Double Your Subscriber Numbers Overnight!
Every month, I trash at least 4 or 5 magazines — without reading them.
They arrive in the mail. I stopped subscribing to them ages ago.
photo credit: bravenewtraveler
I’m sure I’m not alone. A number of friends of mine were just grousing about this annoying issue last week. It’s not just a waste of paper. It’s needless clutter. I have to pay to have unwanted periodicals hauled away. And it’s all a huge waste of my time.
But magazine publishers need to keep their subscriber numbers artificially elevated to keep their advertising prices artificially elevated. Pull the plug on your magazine subscription, and 50% of the time, the monthlies keep coming, anyway. The other 50% of the time, you’ll get swamped with sales letters that beg you to re-subscribe — at rock-bottom prices.
Quality of subscriber? Not important.
Quantity? That’s what these flailing magazine publishers are after.
What’s this have to do with your social media subscriptions? I was a little surprised to hear two internet marketing colleagues whine about their paltry number of “subscribers” this week — and the desperate measures they were considering to increase their numbers. One considered a crazy scheme to increase blog subscriber numbers, and another felt like a failure for having slightly less than 1,000 Twitter followers — after Twittering for a few days.
To me, this kind of needless fretting over subscriber numbers seems like a form of mental illness.
- Maybe it’s obsessive compulsiveness - “1 more, no, 10 more, no, 100 more, no, never enough!”
- Or an inferiority complex — “I must be popular, or I’m worthless”
- Or anxiety - “I must have the appearance of popularity, or I will lose face with my colleagues…”
Or perhaps all three?
In reality, the number of subscribers my cohorts have is irrelevant. Ironically, the quality of the relationships they have with their current subscribers — that’s actually very good! Their subscribers seem to love them — in spite of their neuroses! This camp of lovey-doviness should ensure the word-of-mouse (yeah, I meant mouse!) that will increase the quantity of subscriber numbers.
Over time.
But, my neurotic colleagues want instant results, and instant popularity. They measure their value not in the quality of their relationships, but the quantity. (I also suspect my colleagues are attracting an equally neurotic subscriber base, what with the law of attraction being universal and all.) I hope their quantity-quantity-quantity attitudes don’t make their current subscribers feel unappreciated — because that can surely impact long term goals!
Like John Lennon said, “Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You!”
Over the following weeks, I’ll share some of the unethical and neurotic ideas I’ve heard to increase your followers, connections, and subscribers. They’ll work like crazy all right — but I wouldn’t recommend a single one of these tactics!
You don’t want to be like a magazine, after all! Or develop a mental illness…
I’ll also share some ethical and humane ideas for increasing subscriber quantity — and quality.
First up: here is one completely legitimate way to increase your blog subscriber numbers — overnight!
Use the Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin. If you’re using WordPress to self-publish your blog and Feedburner to manager your Blog feed, be sure to use the FeedSmith Plugin for Wordpress. This plugin scoops up all the different ways someone might be subscribing to your feed, and re-directs them to Feedburner. You can keep track of every subscriber.
Now, my sensational headline “Double Your Subscriber Numbers Overnight” is about as true as any headline you’ll see on any woman’s magazine in the checkout stand. You actually already HAVE these subscribers — you just aren’t SHOWING all your subscribers NUMBERS in your Feedburner subscriber counts without this plugin. You can’t brag effectively without it!
And if you’re subscriber-quantity neurotic, seeing a higher number will make you feel better.
For about a second.
(Results may vary. One WordPress user I know only saw a 50% increase. And it took two days, instead of overnight. But that justified the 5 minutes of work it took to download, upload, and activate the plugin. And yeah, bragging rights aside, accurate measurements are actually important!)
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Comments
Thanks for commenting, Marnie!
I am not a mass marketer. I am a niche marketer. I work for 100% of a niche, not a small percentage of an undefined mass. We differ that way, you and I…
To me, quantity and quality are related. It’s no coincidence that they are frequently mentioned in tandem. But they’re not opposites. To me, they complement each other.
For example, when I state a numeric goal, i.e., “1000 Twitter subscribers by June 1!” I must next reflect, “now, what quality (of life) will that number bring me?”
If I don’t value the quality that the quantity yields, then I’m pointlessly chasing numbers. Life becomes meaningless.
But when I value the qualities that the quantity brings, my life feels richer. I enjoy a stronger sense of purpose. I feel more motivated.
Deeper truths are behind the quantity question. What will X amount give me? More love? More money? More acceptance?
Wonderful qualities must lie behind quantity…as well as answers to the question of why I need more, more, more.
The most important quantity and quality equals — enough!
Hmmmm…I certainly would characterize myself (or you based on your post) as a mass market. More I was trying to say that I think we, as a society in general, still have a mass market model and in that model we get to the quality interactions by having LOTS of interactions.
It seems that the social web starts to change that dynamic allowing us to find niches and live there, in quality, quite comfortably.
Cheers!
Agree with your basic premise: it’s quantity not quality. But I think a lot of things get in the way of getting that put into practice.
1) We have pretty reliable ways to track quantity. Quality is a much harder nut to crack.
2) For the most part, we still have a mass market mindset. If I get it to enough people, some of them will be quality. I’ll work in percentages.
I think both of those things are tough to change. You need to give people some rewards — like seeing those subscribers double overnight — in the area of quality so that they start more consciously working for that instead of quantity as a way to get at quality.
(and there I’m talking about the quality of the relationships — presumably some quality has to be there in the producers output to be talking about/looking at either one).