How To Triple Your Subscribers In One Easy Step
Do you want more subscribers? Do what I just did and have FeedBurner serve your RSS feeds and watch your subscriber count shoot up dramatically!
Measuring Blog Readership
Accurate readership metrics for a blog aren’t always easy to get. Prior to my switch, for example, the only thing I knew for sure was that I had a large chunk of subscribers (over 200) reading this blog via Bloglines. Yesterday when I switched to FeedBurner and placed their “FeedCount” graphic on the site, the FeedCount was at 277, which seemed to confirm what Bloglines was telling me, although in my gut I was pretty sure it was higher.
Today, however, the subscriber count has more than tripled to 944. Here are the FeedBurner stats:
As you can see, the largest block of subscribers (348 of them) read this blog via Google Reader or iGoogle. There are also many other small aggregators being used as well as individual readers, of course. Add in those who read this blog via email (not shown in the FeedBurner stats because I maintain that list using AWeber’s blog broadcast feature) and the regular subscriber count is well over 1000.
Switching To FeedBurner
Switching to FeedBurner is trivial if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog: just download and install the FeedSmith plugin. The plugin intercepts calls to your WordPress feed (usually found at /feed/ on your site) and examines the user agent header to determine who’s trying to read the feed: anyone but FeedBurner itself gets seamlessly redirected to the FeedBurner feed instead. (The redirect is done using a temporary redirect to ensure that subscribers always come back to your original WordPress feed. Thus if you disable the plugin, subscribers will automatically revert to using the original feed.)
Futures
Of course, none of this will help increase the AdSense income for this blog (which is paltry, as I’ve admitted before). But by switching to FeedBurner I’ll be able to capitalize on any feed monetization schemes that Google (who now own FeedBurner) comes up with.
Did I really triple my subscribers overnight? No, not really. What I did was expose my actual subscriber base overnight, just by switching to FeedBurner. But it gives me more clout with advertisers if that ever becomes important. For some real tips on increasing your subscriber count, see copyblogger’s 10 ways to get more subscribers.
Coming soon: an ethical bribe just for my subscribers… 
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Tags
AdSense, blog, FeedBurner, Google, monetization, RSS, subscribers, WordPress