One of the “hot ticket” items in blogging is maximizing the amount of RSS readers that you bring in to your website. As unfortunate as it might be… bloggers nowadays are judged much more by the amount of followers that they have, then on actual content quality. Maybe you aren’t a believer in strong RSS numbers, but because other people are looking toward this number for a sense of reputation… we need to find ways to increase this as soon as we can to stay ahead of the curve!

Can you really DOUBLE your RSS count, without “cheating the system?”
Absolutely! But only if you have the right tools at your disposal.

Today, I’m giving you a method that only the best bloggers are using to boost the amount of RSS readers that they bring in. It is unfortunate that only the big boys use tools like these… but it is a very affordable trick that can more than double your RSS subscriber count with relative ease if done correctly. Let’s get to it!

Using an Opt-In List to Boost your RSS

This method starts by considering an alternative method of recording who is and isn’t a “rss reader” of your blog. I know of three methods that directly impact your RSS count, assuming that you are using Feedburner to manage your feeds (if you aren’t, sign up!).

1. Signing up through an RSS Reader
2. Registering to receive email RSS updates
3. “Opting In” to a Blog Newsletter, and being converted to RSS

Not too many people know of the third option, but it can actually jump up your RSS subscriber numbers in a day if you have a list built up and decide to use the option. I know that many bloggers have done this to win RSS competitions and the like… and it is truly a smart way to increase your readership in an alternative way. We are going to discuss option three today, and get you acquainted with Opt-In lists.

Five steps to double your RSS feed count

The following is a five-step process that I have developed to get anyone who is willing to put in the work a much more healthy RSS booking. You can literally double your reader number within a few days easily… and it’s a shame that bloggers don’t take advantage of this method.

Step One: Signing Up for a Newsletter Service
Unfortunately, if you want to run a newsletter service for your blog, it’s not going to be free. The service that I use, and most of the world for that matter, is called Aweber… and it is truly a great service that I have never once regretted buying. For a small monthly fee, you can register for this service and design awesome newsletters, send out weekly blog post updates or even offer digital content exclusively to your readers. If you are planning on being a successful blogger, I want to encourage you to use Aweber sooner rather than later.

Step Two: Setting Up Your Newsletter
Once you have registered with a newsletter service (and I highly recommend a “paid” service here), it’s time to set up your first newsletter. The methodology here might be different depending on which service you use… but through Aweber they guide you through it until you are 100% complete with the setup. Essentially, you need to put together a few things like a welcome note, address, newsletter format and email setup.

Step Three: Creating an Opt-In Landing Page
In order to get people to sign up to your list, we need a landing page. Want an example? Here is one I just set up for Bullish Bankers LLC. Making an attractive landing page can be difficult. Fortunately for me, I purchased a complete package of landing page/website templates that all work together and can make you a handsome profit. You can get this yourself, as it is available online: Turbo Power Graphics. With Turbo Power Graphics, you get 10 awesome corporate identities… everything from an opt-in page, to a sales page, video pitch page and even an Adsense-enabled revenue page. It’s well worth the price tag, and you won’t need to hire a designer… so that is well worth it. The important thing here is to throw in some catchy graphics, and talk like a salesman… make the customer really want to join your newsletter and emphasize that it is free!

Step Four: Syncing Your Newsletter with Your Landing Page
Now that we have a landing “opt in” page set up on your website, you need a way to take hits onto your landing page… and convert them into newsletter subscribers. Log into your newsletter service (AKA Aweber) and make a “web form” that will link users into your list. There are usually a few ways to do this, for example a pop-up message or overlay, but what you probably want to use is the “inline” method as it is the best to work with. Set up your web form to tie into your new list, and grab the HTML coding for the form (typically a “name,” “email” and “submit” form).

You have your web form in HTML format, so now it is as simple as loading up your opt-in page that we have set up… and putting the code somewhere on the page that makes it identifiable. If you are using an “Opt In” page like in my example, then there will be another way to enter on the top. Make sure to switch that coding around with the code given to you from your newsletter (Aweber support will help you do this if you get stuck). I recommend testing all the forms you have on your “Opt In” page right now, just to make sure that it truly will sign users up and you aren’t wasting your time.

Step Five: Let Readers Know About The New Service!
Everything should be good to go at this point… so what to do now? That’s right. Tell somebody about it! You can generate buzz pretty easily, so I would recommend the following: posting about the newsletter on your blog, letting people know in a forum, contacting your blogging buddies asking for their help.

One thing that I absolutely recommend is having some kind of digital download. People need an incentive to subscribe, so be sure to offer them a custom eBook or other file that people would be interested in. The good thing about Aweber is that you can have downloads automatically sent to anyone that subscribes.

By this point, you should have a few people that took the bait, and have now signed up to your newsletter. Now, you simply need to send out what is called a “Blog Broadcast” to your newsletter readers to get them actively counted in your Feedburner RSS count. This is a pretty simple step that goes under-utilized despite the obvious benefits. So make sure you are in on it!

Bottom Line: You can literally double your RSS feed count with an “opt-in” list that ties in directly with your blog. Imagine if you had 500 readers and all of them signed up to your newsletter (not a stretch of the imagination). You could convert all these newsletter readers into active subscribers and reach the 1,000 level the next day! Not bad for a few extra bucks a month and an hour of work setting up the “Opt In” landing page, eh?

-Jimvesting

I’ve been working feverishly around the clock to develop a massive and all-inclusive guide to the best stock market picks of 2009, and tonight I have finally completed my work! You can play with internet marketing all that you want, but there is simply no asset pool that will ever match the potential gains of the stock market. Imagine throwing $1,000 into a stock one day, and walking away with twice that the next… this actually happens on a regular basis in the markets… and I feel the time is right.

Considering the insane gains available in the stock market, there is always going to be downside risk. This is NOT an eBook that I have developed myself, I have worked exclusively with 10 professionally-minded mutual fund managers that specialize in every area of the market imaginable to combine only the best ideas and get you started. This work is a compilation of many efforts, and holds true investing power in forecasting what the money makers will be for 2009.

Why The Heck Would I Want to Be In Stocks Now?

Now is the wrong time to be jumping ship, it is the right time to be getting back into stocks. Ask any professional, and they will tell you that investor mindset is always wrong: we want to invest more at the peaks, and abandon ship at the troughs. Human emotion plays a big part in this, and the only way to stay ahead and actually make money is to “be greedy when others are fearful” (Warren Buffett).

Are you interested in stocks? Do you invest in your spare time? Are you managing a portfolio of your own? This publication is for you!

I’ve gathered some of the most in-depth analysis together in a professionally-rendered eBook and put it up for an insane bargain-basement reduced cost. If you signed up for a premium stock service, you would get less information for $100s a month (if you are lucky). It’s fantastic that I can offer this to you guys, as stock ideas are always great to go through and learn from.

But you haven’t heard the best part…

… I’m Giving It Away for FREE!

I decided that rather than charge for this exclusive and professional content, I would let you guys have it for free. Sure, I’ve become a financial adviser of sorts over the past few years of operation. While I cannot give you recommendations, what I can do is offer suggestions and ideas to further your wealth. The market is tough right now, so if you don’t understand the stocks you are buying… you are doomed to fail. Regardless, things are cheap right now and investing at the bottom will make money 90% of the time over the long run.

There is no guarantee of positive return with these stock picks and recommendations, however I can almost assure you that all of the carefully selected picks that appear in this publication are well researched and the investment thesis is clear. At the very least, it can be very interesting to see what possibilities lie out there.

How to Gain Access to the EXCLUSIVE Report

I am releasing this information without financial charge, however I would like to reap the rewards of doing so, in various metrics increases.

On February 6th, 2008, I will put out a blog post with the link to download the publication. However, this post will be password protected.

To get the password, you’ll need to do one of three things:

1. Refer three friends to subscribe to Jimvesting via email, and tell them to comment on this post confirming. I will check.

2. If you have a blog post with more than 50 subscribers, write a post talking about Jimvesting and link to the homepage. If you have a blog with more than 100 subscribers, give this blog a paragraph plug in one of your posts, telling people why they should visit. And if you mention the report, extra brownie points to you!

3. Sign up to Jimvesting’s brand new newsletter, and refer two friends as well. You’ll get great information on how to make more money online, but never any spam… just premium content when you want it, where you want it. Use the form below to do this, and ask your referrals to do the same. Then, tell them to comment on this post to confirm… I will also check this.

Don’t forget to let me know below what you plan on doing, and follow up on it once you are done. Of course, participation isn’t necessary… but you won’t get that secret password until you do. Again, these should be new events… not directing me to an old blog post, or referring a member that has already subscribed to my email feed or newsletter. This is a great opportunity, with a HUGE reward in clear view.

This offer closes February 6th, 2009… so let’s get started!

-Jimvesting

Good afternoon everyone…
It’s time for a little Link Love!

I just got back from my weekend trip where I was busy “canning” for THON! Did that not make much sense? Haha, well “canning” is what we refer to when talking about walking up and down populated streets looking for donations at stoplights. This is all donated to the Penn State Dance Marathon, or THON, in the end… so a lot of people do in fact donate money because they know where it goes! This tradition started all the way back in 1972, and has raised over $52 million to date (increases every year!). It’s all about helping out with the fight to conquer childhood cancer, and has become the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. If you’d like to donate, donate to the organization that I represent (“Nittany Lion Fund”) be going to the donation page. Now, on to the link love!

• Tips from a Network Marketer – How to Find Other Bloggers
• Pot Pie Girl – Why Isn’t My Squidoo Indexed in Google? How Google Indexes
  
• Conversion Rate Experts – 14 Free Tools that Reveal Why People Leave
• I’m Blogging That! – Ten Things to Remember When Buying a Blog
• Mr. Javo – How to Recycle Your Blog Articles

We start the week out with a first-time link love for Tips from a Network Marketer… a great write up about finding other bloggers in your niche to network yourself with for more popularity and eventual profit. Pot Pie Girl gets some more love with her latest impressive article on how Google Indexes pages. This one was magnificent, and I had no idea how the Deep Bot and Fresh Bot worked before, and interesting read! Conversion Rate Experts go forward with 14 free tools that you can use to analyze your “exit statistics” to improve your website. I’m Blogging That get’s us a valuable checkbook to buying a blog on a marketplace, and what to remember to look for. Finally, Mr. Javo talks about recycling your old blog articles, something I think everyone needs to learn how to do more effectively.

Stock Market Update
This was a pretty historic week with the inauguration of a new President of the United States, Barack Obama. The Inauguration went smooth as can be… unfortunately for investors, this week was terrible as the market dipped 2.1% (financial sector fell 7.1%). What’s the problem? The risk premium in equity (A.K.A. stocks) is still far too high. Even though things feel “cheap,” they can go much lower on bad outlook and missed earnings. We saw this as General Electric (NYSE: GE) missed their EPS (earnings per share) number by just a penny… and fell 10% on the news to a new historic low.

Are you a Mac, or a PC? If you are an investor… hopefully the former. Microsoft got CRUSHED after missing earnings, while Apple was up significantly after a good report. This wasn’t as bad as the financial stocks, as Bank of America saw it’s stock fell while it was busy firing the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, John Thain, after their merger with Bank of America. Additionally, Wells Fargo and State Street led the pack lower.

There was a lot of economic news this week, so I will hit on what I feel was the most important. The United Kingdom saw a decline of 1.5% in their fourth quarter GDP, the biggest since 1980. China saw their fourth quarter GDP slow to 6.8% to 9.0% in the past quarter. Now, we are seeing a possible delay in the stimulus package because of partisan political behavior in D.C. Next week, look out for the U.S. fourth quarter GDP report… expected to drop a whopping 5.2%.

Blogosphere Update
This week in the blogosphere, we’ve got a lot on our plates here at theNetFool.com. I am going to be putting together a report on starting your own business (LLC. or Inc.). I may actually consider compiling this in an eBook to give away. Additionally, I am planning on putting out my first password-protected post to give a little incentive to you readers that stick around and are more active on the blog. Finally, I am coming out with a fresh competition that will run through February. There’s a lot to do as the month turns over, so let’s get started!

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, more photos and blog posts about the Affiliate Summit West are starting to come out from people that attended… very interesting stuff and it’s always interesting to see the marketers and bloggers you are so used to hearing from in person. As a part of Bullish Bankers, a popular financial website that I have ownership in, we are releasing a report for the “Best Stocks of 2009″ which should be very interesting to ANYONE looking to get into the stock market.

Back into action with another steller week… so let’s get goin!
-Jimvesting

Recently, I had a huge burst of traffic on tailwinds coming in from one website in particular. The website is called “Youngest Blogger,” and it is one of many ranking websites for the best bloggers on the internet. This one features a list of bloggers under the age of 18, so in general these bloggers are very much the overachiever type.

I’m not under the age of 18.

This is a disclaimer, haha, because what I decided to do was literally trick the system to see what would happen. The downside? Five seconds of my life lost, and I would probably be blocked from a list that I could never get on in the first place. The upside? My fifteen minutes of fame! Hmmm… well it doesn’t take a Quantitative Risk Analyst to understand that the upside FAR outweighs the downside risk.

What I Did to Exploit Huge Traffic

Okay, so I come across a website that is claiming to rank the “top bloggers under 18″… and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Naturally, because I am over the age of 18, this would be a website that I just passed by. However, there is in fact a manual submission system in place that allows you to enter your age and website on my own. (evil thoughts)

Hmm… so they are going to allow me to choose my own age, eh? Excellent. I think that I will be 15 years old today. This is exactly what I did after checking with the terms of service. While I am sure that Carl O’Cab (the owner) would have loved for me to only support accurate age information, the last time I checked, I am not legally bound to give away my birth date to strangers. At any rate, the worst that can happen is being banned from the website… which I could care less about if I have my link placed, right?

This system is actually still in place, and the owner Carl O’Cab obviously doesn’t check through submissions… because I submitted theNetFool.com as being my blog, run by a 15 year old. It got approved quickly, and stayed in the #1 slot for a few weeks… taking traffic and subscribers along with it. I got around 50 hits a day from this site alone (in its prime). I’m sure that the website isn’t doing as well as it was when it first came out… but traffic is traffic, and it took me 5 seconds to rake in hundreds of unique visitors.

What is Unethical, and What is Just Plain Smart?

So this entire experiment begs the question… was I being completely unethical to do something like this, or just a bit smarter than your average bear? This is debatable, but I like to think that I am a very ethical candidate. So, yes, I cheated the YoungestBlogger.com system and gained a #1 ranking despite the fact that I was nowhere near the age of 15 anytime recently. Some might applaud this, and some might frown upon it. At any rate, this is something that I knew would never hurt anyone… and at bare minimum would keep ol’ Carl on his toes so others don’t do this with malicious intent.

If I was REALLY smart, I would have done this with an affiliate blogging website to get traffic to that location fast and easy. Maybe you will go and do this after reading? But I encourage you to refrain from doing so. This was more of an experiment on my part to see whether or not a simple submission could benefit my website in a major way.

My conclusion? Always, and I mean always, shoot for the win in situations like these. If you come across a ranking system that allows for manual submissions… why not give it a shot? What’s the least that can happen. By maintaining the risk/reward understanding, you can run a much more successful blog. I’m interested to know where your stance is on the issue… was it unethical, or smart? You be the judge.

-Jimvesting

Disclaimer: This post was meant as an example case, and nothing against Carl O’Cab, who runs a terrific service which I encourage you to use ethically and legally

This is a sponsored review of the GWDish.com reseller of Dish Network services; payment has not influenced the opinion in this piece.

On February 18th, 2009, all full-power television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting in analog and start broadcasting only in digital. What does this mean for you? Well… you better find a better way to watch television FAST if you live in the United States. Although I do have a spot in my heart for antennae-based tv sets (heck, I watched some of the 2009 NLF playoffs on one), technology needs to take precedence as we blow by other nations in our broadcast capabilities.

Regardless of where you live, it is becoming a practical “status symbol” to have the best television and the most channels available. I myself use Comcast’s Digital Cable service… but it sometimes lacks in just what I can and can’t see. Because of this, I think that you should all consider a satellite tv service such as the popular Disk Network.

Getting Hooked Up With GWDish.com
If you are interested in unlocking more channels like more Sports channels and Movie channels, you need a more advanced connection made possible through a satellite tv network like Dish Network or Direct TV. GWDish.com wanted a review here for exposure, and they definitely have a great product to offer. But why would you order through GWDish.com instead of through the Dish Network directly? The answer is in customer service and ease of use.

I’m not going to lie, even I am very confused with how the whole satellite tv system works… but GW Dish is one of only 40 “top level” retailers (OE Partners) for the Dish Network. They are authorized to do business across the United States, and do everything from the installation, to customer service, technical support and billing.

The Best Deal Online?
I haven’t had enough of a research look to confirm that GWDish.com is actually the best bang for your buck… but they certainly do have a lot of advantages. A few of the features that they feature are:

• Free Equipment
• Free Installation
• Free Activation
• Free Home Protection Plan for 9 months
• Free Second Room Programming (with a phone line connected)
• Free HBO+Starz For Three Months
• One Year Cinemax For Just $0.01!  (Need to sign up for credit card auto pay)
• $50 credit to your first bill
• $60 check sent to you within two weeks
• (2-year contract required)

There are literally hundreds of combinations available, and tons of great offers. They have an extensive line up of HD channels that look absolutely incredible.. and GWDish.com will even hook you up with a DVR Recorder to boot. Understandably, the website design doesn’t have much in the way of “sex appeal,” but it gets the job done, eh? Because of this, my recommendation would be to proceed with a certain level of awareness and caution. From what I’ve seen so far, the customer service is top-notch and they are great to work with. If you are in the market, why not give them a shot!

-Jimvesting