Will I Be the Next Blogging Idol?!

Hey every­one! I am now offi­cially part of Blog­ging Idol 2! (clap clap clap)

UPDATE: A reader gave me a heads up. Appar­ently, there is a prob­lem with how Feed­burner reads the sub­scriber stats. He said that it’s safer to just sub­scribe via email instead of the Fire­fox Live Book­marks. Sub­scrib­ing via email ensures that you’re counted as a sub­scriber. Thanks!

This is a con­test by Daily Blog Tips.

I’m join­ing the con­test for sev­eral reasons:

1) I want to improve my blog­ging and join­ing this con­test gives me the psy­cho­log­i­cal push to really plan well, sit down, write and improve.

2) This is an oppor­tu­nity to increase my read­er­ship. My blog’s reg­u­lar read­ers (my stats say I have around one hun­dred read­ers a day now) have increased steadily over the past months. I have not been very aggres­sive in “forc­ing” myself on my read­ers or forc­ing peo­ple to read me. None of my posts have gone viral. One of my most avid read­ers is my own mom! I’ve writ­ten for myself for a long time, and now I want an audi­ence (hehehe).

It is a lot like that philo­soph­i­cal rid­dle of many years ago: if a tree falls in the mid­dle of the for­est and nobody heard it, did it really hap­pen? I have around 500 blog posts since 2006, and nobody but me has read a fourth of those posts. Maybe this is the time to put it out in the open for peo­ple to read. And Blog­ging Idol will give me the venue (and the not-so-subtle excuse) to ask peo­ple to read my posts.

3) The prizes are noth­ing to scoff at. I’d love to get my hands on the Key­word Coun­try life­time sub­scrip­tion and the Trackur one year subscription.

The com­pe­ti­tion runs from Novem­ber 1^st to Novem­ber 30^th.

The objec­tive of Blog­ging Idol Two is this: increase the num­ber of RSS sub­scribers using clever and effi­cient pro­mo­tion strate­gies. I will be reveal­ing my strate­gies in the next few weeks, but for now, how do you help me win?

1) Check my blog: Ang Pere​grino​.com

2) SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED. I am now #29 (updated as of Nov 2, 12nn) in the live score­coard. So many blogs have so many more RSS sub­scribers than me, but the com­pe­ti­tion is about INCREASING your sub­scribers and not how many you ALREADY have, so I have a really good chance to win this.

Many of my read­ers do not know what an RSS Feed is. For those who know, skip this part. Pro­ceed to the next para­graph. For those who don’t know, read this:

Thanks to Problog­ger for the description.

RSS is a tech­nol­ogy that is being used by mil­lions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite web­sites. In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a web­site you had to ‘book­mark’ web­sites in your browser and man­u­ally return to them on a reg­u­lar basis to see what had been added.

RSS Changes Every­thing. What if you could tell a web­site to let you know every time that they update? In a sense, this is what RSS does for you.

RSS flips things around a lit­tle and is a tech­nol­ogy that pro­vides you with a method of get­ting rel­e­vant and up to date infor­ma­tion sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the infor­ma­tion you want quickly after it was published.

RSS stands for ‘Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion’. Many peo­ple describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you sub­scribe to. I find the ’sub­scrip­tion’ descrip­tion help­ful. It’s like sub­scrib­ing to a mag­a­zine that is deliv­ered to you peri­od­i­cally but instead of it com­ing in your phys­i­cal mail box each month when the mag­a­zine is pub­lished it is deliv­ered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite web­site updates.

a) Click on the link Sub­scribe to RSS on the upper right side of this blog.

b) This will open a new win­dow that looks like this. Click on VIEW FEED XML.

c) There will be a pop-up that looks like this. Click on Add. That will put an auto­matic link to my RSS Feed in your book­marks.

3) VOTE FOR ME. Like Amer­i­can Idol, the pub­lic gets the chance to vote for me. The open vot­ing ses­sion will hap­pen on the 2^nd and 3^rd week of the com­pe­ti­tion so please stay tuned for that.