Take a look I mention your blog too:

http://www.bontb.com/2007/06/judging-blog-by-readers-traffic/

Nevertheless , building a nice solid stream of RSS readers and showing it off to your visitor might get their attention . A number of 1,000 – 10,000 readers shows that all those people can’t be wrong , there’s something there definitely worth reading .

The above tips do fall somewhat in the General category . And as for the part SEO regarding feeds . I don’t think any time soon , feeds will help us rank better and no one can judge a site’s popularity according to their number of feeds . You can have 10k unique visitors per day and only 10% of these subscribe .
The way you’re saying it , is somewhat relevant to the way alexa ranks sites .
Based only on the information they receive from their tools , i can add that this isn’t 100% precise .

From my point of view , Google Acquired Feedburner mostly for monetization . They are dominating the PPC market , they were looking for something to expand . I will have to underline , that this is only my point of view .

after i read your post, i moved my feed from 3 lines down on the sidebar to the very top! don’t know whether this makes people subscribe. there are so many people interested in a hawaii vacation, the best hawaii vacation. wouldn’t it be wonderful to have them as subscribers. thanks to those who did after they read my comment. mahalo, pua
p.s.
did not even know yet that google bought feedburner. who/what else are they buying?!

Joseph,
If you think getting musos through their technophobia is hard then you should try church pastors and administrators!!! I’ve been building church related sites for a while, and trying to get info and decisions out of people is dentistry at its worst.

Mal Dow

I’ve been benefiting from your blog since October of last year -thank you for your compassion and passion with it. I’ve done a lot of SEO, RSS and am actively trying to increase readership with my blog, it’s about music, education and technology. The biggest problem I seem to have is that my “niche” is full of “unsavvy” technophobes. It is very difficult getting people (especially educators in my experience) out of the proverbial “box” they operate from.

Your posts have been especially productive for me over the hundreds of others I’ve read in the last 8 or so months. I’ve recently taken the “jump” to full RSS feeds based on one of your articles. I’m still a little unsure about the move…

Just to confirm some of your suspicions about RSS people being technically savvy, I did an informal poll at my last music clinic and only 1 out of 30 attendees had ever heard of it… it’s certainly not real research but for what its worth…

Joseph Pisano

I remember when you were having trouble with your newsletter and what not getting hijacked. I had no idea it had to do with the plug-in.

By the way, I meant I’ve been reading your huge blog since 2005, not 95. I’m not entirely mental.

~Jason

1. I was finding some readers were getting bombarded with emails. Some of my posts get hundreds of comments and to send an email each time one was left was filling up inboxes everywhere and hitting our server hard

2. I get a lot of spam comments. While Akismet catches most of them some still get through and I found that readers were being sent emails for all kinds of dubious content – with ProBlogger’s name associated with it.

I’ll consider a comment RSS in the future for hardcore subscribers but I think the same problem will be there. It’s a tough one for a blog that gets a lot of comments to know how to manage them all.

Please consider it.

Thanks,

Jason

I feel more inspired to write when I have regular readers. It’s like I’m crafting articles just for them. That’s what I like about RSS.

Gal

Anyways,

RSS is one of those kind of annoying things. Like on my blog the traffic is going up pretty nicely, but RSS readership levels haven’t gone up at all… just really irritating.