This post has been submitted by Neil Patel. Neil is co-founder and CTO of ACS ) and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising.
The main reason most people use Feedburner is because it shows how many RSS subscribers they have. That might be a valuable metric to keep track of but there are certainly more things that can be done with Feedburner. By spending just 10 minutes a week analyzing certain Feedburner stats, it is possible to get an idea of how people are actually interacting with your blog so you can improve it.
If you look at the following image, you can see the most popular blog post I have written was: “Making your content Del.icio.us”. That post was written late on a Friday night, few people linked to it, and it did not do well on social sites like Del.icio.us. However, my RSS subscribers loved it.
The next image shows the least popular blog posts on Pronet Advertising. Many of these less popular blog posts were called ‘catchup’, which is a roundup of weekly news items. These catchup posts received a decent amount of visitors but it seems that the RSS subscribers weren’t sharing the love. After I noticed the trend I stopped writing them causing (partially) my RSS subscription rate to increase by roughly 16% in 30 days. Granted, there are probably other factors that caused the increase however I am sure that not writing those posts was a contributing factor.
By using Feedburner you can get an idea of which type of content is appealing most to your RSS subscribers. The key is to understand that just because a post receives tons of traffic or gets lots of comments, it doesn’t equate to your core audience loving it. If you want to increase the popularity of your blog, use some sort of RSS analytics to help you write content targeted towards the people who matter to you most; your loyal readers.
Read more from Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising.
If I understand correctly, this would be the paid version of feedburner?
This is the first time i am writting here. I am big fan of Neil Patel and looking his post here push me to write some thing.
I am chasing him quitely for the last few weeks as i want to step out of the dark world and want to make connections.
I successfully ranking sites in top 3 position for competitive keywords and now i think i should share and learns from big names in the industry.
Feedburner is really helpfull thanks for your tips.
Those are some pretty amazing stats. I am getting ready to set up my own blog on my website and I think I will include Feedburner.
Well, about Feedburner, I don’t think its a reliable source for feed tracking. I mean, in the past, I remember getting different results from other analytic.
Neil, are those feedburner stats available only in the premium version?
Could see the basic details of what my readers were clicking on, but definitely the data the Neil mentions is part of the premium version looks like.
Next post: “How to size images for the web”
Everyone seems to like the stats feedburner gives… I just wish you could get those stats without giving away control of your feeds
How can you have 0 views of the post and 30 clicks? Don’t you have to view the post in your RSS reader to click on the link? Or am I not understanding the metrics?
This is very interesting. However, it looks like some of the features you talk about are in the premier version of feedburner. Still, feedburner is very useful.
You make some good points, but I’m not quite sure what the final message is. Should you stop writing very popular posts because RSS subscribers don’t like them? Aren’t these the posts that get you loads of subscribers in the first place?
I still don’t see a compelling reason to buy the feedburner premium stats. It would just be another way to waste time checking stats instead of creating content.
Nice article. I registered with FeedBurner a few months back, but I am still not getting many readers of my feed.
I don’t think that the free version allows us to view these stats… I always wanted to devote a little time exploring the rest of feedburner though….
Mystery
Neil – try redirecting your site feed to the FeedBurner feed. That way you’ll move over anyone who is already using your site feed.
While this is interesting, It seems that the views and clicks would tend to favor things that were written recently. In other words, the top popular items are likely to be the ones that are newest. Those are what will show up at the top of everyone’s feed burner anyway.
Does the paid version of Feedburner give you a way to get reliable information. So for instance, can you tell it you want to see the stats for each item from the day it was published until day 7?
John Chow made a post about using the time stamp option to post date articles, which I’ve been taking advantage of, publishing content now on a regular basis at 8am, noon and 3pm (EST) and have found that the clicks I see in my sitemeter stats from popular feed readers like Bloglines and Google Reader are on an upswing. At this point though, I’m not sure paying $60/year for the upgraded stat info from FeedBurner is worth it.
Yeah.. I can’t afford full stats on FeedBurner either :(
Hey Neil,
Kem Cho? Seems like you’ve mastered all Bloggy tricks after a worthwhile time spend with some biggies?
Feedburner yeah, it does have a lot of pro’s. You’re right to say that, content for the loyal audience is a must, but the hopping reader, will sometime or the others pass by….atleast for….”Neil, how’re you doing these days?”.
(Baar Baar click karo, Hazaar Baar click karo, yesh blog karane ki cheez hai….) – Neil get this one in Desi style.
Allan.
Not sure if you have written about this before, also note that if you change feeds you can get Feedburner to re-direct your old feeds so this will boost your subscriber count:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/03/29/my-native-feed-is-no-secret/
Also, if you offer multiple posts feeds, or even a comment feed and category feeds, you can bundle these:
http://www.elsua.net/2006/09/19/feedburner-plugin-21-keeping-track-of-all-of-your-syndication-needs/
@ Mark Shead:
Hey Mark,
Yes, you can change the view of your stats to any particular day, or you can change your item view to the last 7 days, last 30 days, or all time. That gives you quite a few different views for you to see which items are the most popular.
Great post! We love feedback, so don’t ever hesitate to give us a shout if we can help.
Jake Parrillo
Publisher Services Team
FeedBurner
Hey Guys, sorry for the delay in posting comments… I was at a conference with Darren.
@ Donnie, Brandon – this is a paid version of feedburner.
@ Mark – the paid version lets you do that from my understanding.
@ Allan – I am doing well.
I’m a huge FeedBurner fan, and I’ve heard nothing but good about Neil from lots of people, but I have to disagree with this post.
The percentage of readers who subscribe to your feed is probably quite small. For one blog I manage, which has very passionate readers, it’s only 4%. Basing your posting decisions on a tiny fraction of your readers just isn’t a very good idea. What if the other 95% loved those catchup posts?
[…] It’s that time again and there was plenty to link to this week as always. I even found a guest post by Neil Patel on ProBlogger about using Feedburner to improve your blog. Neil found through feedburner stats that link posts like this one on Pronet Advertising underperformed and were among the least popular. Seems like a knock against the linking out post. I’ve been noticing the opposite here. These “This Week In SEO” posts have been among the most viewed over the last month and have certainly been generating the most comments. I think it shows that the same idea can have very different results in two places. I’d like to think I’ve added a little more than the typical linking out post, but it could all just be coincidence. […]
[…] It’s that time again and there was plenty to link to this week as always. I even found a guest post by Neil Patel on ProBlogger about using Feedburner to improve your blog. Neil found through feedburner stats that link posts like this one on Pronet Advertising underperformed and were among the least popular. Seems like a knock against the linking out post. I’ve been noticing the opposite here. These “This Week In SEO” posts have been among the most viewed over the last month and have certainly been generating the most comments. I think it shows that the same idea can have very different results in two places. I’d like to think I’ve added a little more than the typical linking out post, but it could all just be coincidence. […]
well.this is indeed a good tip.but ultimately,time will only increase your blog
:) kinda awareness blog.. but hiccups from sides..!
I`m looking forward to having feedburner on my blog.