How To (Artificially) Boost Your Feed Numbers

Looking for your feed numbers to hit some magic number before disclosing them?

Having trouble breaking through a particular milestone in feed numbers?

You can pretty easily boost your numbers by adding your feed to various free feed directories. The directories themselves will show up as subscribers in the numbers, and they’ll regularly request your feed to look for new content. The only thing they won’t do is read or comment on your posts, or buy anything through your links.

But you can’t have everything, right?

Feed directories also give your feed a wider exposure in the long-term, and may very well result in additional real live human readers on down the line. So a short-term boost in feed numbers now, with the potential of more real readers later. There’s not much of a downside to submitting your feed.

I found a list over at DotSauce.com of 55 Active RSS Directories you can use as a starting point for your feed submitting frenzy.

As a side note, the list was compiled in June of this year, and already some of the links are down. So you take your chances with free directories, but as I said above there’s no real downside to submitting.

9 Replies to “How To (Artificially) Boost Your Feed Numbers”

  1. Hi Jay,

    Do you think that submitting to directories like these that your content may be stolen? I’ve come across these types of sites in the past yet have been hesitant to subscribe my feed there without figuring out the facts first.

  2. Hi Jerad! Anytime your feed is distributed, you run the risk of someone swiping content. My personal experience is that content stealing happens more rarely than real people seeing your feed and becoming readers.

    Everyone has their own comfort level, of course. I’m happy distributing my feed widely to get new readers, even with the added risk of content swiping. I use an RSS signature plugin to make sure that every post in the feed links back to the blog, since most people who swipe content use an automated system.

    I also mention the blog by name in the signature, in case their software cleans out links in the post.

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