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How to Track RSS Subscribers in a Blog Contest

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March 15th, 2009
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HOW-TO, WordPress FAQs
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  1. izzat aziz (2 comments.) says:

    i currently do this contest, but i think i will see the email list that provide by feedburner to see who really subscribe. thank for the info i might doing it on other contest.

    • Thaya (51 comments.) says:

      You can use the Feedburner email list to run an email subscription contest and gain email subscribers, but you can’t use it to run an RSS subscribers contest though :).

  2. Erika Jurney (1 comments.) says:

    Brilliant — that’s really clever!

  3. PDR (1 comments.) says:

    I’m going to try to whip up a plugin to see if I can implement an easier way.

  4. Janice @ Big List of Giveaways (1 comments.) says:

    Wow! That’s great information. I’ve always wondered how people who run contests and giveaways can track WHO subscribes to their RSS feeds. I’m in the process of launching a site: http://www.biglistofgiveaways.com that will allow people to log in and post their giveaways as a way to gain traffic and participation. As part of this site their is a blog section where I want to post tips and tricks for running giveaways and contests, do you think I could re-publish this post with a credit to you? Please email me and let me know. Thanks!
    All the best,
    Janice
    Founder of The Big List of Giveaways.

    • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

      @Janice
      I do not own the contents I write here, so please use the site’s “contact me” section to email Mark directly about this.

    • Mark Ghosh (386 comments.) says:

      As long as you do not claim the content as your own and provide attribution to this post, author and blog, you are welcome to reproduce the content.

  5. Todd Larason (1 comments.) says:

    How do you differentiate between people who posted comments with ‘yourcodehere’ and those who posted with ‘[code hidden]’?

    • Thaya (51 comments.) says:

      Once the contest is over, you can remove the line “add_filter(‘get_comment_text’,’contest_comment_filter’);” and all the code will be visible again. You can then use that to verify the real contest code against [code hidden].

  6. Jack (2 comments.) says:

    Very good. This is a great idea. A simple code can do all the job.
    Thanks.

  7. Music (1 comments.) says:

    YEAAA! GO THAYA!!! I know my comment has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE POST whatsoever but yeaa.

    ^^;;

    Okay, have a nice day~

  8. Mahesh (1 comments.) says:

    Thanx for the info. Very Nice!

  9. George Serradinho (107 comments.) says:

    Nice idea, I seem to agree with PDR about having a plugin do this. It would make it easier for beginners to get it right.

  10. Chung Bey Luen (14 comments.) says:

    Great idea. Thanks. I can use it in my future blog contest.

  11. KushMoney (1 comments.) says:

    I have to try this next time I run a contest on my blog.

  12. Property Sale (1 comments.) says:

    This way sounds easy! Shall try test it out and see if it works.Thanks!

  13. Eddie Gear (2 comments.) says:

    Hi there,

    Thank you for sharing information. This is an excellent post. I’ve always been wondering how to track subscribers specially when they subscribe via RSS. Did you happen to write or have written a post in the past relating to how to conduct a competition? I tried looking around.

    Cheers,
    Eddie Gear

    • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

      Thanks for your kind words. No I haven’t written an article about conducting a competition. I found plenty of those online when I was trying to run a competition, but found that nobody explained how you can confirm RSS subscription when running these competitions.

  14. jessie (1 comments.) says:

    thaya,

    thanks so much for the info. i’ve been looking for ways to ease up tracking of participants in my blog contests. i’ll use this code you stated here next time. :-)

  15. Fresh Young Bloggers (1 comments.) says:

    Ah nice! good idea!

  16. Blog Contest (1 comments.) says:

    Hmm…I’m always into contests and I’m looking forward to finding more of them online.

  17. tina says:

    Okay, this is nice what what about those of us who use blogger? this is only good for wordpress.

  18. Megan (2 comments.) says:

    I followed your instructions in the above post but did not get the same results.
    – I use WordPress.
    – Added the code from #1 to my Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions (functions.php) code (above the ending “?>”).
    – Then I subscribed to my feed from a separate computer.

    I can see my feed, but there is no special code anywhere.

    Would I need to post a new blog before the code is visible in the feed? If so, that means new subscribers won’t see the code until after I’ve posted again. Please advise.

    • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

      Hi Megan,
      I think this is because your feed is an excerpt feed and you are appending the contest code to the end of your post (which never shows up because only an execerpt of each post is displayed in an excerpt feed). You can modify the code in #1 to:

      “return ‘Special Contest Code: yourcodehere<br/>’.$content;”

      To have the contest code show up before each of your posts.

      • Megan (2 comments.) says:

        Genius! Works perfectly! Thank you! Do you know if this would work with Feedburner? I’d like to have both.

  19. ant says:

    I just used this code and tested with a ‘test code’ and then I changed the code and reuploaded my functions.php file and now it won’t update to the new code i entered. It keeps displaying the old one. How can I fix it?

    • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

      Are you using Feedburner or any other feed service? There are usually a content change delay with those services.

      • ant says:

        Yeah! It ended up working. But, people are commenting and the code is showing up as visible within the comment field? Isn’t it supposed to be hidden? I don’t want other people reading the post to be able to see the code through peoples comments.

        • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

          Did you do part 2 of this post (Censor the code)? Make sure you follow every step and make sure “yourcodehere” is replaced with your code.

          • ant says:

            Yeah, I did. I even replaced it a second time just in case I missed a line or something. I am not sure why they are showing up…

  20. DuFFeR - ??? (1 comments.) says:

    if you can please help me a little
    i have a wordpress blog and recently subscribed to feedburner
    the counter from feed burner is just showing a few readers count
    while i know that its too high than shown number
    the old users have subscribed to my blog’s original feed, not feed burner
    what is the procedure that i get a sum of feed count of feedburner and my blog’s feed subscribers count?
    thank you so much in advance :)

    • Thaya Kareeson (51 comments.) says:

      I don’t think there is an easy way to do this. I think the best thing for you to do is to write a blog post telling your readers to switch over to the new Feedburner RSS URL.

  21. Raju (2 comments.) says:

    This works like a charm. Thank you so much!
    is it possible to have HTML tags inside?

  22. Tim (2 comments.) says:

    I love this concept! I think there is a plugin that will do step one for you called RSS Footer. I haven’t seen a plugin for step 2 yet:(

  23. Tim (2 comments.) says:

    Wait a minute! It seems that if someone were to just click the subscribe button, whatever is appended at the end of each post becomes visible!

  24. kevin love (9 comments.) says:

    always good to help me track!



Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. […] one’s blog is a common criterion for all the blog contests out there; let’s be thankful Thaya Kareeson over at Weblog Tools Collection has written a helpful tutorial for keeping track of new subscribers to your RSS […]

  2. […] WordPress hacks that is needed to be able to track RSS subscribers in a blog contest. Check out the full tutorial here. Enjoyed This […]

  3. […] be related to the attractiveness of the gift. If you’re interested by this technique, learn how to track RSS subscribers in a blog contest. Share […]

  4. […] This is a pretty good way to make people subscribing happily, obviously some people will unsubscribe right after the contest, but you’ll get some new subscribers for sure. The number of new readers is likely to be related to the attractiveness of the gift. If you’re interested by this technique, learn how to track RSS subscribers in a blog contest. […]

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  7. […] winners. But how the hell am I going to track who truly subscribes? This great post about tracking RSS contest subscribers from Weblog Tools Collection has it down to a science. Be sure to read through the comments as well – a gem of a find and […]

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