Bloggers care about their metrics. For majority, the number of RSS subscribers is one of the biggest indications as to whether your blog is worth reading or not. However, due to a special deal with Feedburner and Aweber email autoresponder, Feedburner counts email subscribers as RSS subscribers.

Hire a few people, let them create fake email accounts from various email services, and ask them to subscribe your blog via email form. I guarantee 1000 RSS subscribers in a month with this technique.

Last summer Aweber launched pop-up email sign up functionality. Every time a user visits your blog, a pop-up appears and asks you to subscribe. Quite a lot of bloggers, including the very popular ones, liked these pop-ups.  A few months later I noticed significant increases in their RSS subscribers.

Do you think it is ethical or unethical? Assuming you did not aware of this before, do you feel cheated by these bloggers?