A few months ago, a few of the guys from FeedBurner stopped by to talk with the Realtor.org team. I sat in on it as I had heard a lot about FeedBurner and I didn’t know what they offered. If you’re unfamiliar with them, I’ll just quote them from their site:
FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
For the purposes of CRT’s blog, FeedBurner does some analysis of who is reading our RSS feeds, what articles clicked through on, and what RSS reader they are using. They also simplify subscribing for the potential RSS reading user, add “flair” like “Digg This” and “add to del.icio.us” to posts, and have the ability to mix in other RSS feeds such as your del.icio.us tags. They have a bunch of other services that include helping with advertising on your feed and some podcast tweaking that we have played with. Recently they’ve unveiled some site stats that we’re also experimenting with.
I turned on FeedBurner about a month ago so we could have some data to talk about. As of a few minutes ago, we have 116 subscribers to the RSS feed. By their analysis, most of those who read our blog via the RSS feed are doing so via on-line RSS readers/aggregators such as Netvibes, NewsGator, or Bloglines. Of course, there are some other readers, such as Google, who don’t report how many users they are pulling from, so that is a know skew of the numbers. However, it was a bit suprising to me that over 60% of our blog subscribers are reading this way. People reading RSS via an application (like I do using Vienna on my MacBook Pro) are clearly in the minority.
Another service that FeedBurner provides is the ability to have people subscribe to your blog via e-mail. On a daily basis, new blog posts will be e-mailed to those who subscribe. On the top of our blog you’ll see a link to our “subscribe” page which is a form to sign up for the e-mail delivery of CRT’s blog. Without having mentioned it, we already have 5 subscribers. It’ll be interesting to see if the numbers change now that I’ve talked about it.
We’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with our FeedBurner usage on CRT’s site. All the services I’ve mentioned are services they provide for free to most people. There are a bunch more free services we haven’t played with as well as some for-pay services that do more analysis. Its worth the time to check it out if you want to do some more tracking on your blogging.
