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Social Proof: Increase subscribers to your blog by displaying your feed stats

June 12, 2008 – 4:49 pm | by Miriam Schwab

Last night I attended MashBash Tel Aviv, an intimate gathering of Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and 800 of his closest friends from the Israeli hi-tech industry. In between having fun and getting served free drinks for three hours, I managed to learn something new. I learned about “social proof.”

Social what?

I met a guy at the event who I “knew” through twitter. Harry runs a snazzy new website about Jerusalem attractions and other stuff. We were discussing the right steps to take to increase blog traffic, and how he’s managed to get really decent traffic to his site in a relatively short period of time. He mentioned one tip that I had never heard before in all my blogging years, and it struck me as so simple yet so smart.

Social Proof.

Harry said that once you have at least 50 RSS subscribers, you should display the number of subscribers on your blog to encourage others to subscribe as well. The reason is that people like to try out things that lots of other people like. Think of a restaurant or cafe – if you’re walking down a street of cafes, would you rather go into the empty cafe, or the one overflowing with patrons? When lots of people patronize something, by showing up, subscribing, or in other ways, it encourages others to join as well.

(Harry learned this tip from Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Course, which actually sounds like it might be worth the investment from what he says.)

So take a look over to your right here. See that little feed reader thingy? As you can see, WordPress Garage has 781 subscribers. We’re a really cool crowd, having lots of fun. Doesn’t that make you want to subscribe too?

You can subscribe to the feed, or via email in the sidebar.