FeedBurner is a tool which allows your blog’s feed to be syndicated and subscribed to more easily to your readers. It really is a fantastic tool and i’ve no doubt you will already know about the site already since so many large blogs use it.
Basically, when you sign up to feedburner, your feed url goes to an easy to read page where readers can add your feed to their chosen rss reader.
As well as tracking stats and giving you other monitoring tools, the feature most blog owners use is displaying a feedburner tool called FeedCount which displays the number of readers you have. It also acts as a link which goes to your feed page.
Here is my feedcount display (ive used the standard colors for this example) :
The count may be different when you read this post however as i write this post it currently stands at 13 readers. This is a new blog so im actually pretty pleased about having 13 already.
However it raises the question - When should you publicly display your feedcount on your blog?
Clearly, when you have 0 readers it isn’t advisable to display it. A zero count gives the impression that your site isn’t worth subscribing to. Us homosapians are shallow creatures. Sad but true. We’re much more likely to subscribe to a feed that is popular and has a lot of readers than one that doesn’t.
It’s common sense isn’t it. If hundreds of people are subscribing to a blog then the blogger clearly writes good articles and updates pretty frequently. We know a zero count doesn’t look good so at what point should you display your count.
I don’t think my current count is something to boast about so im gonna wait til its closer to 100.
Do you think blogs should til they have more readers or even broadcast it from the very start?






















Market Matador | May 11th, 2007 at 2:34 am #
I’ve personally struggled with this very issue, and at around 59 subscribers, I don’t if I should do it yet. When I first started my blog, I said 50 would be the number, then I would immediately post the widget. It’s funny though, when you get there, you just don’t want to post it. I’m definitely going to wait till the number holds over 100. Then I think posting the number will actually increase my subscriber numbers.
Just my 2 cents,
-Sam from MarketMatador.com
Kevin | May 11th, 2007 at 1:24 pm #
i feel the same way sam. Im gonna way til i reach 100 before i display it publicly