Yeah, I admit it, I’m a metrics junky. Which is good, since I am the chief blogger for Elytics.com writing on the web metrics blog. Regardless, I’m also a huge fan of FeedBurner. I admit I check my FeedBurner stats throughout the day, especially when one of my articles has been picked up by several other blogs. In spite of being a metrics junky and really wanting to know what content is popular on my blog I resisted trying Total Stats PRO–Burning Questions – The Official FeedBurner Weblog - FeedBurner – FeedBurner Total Stats PRO. Why? I’m cost conscious. I really try to keep my business overhead low. Then it hit me, as a blog consultant/pro blogger/syndicated writer I really should look into this. I already set up all my clients with FeedBurner from day one–learning from my own mistake–and I tell my clients check your FeedBurner and other stats to figure out what content is most popular and use this to help guide your content decisions. It makes logical sense, then, that I should try it myself and see if it’s worth $5/month. So, over the next 15 days I’ll be checking my stats with Total Stats PRO. I’ll probably do an initial assessment later today, then one in a few days, etc.As professional bloggers our content is both our calling card and our gravy train. It’s how we earn our money. There’s no point in writing tons of articles on topic x if those aren’t as popular as topic y, especially if you’re writing for a client. There will always be a certain number of articles that you write or publish, things like press releases, that aren’t glamorous and don’t get a lot of attention, but are essential regardless. Then there are the articles which both you and your client intend to be interesting to a wider audience, those are the articles that I’m talking about. That’s the important information that I hope FeedBurner can now provide me. If so, $5/month could be a paltry price to pay to be able to effectively target the content published on a blog by blog basis. Here’s hoping!
I will post charts, tables, etc as appropriate to give you a feel for what I’m seeing. Because great data poorly presented, is almost as useless as not having it at all.
Technorati Tags : FeedBurner, blog metrics
Tris Hussey is a professional blogger and blog consultant, the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software, and Managing Director of Qumana Services. He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com or tris AT trishussey DOT com.
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My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
I really dont like great pictures in post´s (except it help for the explanation). And I think there is a little to much “Filed under”.
Tris, your post sparked my interest in FeedBurner, so having a brand spankin’ new blog, I headed over there and signed up. I was impressed by how easy it was, and like you, I signed up for the Total Stats Pro…it just seems like a small price to pay for a much better understanding of your reader’s habits. Plus, the $5/month seems to cover up to three blogs, which should have someone like me covered for the time being.
Cary,
Exactly. FeedBurner has done an excellent job at making set up painless. I have a routine I go through of which things I check off. Podcasting, podcasting HTML look, Creative Commons, etc. Takes less than 5 mins per blog. I wish I had signed up earlier. I know that FeedBurner tracks only a portion of my RSS readers since I can’t do a true HTTP redirect from Blogware.
$5/month does seem like a very small price fro three blogs. The data I’ve seen early on looks good, I have to say.
For people running WordPress, there are plugins that provide great stats on just about everything.
Hey Tris, I’ve been checking out the little animated Feedburner icon that I placed on my blog, but I’m not at all sure what it is actually supposed to be showing me…is it the number of subscriptions to the feed, the number of times the feed has been viewed, or something else? Hmmm, I checked feedburner’s site but couldn’t figure it out. My icon shows a big ZERO, not surprising since I just built the thing two days ago! But my stats say it’s been viewed 14 times…
That little chicklet is the number of subscribers to your feed from the previous day. So right now Darren’s on this site reads 430 and on my site 148, but from my FeedBurner stats the 24 hr moving subscriber number is 157. So tomorrow you should get a number there.
Hey thanks!
Sure enough…it’s morning again and my new blog has a big 4 readers! Too funny ; )
Cool. I’m one.