As I have mentioned before, RSS is the best metric to show the real success of your blog. Sure, you may have thousands of visitors every day, you may rank for every keyword in your niche, but if you don’t have RSS subscribers, you are failing.
Having subscribers is the equivalent of a newspaper, you have X amount of people, whom you will reach no matter what. Sales may fluctuate, you may have good days and bad days, but the number of subscribers is relatively stable.
And, honestly, it is much more important to say “I have 3000 RSS readers”, than to say “I have 15000 visitors every day”. The random visitors usually come because they find you in the engines, or from other links etc. No, of course, you cannot call them insignificant, but they are not a precise metric. RSS pretty much is.
I read somewhere that an RSS reader is the equivalent of 25$/month. I say this is crap, but he surely has a value, even if its not monetary.
So, why am I babbling about RSS instead of discussing the RSS data of this blog? Because there aren’t any 
Checking out my Feedburner stats, I find ~25 subscribers. Pathetic, I know, but still considerable since this is a new and small blog. I believe it depends on the niche, but less than 5% of your visitors will either comment, participate or subscribe. The other 95% are lurkers.
Sunday, September 14 – Saturday, September 20
- 23 subscribers (on average)
- 10 reach (on average)
| NAME | VIEWS | CLICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Practical tips on webdesign | 18 | 19 |
| A small collection of icons for you | 9 | 21 |
| TLA vs TNX | 24 | 1 |
| Most people are average, normal and bor… | 20 | 1 |
| Writing good content for your website, … | 15 | 3 |
| How to shoot yourself on the foot, or h… | 14 | 2 |
| Twitter got me! | 12 | 1 |
| Modified pingcrawl plugin | 13 | – |
| Eggs, cookies, passive income and html | 12 | – |
| Statistical chaos | 11 | – |
| Making money from poker | 11 | – |
| Glowleaf.net X-rayed | 9 | 1 |
| Google turns us all into coal miners | 9 | – |
| Building your SEO empire, the Glowleaf … | 7 |
Feed Readers and Aggregators
| NAME | SUBSCRIBERS |
|---|---|
| Google Feedfetcher | 5 |
| Bloglines | 4 |
| Firefox Live Bookmarks | 2 |
| NewsGator Online | 2 |
| FeedReader | 1 |
| NetNewsWire | 1 |
| Vienna | 1 |
| A Java-based feed reader | 0 |
| Mozilla/5.0 () | 0 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (SimplePie; Allow like Gecko) | 0 |
Bots
| NAME | HITS  |
|---|---|
| IceRocket | 52 |
| Technorati Search Bot | 21 |
| Another Google Bot | 4 |
| Moreover | 2 |
| Sphere | 2 |
| FeedBurner Feed Insurance | 1 |
| Radian 6 Crawler | 1 |
| FeedBurner | 0 |
| RSSMicro Search | 0 |
Related Blogs
- Related Blogs on feedburner
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- Permission To Change Direction
- Seth Godin “all marketers are liars” marketing master
- Making Sense of Marketing Models
- Comment on Permission Marketing ?.0 by Social Bookmarks
- Related Blogs on rss
Popularity: 8% [?]
written by Glowleaf
\\ tags: feedburner, permission marketing, rss
September 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I’ve always wondered how reports were pulling RSS stats. Is it reporting every reader that got a recent update? Current readers that are subscribed to your site? New readers that subscribed to it that day, or hits from current readers pulling your feed…?
You have more insight? I still don’t see the value in RSS. I don’t like keeping track of a reader and usually just bonce between blogs in my browser favorites or some on my radar. I think I’m behind the times though with RSS.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Feedburner gives a lot of stats, more than what you really need. And you personally may not see the value of RSS, but I for example, have around 60 blogs on my reader, and their new posts pop up every day.
The clickover stats are as accurate as they can get. Only firefox ver 2 had a bug that messed that up, and now its fixed.
Also, as I said on the post, a blog with 100 rss readers and 200 uniques/day has bigger “balls” than a blog with 25 rss readers and 300 uniques/day (like mine)
Its like having your own customized newspaper every day. I do it, plenty of other people do it, so why not give them the choice?
But, it really does not matter whether you or I see the benefit in RSS.
Submitting your feed to feedburner actually has a tangible SEO value, which shows in your cpanel crawl visit stats.
That fact alone is enough.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Got it. Thanks.