Getting More From Your RSS Feed

Ever since I started this blog in July 2004, I've used the free FeedBurner service as a means of enabling you to easily subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. FeedBurner is probably the RSS subscription service of choice for most people as I see its little icon on more blogs than any other service's little icon. FeedBurner also tells me general traffic statistics about the feed: how many people subscribe to it, which RSS readers they use, etc. This is good but knowing more than that about the subscribers to an RSS feed and what they do is becoming increasingly important - more so, I believe, than knowing how many people visit your blog. Why? Because of Feed Demon). Whether web-based or installed on your own computer, they enable you to receive information from many different websites and blogs all in one place. What this means is that it's increasingly likely that more people will read what you write via subscribing to your RSS feed than through visiting your blog. This is especially true if people like what you write on your blog and so want to read more of it, and read it regularly. Look at it this way. If you want to read what 20 different bloggers or websites write about, you could go and visit each of those blogs or websites. So that's 20 different places to visit. Or, you could sign up to get each of these RSS feeds and automatically receive what they write, every time they publish something, in your RSS reader. I know which method I prefer and have been employing for the last ten months. Indeed, the only times I tend to proactively visit blogs are for reasons like these:

1. To read or leave a comment to a post
2. Writing a post on my own blog and wanting to Total Stats Pro. With free FeedBurner, you already get this as part of the deal: * Feed Circulation: A daily measure of your feed readership that tracks your popularity over the life of your feed. With Total Stats Pro, you still get that that - and you also get this:
   1. Detailed Item Popularity: The performance of each item you publish, tracked in web-based and desktop news readers.
   2. Who's Syndicating Me? Referrer reports by item that help you understand not only which web-based aggregators are driving traffic back to your site, but also identify any non-aggregators that are repurposing or resyndicating your feed content.
   review of Total Stats Pro that explains the benefits of the new service very well (better, actually, than FeedBurner explains it) together with some screenshots of how he's using it. A key point from Matt's review: Understanding referrer data is particularly important since you can't assume that clicks from your feed are coming only from people's RSS readers. URLs from your feeds will get out into the Internet [...] and people will click on those URLs. Your URLs may appear in RSS readers, on web pages, within the posts of other people's feeds, etc. So, identifying the source of the clicks is at least as valuable as knowing how many clicks your URLs generate. This helps you understand both what people want and how they want it. Total Stats Pro costs $4.99 a month. For that, you can include up to three feeds in the tracking service. There is a free 15-day trial, which I signed up for today. I'll report on my experience with it in a couple of weeks' time. Finally, I believe that RSS will become one of the most important tools at your disposal in the efforts you make to extend your connectivity with other people and build relationships with them. This applies no matter what type of site you have, whether it's a blog, an online news service or a traditional marketing website. Here's why, in the words of I'd just add one point to Robert's view - publish full content in your RSS feed, not an extract. Give me good reasons to come and visit you, not the (equally) lame way of using a bit of content with a dot-dot-dot at the end. NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

   Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at NevilleHobson.com