Semi-Pro Blogger

If you are going to be running a blog, one of the main metrics you should be concerned about is your RSS subscriber count.  The best way to manage and monitor your RSS subscriptions is to use the free service from Feedburner; owned by Google.  Feedburner provides you with daily updates to the number of people subscribing to your blog, as well as some interesting insight into what people are reading on your site.

Feedburner allows you to display subscriber counts directly on your blog if you’d like.  However, if your just starting out and dont have many subscribers, I recommend not using these buttons.  Displaying the fact that you have zero or little subscribers may send the wrong message to your readers that what you have to say is unimportant.  On the other hand, if you have a few hundred or even thousand subscribers, I highly recommend using the button as it can send the message that many people find the content on your site valuable and is worthy of being subscribed to.

To begin setting up your Feedburner feed, visit http://www.feedburner.com and sign up for a free account.  Once you have created an account your RSS feed URL will appear as http://feeds.feedburner.com/domain.  Now that you have the new RSS feed URL, you’ll want to go in and redirect your old RSS feed URL that comes as the default with Wordpress to the new location.  The advantage of the redirect is that any current subscribers will be counted by Feedburner.  There is a plugin available for Wordpress that can handle this redirect automatically for you called Feedburner Feedsmith.