Feedburner is a great system to track your R.S.S Subscribers. It shows statistics, hits, email subscriptions, and offers more customization than many of their competitors. (Being Google owned also offers a distinct advantage for new projects )

Anyway, The point of this post is not to tell the readers how good this service is, rather to discuss the issues that a blogger can face when displaying their R.S.S feed subscribers. Lets break it down in terms of Pros and Cons:

Pros

• Great way to show readers that people are reading your content.
• Shows first time visitors that this blog has good enough content to attract X amount of subscribers.
• Could influence a new visitor to subscribe to your feed as people usually like to follow the numbers rather than initially start a trend.
• Makes you not have to sign into your feedburner account to see how many subscribers you have

Cons

• If the numbers are small, you could deter subscribers from subscribing to your feed because of the point outlined above (people like to follow a trend rather than start one)
• What is the magic number to influence a first time visitor to subscribe? (Eg - Hundreds? or Thousands?)

I know I have posted about this previously, but when you keep seeing your rss subscriptions increasing, this question plays tricks with your mind

What are your thoughts about Feedburner Feedcount? Will you display it once a certain number of subscribers have subscribed to your feed? Or avoid the problem entirely, and not consider it.

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As a blogger, you may think about what your going to write about tommorow, perhaps create a week’s lineup worth of posts inside of your head… but have you ever considered what your blog will be like in a year? 2 years?

Wouldn’t it be nice if this post could tell you what your going to see happening to your blog in the future? Don’t you wish there was some equation that could tell you what was to be?

The facts to be successful in the future are this:

• Your blog will get more popular with age.*
• Making Money Online will be an option when your blog has a decent reader base.**
• Your blog design needs to be stand out from the rest.***

The *’d details are these:

• *(Only if you put posts on your blog that people want to read about)
• **(If you start to blog about how to make money online by jamming sponsored posts into every other space of your blog, don’t expect readers)
• ***(Meaning those free ones aren’t going to cut it in the long run.. Consider hiring somebody to create that perfect look for you)

In an attempt to sum everything up, I’ll create that equation I was talking about earlier:

Time = Money –> Blogging = Time –> Good Blogging = Readers –> Good Blogging + Time + Readers = Money

This part of the series will help you find advertisers for your newly created advertisement spots. By doing this, you will generate a profit from your space and possibly pay for your blog hosting/advertising etc. Most blogs don’t have 4,6, or 8 advertisers that will instantly come running to buy your spaces, and thats what this post will help you find

Visiting Your Competitors

Looking at your fellow bloggers 125×125 ads can always help find yourself some advertisers. More times than not, if they will advertise on the pertaining site that you are visiting, they will likely advertise on yours.. Especially if you have a fair price. This is always the best method to use and personally is how I’ve sold half of my advertisements.

Asking Your Regular Reader

If you have a few regular readers that participate in discussions, forum, or posts will likely want to put their ads on your website, because they like the content. They realize that if people see that they actively participate on the website, and have purchased an ad from you.. It might be a site worth seeing in the eyes of a new visitor.

Adding the Classic Nav Bar To Your Links

Whatever you do, please don’t forget to add a link beside your “Home” or “Archives” page to give a potential advertiser an “Instant Link” to your rates and blog stats. Nothing can repel a person faster than having to give up their time to look for a simple link to send you a note

Nothing in blogging can compare to the feeling of gaining a couple more RSS subscribers each day… or the feeling of losing the ones that you gain the next day. An interesting comment I observed yesterday was one from Adam Pieniazek (who blogs over at AdamPieniazek.com surprisingly )

My subscriber count looks intact but I do see it fluctuate a lot from day to day on a regular basis (e.g. it’ll move up and down up and down with seemingly no real pattern).

What Adam and many bloggers experience on a daily basis is the effects of their subscribers. The Feedburner Feedcount stats all depend on who tunes in with their RSS readers. Basically meaning that if one subscriber only tunes in every Saturday, they’ll have +1 for the day of Saturday but lose that +1 every other day. So that “fluctuation” is just when more or less people tune into his content.

Personally I would just use Feedburner’s Feedcount as a rough estimate of how many real subscribers you actually have. To the delight of most people, you may have more than you think

I signed on to my feedburner stats this morning and found my subscriber count at 0!!! Did I just kill my blog with yesterdays article or do other people have the same thing..

The screenshot to the left is what I saw!

Do you have the same problem with your RSS Feed?

*Update* - Around 3:00P.M the statistics were fixed.. Thank goodness

So If you still have 0 Subscribers, Become a better blogger and promote your content (Or a simpler solution would be to subscribe to this blog for easy to follow tips)

Feedburner is the standard for R.S.S Feeds. Nothing else offers as much statistics or complete control over what you can do with it. With the PRO features now given to you free because of Google buying it, you can now do so much more!! However, that is for a later time.

Newly installed Wordpress Blogs offer their own R.S.S Feed, with no connection to any main R.S.S Syndication Network which will deliver content to the reader of their choice. However if you’ve made the (Smart) decision to allow Feedburner to control your feeds and would like to exchange all of your default R.S.S feeds with your Feedburner address, this plugin is the ultimate one for you.

The download link is available here and redirects all of your feed traffic, subscribers and links to the specified one via Feedburner. All you need to do is download and activate it… Poof - Your readers now use feedburner to syndicate your content to their readers & email.

I’ve been having some “fluctuation” (for the worst ) with my subscriber feed count today and thought of this post that I could write about it. I’ve concluded that even though people may un-subscribe from my blog, the largest part of the fluctuation is that many people don’t tune into their R.S.S readers everyday and then Feedburner counts that as an “Unsubscription“.

I’m sure that you know that writing good content is the key to gaining readers and traffic, so I won’t go into detail about that.

So, if your blog is hitting a rough patch in your subscriber or reader count, don’t be discouraged.. Your loyal readers will just have more posts to read later when they turn their Really Simple Syndication (..So thats what R.S.S Stands for!!) readers on.

An above all, If you do manage to lose a couple subscribers.. Don’t stop writing content thats worth reading, or the past will be replayed in the future.