Why My RSS Feedburner Counter Jumped Since Yesterday
I just got home from a meeting I had with someone, and I loaded up my Blog to check my comments and stats and I just about fell of my chair when I saw my RSS feed count. I was at around 425 RSS subscribers yesterday and now I’m sitting at 1265. My first reaction was - huh?
I logged into Feedburner to check out what’s going on and that’s when I realized what happened. What happened is that two days ago I was reading an eBook by someone that was talking about how to setup AWeber to send out a regular email to your email list that shows your latest articles from your RSS feed. I’ve been meaning to start doing that for quite a while now but I just never really got around to it.
Anyways, I went in and I set that up yesterday so that my email list from AWeber could start to receive an email from me once a week or so highlighting my articles from that week. A lot of people actually prefer that method as there are still a lot of people that don’t know what RSS is, don’t know what an RSS reader is and frankly don’t care.
So, I went in and set that up to automatically do that. What I didn’t realize is that Feedburner and AWeber talk to each other now and AWeber tells Feedburner how many people are receiving this email and Feedburner now counts that number. This is not just on my Blog, but on all Blogs that display a chiclet and send an RSS email feed to their AWeber email list.
Apparently Feedburner’s been doing this for months now, I just wasn’t aware of it because I never had mine turned on to do that. A few months back it wasn’t a big deal because my email list and my RSS feed count weren’t that big, but lately as my Blog has been growing in popularity, my email list has been growing quite quickly.
So when you see my Feedburner chiclet now and you see 1,265 (or more) and are wondering why it jumped by around 800 in one day, it’s because I finally connected the two systems together.
At first I actually wondered if it’s the right thing to do to show that number like that because I don’t really have +1200 people subscribed via RSS readers. I looked around at some of the other Bloggers out there to see what they’re doing and actually it looks like they all experienced the same thing. One day, AWeber and Feedburner just started talking to each other and their RSS counters jumped. A lot of Bloggers blogged about it explaining the sudden jump.
After reading through some of their articles, I realized that of course it makes sense to include your email list count as part of your Feedburner count because in fact they ARE receiving the RSS feed to my articles. Meaning, if a person doesn’t use an RSS reader but subscribes to my Blog via email, and gets my articles delivered to them via email why wouldn’t they count?
Reading through some of the comments on other Blogs that suddenly had this “jump” in their numbers, I have seen some negative backlash from people who say that the email list shouldn’t be counted, almost implying that RSS subscribers “count” but email subscribers don’t because they’re not as valuable or something. Right or wrong, as a metric for valuing the exposure of a Blog, which is typically what Feedburner counts are used for, I have no doubt that email subscribers are just as important for reaching people.
If for example, a Blogger has 5,000 RSS Reader subscribers and 20,000 email subscribers, I think it’s accurate to report that by advertising on that Blog you are getting exposure to 25,000 people. Who really cares what kind of “reader” they’re using.
Anyway, I just wanted to explain the sudden jump as I know some of my loyal readers might be thinking that either (a) Paul just performed a miracle in one day, or (b) there’s something fishy going on here. :) There’s nothing fishy going on, there’s no miracle, it’s just that Feedburner is now counting my AWeber email list accurately like it should have been all along if I set it up that way from day one.
To be fair to any advertisers that advertise on my site, I’ll be glad to send a snapshot of the breakdown of my subscribers if they wish, so that they can see how many people are subscribed by readers like Google Reader, Bloglines, MyYahoo etc. and how many are receiving the feed by email either though AWeber or Feedburner Email Subscriptions.
Update:
Jacob over at www.GroupWritingProjects.com is doing a group writing project on tips for building your RSS subscribers. I’ve decided to submit this article towards it. You can get more info regarding the project and details about the contest by following this link: This Will Be BIG: the Building RSS Group Writing Project and Contests
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| 10 Comments
Oh, this is really good to know. Will definitely set up aweber now. THanks!=
Interesting occurrence. Question regarding the topic - When you first started dabbling with autoresponders, what were some of the resources you were referencing?
I am educated on the functions of RSS feeds and autoresponders, but as I have not fully incorporated these tools into my online arsenal, I’m a tad blurry on the actual implementation of these tools.
Any particular resource you could point us towards?
Cheers.
Hehe I had exactly the same thing happen on my blog. went from 5 to 135 in a day, thought feedburner must have screwed up and so just ignored it.
@Elijah: What specific questions do you have? From my research I found everyone to be using AWeber, but I wanted to see the differences so I played around with a few different email sender services such as iContact etc., but in the end I kept finding that the services were missing things. Some of them did one thing, but not another. Some looked pretty, but were hard to navigate. Some had a really weird pricing structure that didn’t make sense to me.
In the end I just ended up using AWeber like everyone else, probably because they are the best at what they do. Their software is simple, effective and powerful. I have no hesitation recommending them if you’re looking for a software to track your email list.
Also, I think people trust them for signing up because they are very strict with their NO SPAM policies and make it super easy for people to unsubscribe if they don’t want to be on the list anymore.
I was already wondering about this, 800 more readers in a few days is a huge leap forwards! Glad I found the reason, very useful information, yet another reason for working more on my contactlists
Paul, you should consider entering this tip in my Building RSS Group Writing Project:
http://groupwritingprojects.com/blog/building-rss-group-writing-project/
All you would need to qualify for over $350 in prizes is to add a link to the announcement post at the above link. Although additional tips before Sunday night’s deadline would increase your chances of winning even more.
@Jacob from Group Writing Projects: Thanks for letting me know!
Done!
Hi Paul, this is Sindre from Norway again. Thank you for this tip. I also run a blog here in Norway, and I am wondering if Aweber would be useful in other languages too? How exactly does it work? Is it possible to send out entire newsletters in whatever language I want?
I realize this might seem like a silly question, and might be hard for you to answer as you probably only have experience from sending English newsletters.. But I never worked with Aweber before, so I’m just a little curious.. Thanks in advance and keep up the great work on your blog!!
@Sindre: Yup, Aweber just allows you to keep track of email lists and then to send them either automated or broadcast follow up emails.
Essentially the whole point of AWeber is to keep track of your email list for you. People can automatically subscribe/unsubscribe to your email lists and whenever you want to send an email to your list you just login and do it.
The language thing is a non issue since you write the emails yourself, you can write them in whatever language you want.
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