Posted on Sunday 11th of November 2007 at 13:29 in Blogging

An evil way to cheat your way to unlimited RSS subscribers

Let me get the pleasantries out of the way: this isn't a post for me to discuss the benefits of RSS (because that's been done countless times before), nor is this article here to explain what you're doing wrong - this is a post discussing psychology and more importantly how to leverage users in a very evil and dishonest way using the Email RSS subscriber widget that Feedburner provides.

Whether you have 1,000,000 readers or just 1, the chances are you're aiming to convert more readers in the future. The thing you need to understand about humans is that we're naturally a pack animal and we give information more importance when more people say it's good. This is clearly exemplified by the rise of sites like Digg and Reddit (that allow users to vote on which news stories are the best).

If you've got no visitors, no feed subscribers and therefore nothing to brag about then it's going to be very hard to convert more users. So, what about faking your RSS subscribers so people think that 1,000 people are subscribed to your feed? That changes things...

What you need to do:
1. Set up an email address that catches all email sent to a domain
2. Enter as many random email addresses @ that domain into your subscription box
3. Go through the inbox and confirm each fake address (as they all forward to the same place)
4. Put the Feedburner feed-count on your site to entice more readers to subscribe.

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If that's not enough information, continue reading and I'll explain it in greater depth.
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How to be evil and give yourself as many feed subscribers as you wish
This is where having your feeds managed by Feedburner becomes especially useful; not only do they offer Email subscription widgets to install on your blog but they also count towards your overall feed count. In basic terms, having 0 RSS subscribers and 50 Email subscribers still gives you a feed count of 50. Moreover, John Chow discovered in his How I Gained 4,691 RSS Reader In 1 Month post that the only way Email subscribers to stop being counted is if they physically unsubscribe (or close their email address).

So if you could somehow fake having 1,000 Email subscribers on your account, then you would have a statistic worth bragging about - which would in turn entice more users to subscribe... It's another example of the rich getting richer; only when you have something do people want to give you more.

So how can it be done?
Surprisingly it's rather easy. All you need is hosting that allows multiple Email accounts to be set up (which most do) although you only need to create one more. All you need to do is create a second Email address that catches every piece of email sent to your domain that doesn't resolve. Let me explain using examples:

I have steven.york@seopher.com registered as my contact address, but I also created a catch-all@seopher.com which catches everything that doesn't go to my steven.york one. So if you sent an email to abc@seopher.com it would be forwarded to catch-all@seopher.com. So you can enter any email address you like and it will always end up in my catch-all inbox.

You can now sit infront of your RSS Email subscription form and enter any number of email addresses into the subscription box, it really doesn't matter what you enter because unless it is matched against a specific address, your catch-all will hold it. This means that if you enter:

a@yourwebsite.com
b@yourwebsite.com
c@yourwebsite.com

All three will have the confirmation emails forwarded to your catch-all, so all you need to do is go through each confirmation email and click on the link. That marks that address as active and Feedburner adds that user to the list of RSS subscribers. So if you have the patience you can sit and add 1,000 fake Email addresses into the subscription box, then later go through the 1,000 emails you have and confirm each account.

So there you have it, a very evil way to have more RSS subscribers. Of course I don't encourage this behaviour and you should only ever consider using this as a method to break down the mental barriers people have: so they look beyond the lack of subscribers to see your excellent content.

 

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