is traffic and pageviews, which is easily calculated.
Posting Quantity Increased
For those that have been paying attention over the last 3 months the number of posts have increased dramatically on a daily level. Although recently I’ve had to drop it down due to other extremely large projects, I had been striving for 5 posts every single day.
That’s a lot of posts.
But, the coverage was uniquely broad and it enabled me to cast as wide a net as possible to encourage readers to subscribe. More content means more possibility of grabbing someone’s attention that may not otherwise be interested. It’s been a tough run but it’s been well worth it.
Viral Coverage Increased
I’ve had some significant viral coverage in the last 3 months that have definitely helped increase the site visits and eyes on the content presented here.
Just look at the graph below; obviously there was a huge spike for 3 to 4 days that annihilated every record previously held in terms of visits and pageviews:
I certainly didn’t complain. But, what I did do was make sure that the content in those two to three day span was of the highest quality and that spanned the 3 major categories that I have chosen to cover so that the people visiting would have more reason to stick around and subscribe.
As a result I gained more than 50 subscribers in only a few days. I like that, I like that a lot.
Guest Posting/Contests Increased
It’s always been my plan and desire to have as many guest voices as possible here on ChurchCrunch. It’s just simply better. I could spend more time than necessary talking about this but the bottom line is that it’s increased traffic and increased subscribers.
So, you should probably want to think about that.
Also, the amount of contests I had in the last 3 months were more than usual. Again, I’m not going to attempt to explain why that increases traffic and subscribers; it just does.
Trust me.
So, Where To Now?
Like I had mentioned earlier in this post I’m going to keep moving forward; nothing has changed dramatically out of my plan for the first 365 days. I’m going to keep blogging as usual.
But, I’m going to try a few more things and do a few other things differently. I’ll keep that a secret and let you know in the next 50 or so days how it all works out.
One final note that RSS Subscriber growth is also very organic; it simply grows over time, and there’s not much else you can do about that. Sure, there are a few strategies here and there, but for the most part it’s really just dumb luck.
On to the next 1k…!
[Image from Desiree]
stephenbateman says
Thanks Sensei Saddington (as Jim gray would say).
Great stuff and I can't wait for the next 1k/90day iteration.
klreed189 says
This is awesome to hear John. I am glad to see the growth of this site. I know I have discovered it in the last month and have been trying to pass it along to friends that I know who would enjoy it. I don't think I will be able to share that with 1000 people, but maybe through my blog I can help a little bit.
Can you give me some more info about friend finder? What is it, how does it work and how do I get it?
Thanks dude
kyle
klreed189 says
This is awesome to hear John. I am glad to see the growth of this site. I know I have discovered it in the last month and have been trying to pass it along to friends that I know who would enjoy it. I don't think I will be able to share that with 1000 people, but maybe through my blog I can help a little bit.
Can you give me some more info about friendfeeder? What is it, how does it work and how do I get it?
Thanks dude
kyle
human3rror says
friendfeed.com …!
klreed189 says
I guess I see how it is useful. I just don't know of anyone that is using it.
human3rror says
yeah, it's not my service of choice.
klreed189 says
How do you integrate it into feedburner? Or really, how do you keep tabs of the stats like you talked about in feedburner?
human3rror says
it's auto calculates… and anaytics can help you determine where your viewers are coming from
human3rror says
it's auto calculates… and anaytics can help you determine where your viewers are coming from
Jim says
ha…i remember the beginning when there were a few who commenting…i love sharing the goodness
dsims says
I'm not sure pruning your FriendFeed services is a good idea. FriendFeed subscribers can hide whatever they don't want to see. For example if someone doesn't care about your Flickr activity, with just a few clicks they will never see it again. That's why I'm not too concerned if my FF profile gets a little messy at times.
Lately FF has been downplaying the services too, as now everything appears as a uniform post and you can only display up to 5 service icons on your profile.
But I guess if you really saw more traffic as a direct effect of dropping services, then I can't really argue with that 🙂
Aaron says
So what happened on June 5th that caused your blog to go viral, but only for a few days?
(Denial of service attack?) 😀
human3rror says
the “god text messaged” post.