Friedbeef’s Tech

CopyBlogger puts it perfectly - “Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog”

Subscribers are visitors who care enough to actually want to be notified whenever you update your content. and “Getting someone to voluntarily pay attention to you over time is the greatest gift you can get as an online publisher”

Now typically, unless a publisher willingly shares that information via a feedburner chiclet (which looks like the pic below) - that information is pretty much kept secret.  This post will show you how to obtain those numbers!

Why find out the number of subscribers?

If you’re a blogger:

You want to be able to benchmark your own numbers with similar sites.  Furthermore, it gives a more complete picture to complement existing benchmarking metrics like

• Alexa - which tracks traffic
• Technorati - which tracks linkbacks
• Pagerank - which tracks importance within Google.

It is especially useful if you’re new to blogging and want to know what works, (eg. writing style, topics, posting frequency etc.) - and how it translates into subscriber numbers.

If you’re an advertiser:

You want to be able to to track how many people would be reached via a press release, sponsored post, buying an advert in the feed, etc.  Yes - you could just ask the publisher, but this greatly speeds up the filtering process.

So what’s the secret to getting the numbers?

Step 1: Sign up for Netvibes - a free AJAX start page

Step 2: Install the SK-Feedburner statistics widget

Then just site back and track the Feedburner Statistics of any site running feedburner!  

Note: Most sites which track their feeds are already running on Feedburner - so this set of stats will be highly relevant across most sites.

Which is more valuable to you?  Pagerank?  Technorati rankings? Alexa rankings? Or the number of feed subscribers?  Let us know in the comments!

[tags] rss, metrics [tags]