Sometimes you just have to burn one

This is really old news to some blogger’s,but I’m posting it again because a lot of people I know are just starting off in the blogging space. 

If you have a blog you’re probably wondering how many people are reading it. You can get some decent statistics from your feed (RSS/ATOM, etc). However, most blog engines do not provide a way for you to get at the really good statistics of your blog.

For a lot of people your RSS feed is your interface into your blog. Personally, I NEVER go straight to a blog from typing in the URL. I use Google IG as a feed aggregator. There are tons of other tools for this, but I personally like Google IG. I set it to my home page and I can read stuff as I encounter it and I don’t have to open ANOTHER program to read WEB items.

Ok, so you already have an RSS feed. So what? Do you know how many people subscribe to it? Do you know what types of browsers they use? Do you know how many people you had 1 month ago? Probably not.

 

Would you like to know?

 

If so, then Feed Burner could be of some use.

Benefits of Feed Burner include:

• Less bandwidth pull on your RSS feed. Hanselman (among many others) have stated that their RSS bandwidth is crazy huge. Moving it to Feed Burner can remove that bandwidth polling.
• Statistics on how many subscribers you have to your feed.
• If you move locations your feed stays the same. Just update the location of your blog in Feed Burner. This is especially useful if you are part of a community such as Blogspot and then decide to move your blog to your own domain or another community. You don’t  loose subscribers when you move (muy importante).
• Ping Shot – Notifies feed reading services that your blog has been updated.
• Email Subscriptions – Allow people to get updated via email when your blog is updated.
• Stats… graphs, and pictures… 🙂 as shown below ….
• And a lot more ….

 

The best part is… its free.

 

So what’s the downfall?

Single point of failure. If Feed Burner goes down, your blog is down to readers. I think I’ve only see this happen ONCE in the years I’ve used it. It was only down for maybe an hour or so. This could have been scheduled, who knows.

 

Also, no, I did not get paid to write this … I actually like the service so much that I wanted to write about it.

 

 

Subscriber Reader Type Break Down

 

Feed Dashboard – See what’s happening and when