I probably know what you’re thinking right now… everyone already knows that you can increase your Feedburner subscriber count by using fake e-mail addresses that auto-forward to one account. By my estimate, that trick can add, at best, around 100 to 150 subscribers per hour, maybe a little more if you could automate the form completion and all that.

This is much more effective. My trick can add 50 to 100 subscribers per minute. All it takes is one Google account and a pen cap. No fancy automation and sore fingers required. One of the few things I love more than playing computer games is cheating at them. It’s an addiction. When someone figures out how to cheat at a game I play, I usually feel compelled to top it. When I saw the douchebag at RSS Xplosion actually charging people $1 per fake subscriber just to use the fake e-mail address trick, I knew I could do better than that. Unlike that twit, however, I won’t act like a jackass on the John Cow comments.

So how can you go from to in less than ten minutes?

I’ve been holding onto this information for several weeks, trying to decide whether I should make it public or not. In the end, my ego won. Public it is.

Step by Step

1. You need a blog and a Feedburner account. Because of the dastardly nature of what you’re about to do, I wouldn’t recommend using an account that you care about. Copy the address of the feed.

2. You need a disposable Google account.

3. Visit iGoogle, the personalized home page service offered by Google. Sign up for a personalized home page with your new Google account.

4. From the personalized home page, click “Add Stuff” on the right side of your tab bar.

5. Click “Add feed or gadget” on the left sidebar.

6. Paste the address of your feed into the popup box.

7. Hit ENTER.

8. Notice that the popup box doesn’t close down?

9. Hit ENTER again. And again. And again.

10. Jam a pen cap into your keyboard to hold down the ENTER key.

11. Walk away.

12. When you come back, you will have added anywhere from fifty to one hundred subscribers per minute that you were away.

13. Look at your Google personalized page, and you will see something like this:

14. Wait five to seven days. I don’t know why, but during my testing, I’ve found that the subscriber count takes five days to register your new subscribers. What you should see in Feedburner is something like the image at the top of the page.

15. Delete your blog. Delete your Feedburner account. Delete your iGoogle account, and forget steps 1 through 14. If you use this on a real blog, you’re going to look like a complete idiot when Google fixes this bug and you lose all your fake subscribers overnight.

1. Generate $100 per day in mostly passive income. I wrote last year that my family could get by on about $66 per day, but that gives us no cushion, no room for emergencies, no ability to save, and no extra spending for luxuries. $100 per day brings us to a more comfortable position It’s still not enough for everything we want, but $100 per day fills our needs and wouldn’t be scary as hell. I’m still not sure I’d quit my day job if that’s all I was making, but it would be very realistic if I chose to do so.

2. Reach 1000 RSS subscribers. In the first 3.5 months this blog was online, I went from 0 to 70′ish subscribers, and in the nearly two months I didn’t post a single new entry, that increased to over 110. If I maintain the business-building focus of my featured articles, and post more consistently I don’t foresee this being a problem.

3. Complete the framework for my collection of Build a Niche Store sites. This includes a new blog about BANS and eBay marketing, separate from this blog. That blog will focus very tightly on using the software to build niche stores, development of themes for BANS, and building an eBay-based business. I’ve done a lot of work with BANS recently, but selling stuff on eBay is still new to me, so there will be a lot of learning involved here.

4. Comment on more blogs. I read a lot of blogs, but rarely comment. Usually just because I don’t want to spend time typing, even when I think I have something worth saying. That should come to an end.

5. Continue to spend lots of quality time with my girls and my wife. Life’s not just about making money online, ya know?

I unsubscribed several weeks ago, and only check back occasionally when I feel like I need a downer. Such a fun site, such original and thought-provoking content, all gone. Anyone still reading there? Anyone still subscribed?

Here’s hoping these iEntry people sell the site back to the original owner for a few dollars, now that they have run it into the ground and destroyed all value.

One of the unfortunate side effects of saving money is that our grocery bill had to shrink considerably, which proved to me something I had suspected for years. It is far more expensive to eat healthily than it is to eat poorly. Bell peppers, for example, cost more per pound than ground beef, and most cuts of chicken and pork. All of them, however, cost about seven to ten times as much per serving as a box of macaroni and cheese. And I’m talking about Kraft, the good stuff not the cheap store brand box which costs half as much.

Because of this, I haven’t used my vegetable juicer in about two months. Now, I didn’t exactly break down and go on the Ramen diet, but I did eat more sandwiches and frozen pizza than I really would have liked. I miss my concoctions of peppers, carrots, beets, and cherries. I had a choice between an Xbox 360 and $20-per-pitcher vegetable juice, and the juice lost.

How do vegetarians do it?

I wish I could say that I had been lounging on that beach in one of those chairs next to that infinity pool. Alas, that is someone else’s picture of my dream. What I have been doing, although not nearly as beautiful and relaxing, may get me there someday. I have been working like crazy to build new BANS sites, which are making money for me. I’ve also been working to build a variety of content-neutral BANS themes, which I intend to sell as a package to other BANS users. The program comes with some very basic themes, but a with little effort you can make your eBay store look just as sharp as any other website out there.

School, of course, kept me really busy as well. I will never again take two six-week classes at once. That’s eight credit hours of material crammed into a six week period. Every single week I had to complete eight to twelve assignments, including two to four papers. Insanity. HUGE mistake.

Now I’m on vacation until January 7! Apparently I didn’t call in sick enough at work this year, and ended up with a depressing amount of of PTO (Paid Time Off, for those of you fortunate enough to not live in the corporate world) left over. I can only carry over 40 hours to the next year… that’s never been a problem before, but it was this year. I actually had 52 hours, six and a half work days, left over. So I get to start the year with a nice break. May as well use up my carry-over as soon as possible, before I forget that I have it.

Let me explain the new theme before it scares anyone away. I realized that one of the reasons I had trouble writing new blog entries was that I wanted everything to be long and serious. I didn’t want to give myself any room for shorter or more personal content. I was boring myself a little, which made me less willing to make time for this.

Taking a cue from the new trend in magazine style themes, I decided to build a new layout which would give me space for once-or-twice-a-week serious, more in-depth content that will be featured more prominently, and additional spaces for shorter, less important content. The new theme uses categories for nothing more than determining which box the article will appear in, making tags an even more important piece of my organization.

The new theme, you may have noticed, is very short. At a high resolution, the article excerpts all fit on one screen. Even at more common resolutions, the entire page takes up no more than two or three screens. Everything important is above the fold. This is an experiment in design… so many blog layouts, including my last two, go for long and narrow. They also contain massive amounts of information in the sidebars. Again, I’m going the other way. Not much there now. I may re-add some widgets in the future but for now I’m going with the plain look.

I’ve also taken a tip from Skelliewag, one of my new favorite blogs, and added some more visual flair to the layout. Th image slivers on the main page page are a questionable design choice, one which someone people already don’t like, but I like it and want to give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m back, and I won’t take another break like that for at least a month. Promise.

So I am putting it to a test.  Can I become #3 on the Google search for Becky S?  What about Adsense Monkeys, a keyword for which she ranks #1?

If this article can gain top place for the specific search “adsense monkeys“, I will give Becky S of Becky Plugins and Adsense Monkeys fame an Affiliate Payout for Christmas.

Is this the worst blog post ever?  So far, yes, it is.

All silliness aside, this is a fine article about a very useful research tool, one I’ve never looked at before.  I probably wouldn’t use it as a blogger, because I don’t want to be just a keyword stuffer who chases after search engine traffic of questionable value.  But as an affiliate marketer, I can see the benefits of this right away.  How is it that one BANS site might rank well for, say, searches for brass musical instruments, but mine does not?  Chances are there is some keyword targeting going on… maybe their real traffic is coming from searches for flugelhorns, spit valves, and cornets rather than trumpets, tubas, and trombones.  Maybe that guy selling motorcycles (and getting a ton of eBay signups) on his website ranks well for Honda Helix scooter sidecar, even if he’s nowhere to be found on the search for motorcycles. 

Thanks, Becky S!

This will be my first down post about BlogRush.  Sorry, buddy, but it has to be done.

With the new 2nd Phase dashboard, you can see how each of your posts are performing.  You can see the number of impressions they’ve been given and the number of click-through’s they’ve received.  This is excellent information.  Let’s face it, most people judge a post by its title.  A weak title will yield poor results to someone who is just browsing through a blog.  This new information can not only help you improve future Blogrush click-through rates, but it should help you retain StumbleUpon users for more than three seconds, and it might help you get more Diggs, Zooms, Plugs and Sphinns.  Strong titles yield strong results, and you can see that in the Blogrush dashboard.

What you can also see in the Blogrush dashboard, is when one of your articles is being ignored by Blogrush. 

For some reason, my article What Does It Take To Achieve PageRank 7? has been given only a tiny number of impressions compared to the rest of my recent articles.  This is disappointing, because I believe this article would be of interest to nearly any blogger, and would have been of even more interest during the week of PageRank upheavals.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll never know now, since Blogrush decided to only syndicate that article 179 times, compared to 2533 impressions for my tiny post bragging about my position on the Top 100 list, or 2270 for my quickie review of BloggingZoom. 

The Top 100 post received only two click-throughs, and the BloggingZoom review has received zero click-throughs, so I know the problem is not with the fact that the PageRank article also received zero click-throughs.  That was my first thought, when I saw that it was receiving no impressions… maybe it had received 178 impressions without a single click-through, so BlogRush decided the headline sucked and stopped wasting my impressions.  Obviously, if that was the case, then the BloggingZoon review should have stopped receiving new impressions a long time ago.

My second thought was that the article was not at the top of my blog for very long.  This seems more likely to have been a problem… I had a burst of energy that night and wrote three articles.  The first, about the PageRank updates, I posted immediately.  The PR7 article came second, and I post-dated that for early the next morning.  The Top 100 post came third, and I post-dated that for late the next morning, giving the PR7 article only a few hours in the top spot.

But I know that BlogRush does not just syndicate your most recent article.  OnePulseIM’s “ViralUrl - Finally Launches!” has been the #2 article on that blog since October 31st.  But it still receives impressions on BlogRush.  I know because I continue to see it on my own widget CONSTANTLY.  For a tiny article of low value, it’s a little disappointing that that article has received over 68,000 impressions (more impressions than I have ever earned) despite having only a medium buzz rating. 

My disappointment aside, that’s pretty solid evidence that Blogrush does not only syndicate the newest article.  So why is my one article, the one I had such hope for, being ignored by Blogrush?  I have to assume it’s a combination of bad timing and no immediate click-throughs. 

What Can You Do?

In the future, make sure to take these steps to ensure that your more important content gets maximum exposure on Blogrush:

1.  Better timing.  If you have an article you think is likely to receive good traffic through Blogrush, make sure it is the most recent article on your blog for at least one business day.

2.  Make sure to block syndication of lower-value content, such as site reviews and posts bragging about PageRank and Top 100 positions.  You can do this from the Blogrush Filters screen.  Be sure to do this before posting your article.  You can’t retroactively filter your articles. 

3.  Better headlines.  CopyBlogger has written a bunch of articles on writing better headlines.  I used tip #1 from this article when writing the headline of the article you are reading now. 

BloggingZoom is more fun than that.  BloggingZoon is a Pligg site for bloggers only.  It’s already received far more article submissions than most Pliggs ever do, and it’s only Day 1.  BloggingZoom has been added to my bookmarks and I will continue to visit as long as there is fresh content.  So far I’ve already discovered a couple of very entertaining bloggers from way outside the Internet marketing/online business niche that I would probably never have read otherwise. 

Give BloggingZoom a try.  Add RichGilchrest to your friends and send me a message; I’ll you to my friends list as well and probably Zoom your submissions. 

Pligg, for those who don’t know, is an open-source Digg-style news and article submission engine.  Given some of the recent changes to Digg, I actually prefer the Pligg script now.  Those who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been interested in Pligg for a while now and may (hint hint) be working on something myself.  While I frequently see people complaining that Pligg is buggy and unstable, I have yet to see any evidence of that myself, either as a user on sites like BloggingZoom, PlugIM, or Sphinn, or from the administrative side. 

Although being on the list has brought a smile to my face every day since the first time I made it, let’s face it.. when you’re #100 on a top 100 list, dropping even one spot is a LOOOONG way to fall, so I was reluctant to bring any attention to it.

Not only did I stay in the top 100, but I jumped up to #73. Now I can safely brag a little

Frankly, this means more to me than Alexa and Technorati, and in many ways is just as cool as finally having a page rank over 0. Thanks again to Mark of 45n5.com for this very cool tool.

I know this because one of my articles has a Page Rank 7. Other articles of mine have page ranks of 4 and 5, while most are 0. For all I know the one PR 7 article could be propping up the rank of the entire site. That’s how it works, or so I hear.

So what does it take to achieve a page rank of 7 for one article? Fortunately, the article in question was about blogging technology, and was only linked to by bloggers on their blogs, so as far as I am aware. I believe that every single backlink to this article shows up as a trackback on the article itself. I’ve tallied the incoming trackbacks, and here are the backlinks that one article received:

PR 6 - 1
PR 5 - 8
PR 4 - 19
PR 3 - 37
PR 2- 33
PR 1 - 12
PR 0 - 105

Additionally, 11 trackbacks led to either 404 errors or pages that weren’t loading so I couldn’t check their page ranks. These are the page ranks of the articles that are linking back to my article. Several of these, such as PhotoMatt, Lorelle on Wordpress, and BloggingPro, have much higher page ranks on their main page than the article that linked to mine. I think (And please correct me if I’m wrong) that it’s the linking article that is of interest here, tho.

So there you have it. 215 backlinks between PR0 and PR6 can add up to a page rank of 7. That really doesn’t seem like it would be hard to achieve. I would guess the blogosphere is probably shooting itself in the foot by linking to specific articles, rather than linking to each others’ front pages.