Know your numbers, your feedburner numbers

[A Clear Blogging Tip.]

Considering that I spent the better part of a chapter in my book on FeedBurner.com, you should not be surprised by this tip: Get to know what Feedburner can tell you about your blog, your readers and your numbers.

Now that Google has acquired FeedBurner and stopped charging for it's more advanced features, you have no excuse at all for not using this great free resource to do two things: make your blog more valuable to readers and track your stats. We'll talk of the former another day; for now here's the top 4 things you need to know about what FeedBurner can tell you.

1. FeedBurner can tell you not just how many people subscribe to your blog's RSS feed, but how many people visit your blog on the web directly. Just enable Total Stats for your blog. Depending on your blogging environment this can be as simple as checking a box to a bit of copy and paste into a couple of your blog's template pages.
2. FeedBurner can show you your posts in order of popularity. Just click on Item Use in Feed Stats list on the Analyze tab. Whether you want to pander to popularity by say adding static links to your most popular posts or dig deeper into why certain posts didn't get the attention you expected, Feedburner can help.
3. FeedBurner can show you how people found your blog and breaks this down with detail between inbound traffic resulting from searches and from links. These latter are people you should get to know.
4. Finally, FeedBurner can tell you which links in your blogs your readers are clicking on, how frequently, link by link. Again, this is information you need to understand your readers.

How do you make this tip work?

1. If you don't have a FeedBurner account, get one. It will take about 5 minutes and cost you nothing.
2. If you do have a FeedBurner account, go to Analyze and turn on Total Stats if you've not done so. Depending on your blog engine, you will need to do a bit of further work - see the popup window for details.
3. Finally, in your calendar, make 15 minute weekly appointments to get to know your FeedBurner numbes.

Who is reading your blog, where did they came, what do they like and where which of your offered links do they click on will go a long way to bring into focus your blog's readership. FeedBurner is the way.

Comments

[Emma]

Thanks, I had this enabled but I needed to post the code. Thanks for tip. I'm subscribing to your blog.

[Emad Ibrahim]

Thanks for this very helpful post... I found you through ProBlogger where my post on blogging tips
made it to the list :). See it at http://emad.blogstogo.com/2007/07/29/make-money-from-my-blog