If you follow my blog regularly you know I put a lot of emphasis on keeping your finger on the ‘digital pulse’ of your business by regularly reviewing online statistics.
Where a blog is concerned, there are two very important measurements:
1) The total number of people who visit and read it. (“Total Weekly/Monthly Unique Visitors”).
2) The number of people who are subscribed to blog announcements (for example using the box at the top right of this page).
The total number of unique visitors in any timeframe is useful, but that could also include people who landed on the blog, realised it wasn’t what they were looking for and then left immediately, never to return.
So of the two measurements, the number of subscribers is a critical metric.
It gives me an indication of regular readership.
It also represents the number of people who get notified when I announce new products and services, in addition to getting the free ongoing web marketing strategy blog updates.
However, there’s another critical subscriber statistic that I’ve been missing for a long time.
Until this morning I’ve not been able to tell how many people are subscribed to my RSS Feed.
If you don’t know what an RSS feed is I strongly urge you to find out… because it’s becoming increasingly important to offer RSS on any commercial web site, not just blogs.
I’ve written a short article on RSS that gives you the basics.
Thankfully, as from today I know exactly how many poeople are following my blog via RSS, and I’ve had a very pleasant surprise. I have a lot more readers than I realised.
I’m late to the party. If you’re currently blogging, but not tracking RSS readers, then I strongly recommend you do so. (Don’t leave it as long as I did!).
How to Track RSS Readers.
There are quite a few services that allow you to track RSS feeds, but I’ve opted for what appears to be the main one, ‘Feedburner’.
It only took me 15 minutes to setup Feedburner and add it to my WordPress blog, (the type of blog I recommend in my Ultimate Business Blogging home-study programme.)
1) Go to the Feedburner blog sign up page.
2) Scroll to the bottom of the page and type in the web address of your blog, then click next.
3) Follow the instructions. (If you want a step by step video of how to do the whole process, end to end, just add a comment to this post and I’ll create one for everyone to watch.)
If you’re starting out blogging, and think you only have a very low number of readers, try Feedburner. You may get a pleasant surprise on the actual number of people you’re blogging for.
-Ed.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Hi Ed
Another worthwhile feature that Feedburner has, specially for typepad blogs, is adding a automatic “Email this” at the bottom of every post or page you write.
In the Feedburner Account, go to the tab: Optimise and select FeedFlare. In there select ‘email this’ in feed and on site. Follow the instructions further at the bottom of the box to add it to your blog.
(When you enable this feature Feedburner will also start tracking the visitors, pages read, incoming links and evenly important: outgoing links)
Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
February 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Hi Ed,
Great post. I am fairly new to blogging and found (as simple as it might be for others) that getting the RSS button was not easy to install because most directions assumed the end user (me) knew terminology or acronyms to “simply install it.” So if you could do a short video that would be great.
Just as a note, if you Google how to install an RSS button from a NEWBIE viewpoint, what’s out there to explain it is still like “Alegebra II.” Someone would do well to get the “Math 101″ version and sell it. I’d have bought it to save the headache I went through.
Thanks again. I find your material simple and very helpful.
Dave
February 18th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Hi Ed,
I am new to blogging but will be improving thanks to your great tips.
I have tried to use feedburner to add RSS to my blog and track vistors but I cant seem to get it to work so your video would be great.
Kind regards
Alan Briggs
March 26th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Hi
Feedburner is pretty much the best way to go now. As mentioned by Karin the “email this” is a good feature, but another great one is allowing people to subscribe to you feed by email. It’s just an option. You can also include Adsense in the feed if you want. But that top feature is of course having an accurate count!
March 28th, 2008 at 10:13 am
“But that top feature is of course having an accurate count!”
But like any other online ‘counter’ Feedburner does have hiccups once in a while.
Last week my kiss business blog average subscribers dropped from 85 to 50 in one day! Checking the data saw the ‘huge’ drop was only in Google feedfetcher – and I just can’t believe that 35 readers decided all at the same time to delete me from their reader.
Only since yesterday it is getting back up – 75 now.
Ergo: statistics are nice, but don’t ‘count’ on them too much
Karin H.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:33 am
Feedburner is cool but the feeds are on the Feedburner domain. You have to pay extra to be able to use a branded domain but someone told me you can use your domain on feedburner for free by setting up a CNAME of a domain. Do you have this information somewhere on your blog?