The guys at Smashing Magazine have started up a weekly newsletter. And they’re doing it in a cool way.
They’re turning it into a challenge.
They’ll only launch the newsletter if they can get 10,001 subscribers (see: The 10,001 Subscriber Challenge).
We’d love to see them hit that goal, because they’d be using MailChimp to send those emails (yay!).
But I’m actually writing about all this because they’ve got an excellent use of a feature that not a lot of people know we have: the subscriber chiclet. You can grab some code from MailChimp, and put your current subscriber count on your website, just under your signup form. Oh, just in case you want to show your subscriber count inside your email newsletters, there’s a merge tag for that (look for the one called “LIST:SUBSCRIBERS” on our merge tag cheatsheet.
[UPDATE] It’s been fascinating just refreshing their page with the signup form, because I can see how fast their list is growing. Currently, it seems like they’re adding 1,000 subscribers per hour.
Fine feature. The subscriber chiclet link in the rss feed is broken.
It would be great if the “powered by MailChimp” link used our referral link.
More incentive to add it to the site then
Thanks, Andy. I know we considered that when we first launched, but as usual, probably skipped it just to get the feature live asap, then iterate again based on feedback. We’ll probably revisit the idea now that we actually seeing chiclets used “in the wild.”
Please do I’m using it
http://blog.servertastic.com/
The number of subscribers exceeded the 10,001 by the double at least by now. SM is a model in it’s role, just as you are
Well done guys.
Yeah, I was tracking how fast their list grew. About 1,000 per hour. Was really nice. That’s what happens when you have good content. Don’t know where they get the energy!