A lot of people think about blogging as a way to catalog their life’s events. But some people look at blogging as a way to do business. When you think about blogging as a marketing tool it is important to understand where your audience comes from how the consume your information. If on the Internet call these statistics wed analytics. When it comes to your website using a web analytics software, like Google Analytics, to help you show where your traffic is coming from and where it is going. However, with blogs tracking the same information it is a little more difficult because of RSS readers.
An RSS reader is a tool that consumes your RSS feed on your blog. An RSS reader can be an application on your desktop or a web application, like friend feed. Unlike the analytics on a website when you consume the RSS feed you were not selecting a web page. So the standard analytics does not work. But of course there is a way to track who is consuming your feed. And once again we look to our good friends at Google to help provide as a solution.
Welcome to the world of FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a web application to help provide statistics and information on how your RSS Feed is consumed. It places tracking services on your feed, by replacing the RSS Feed with a new URL to have people consume the information. For example:
The feed address on this blog is http://www.getenoch.com/blog/syndication.axd?format=atom (yeah, I know it’s not pretty). Once I started using FeedBurner it created a new URL for me I use to track subscriber information. The new URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GetEnochBlog, a much more elegant URL than previously. Anytime I point someone to my RSS Feed now I point them to the new Feedburner URL instead of the old URL. The old RSS URL is still working (it’s how FeedBurner is pulling the feed), but I never use it. As long as all my consumers (web and people) use the FeedBurner URL I get analytics and traffic statistics.
Once you have your analytics in place you can see reports and layouts about what is happening with your RSS Feeds. You can track subscribers, applications pulling your Feed, and number of consumers. This can also help you understand what you need to grow your audience.
Discovering what the numbers do is a great way to understand what is happening with your marketing efforts. Once you have the numbers you can get a better understanding of what to do with the information. But first you have to get the numbers. How do you do that? It’s super simple.
First, you need your Gmail user account. Why? Because it’s Google and you can get into anything Google with your Gmail account. If you haven’t read my philosophy of using the web simpler than make sure to visit my entry Signing Up for the Big 3.
Second, you need to go to FeedBurner (the web address is http://Feedburner.com) and log in using your GMail account.
Third, now that your account is created you will see a Burn a feed right this instant text box. Just place your RSS URL into the text box and hit “Next”. After you’ve done that you will get a prompt to give a “friendly” user name to the FeedBurner URL. (once again this blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GetEnochBlog) You can create something as neat as that for yourself or your business. Just continue and your FeedBurner URL is up and running
Finally, replace your RSS URL’s with the new FeedBurner URL. You might have to go into your website to change this. Some systems, like Blogspot, put into their “configuration” a way to use FeedBurner URLs instead of their RSS URLs. This is handy, but each system is different so I can’t take all the time to show this as I would like.
So what is your 10 minute tip of today? Simple. Head over to FeedBurner and create your feed statistics. It takes about 7 minutes, but the last 3 you can use to update your Blog RSS.
Now that you have the information you can start monitoring the activity and see how people are reaching your information. Then once you have the numbers start creating marketing strategies to pull more consumers. Remember numbers are fantastic to help you point in the right direction. And once your headed into the right direction … it’s only a matter of time before you reach your goal. And that is something exciting to see. Happy blogging!