The impact of RSS subscribers on traffic

A few minutes ago I logged into my feedburner account and began to take a good look at some of the statistics, prompted by this article about analyzing your traffic statistics to best leverage it over at Daily Blogging Tips. I decided to analyze the past 7 days worth of traffic as best I could using the Feedburner stats.

The first thing I noticed was how often articles I wouldn’t have thought would get good clicks got them. For instance Weekly goals week 2 was viewed via feed readers 6 times and clicked on 13 times. I didn’t expect anyone would really give that article any thought. Another example is Page rank woes are not justified. I had figured the topic had been done to death and I wouldn’t get any great benefit from the article, but once again I was wrong.

Next I began to wonder just how often people check my feed. So I posted a quick article and waited about 20 minutes. I got the common “25 hits in the past half hour” notification when I looked at my “live hits”. This tells me that people are at least checking my feed, because prior to the article being published it was saying “25 hits in the last 2 and a half hours”. Of course this isn’t anything to get worked up over as both humans and bots count as hits, but it satisified my curiousity.

Next up is my email feed. It’s been holding steady at four subscribers for nearly 2 weeks now. Before that it was at 3 subscribers since the beginning of September when I initially began to offer it. This tells me that people don’t really like getting email from me and I can’t say I blame them. Each time I’ve subscribed to an email feed I soon find myself either marking it as spam or unsubscribing. I get enough email as it is and chances are when I get one from a blog I overlook some gems. Either way feel free to subscribe (just enter your email and click “subscribe” over to the right) if you like, but I’m not really surprised that I only have 4 email feed subscribers.

Aside from the dismal numbers I can’t help but wonder if any of the four people who subscribe to the email feed ever actually make it onto the site? If they do great, if not then it is simply 4 more people that I have no chance to convert into dollars and cents.

The bottom line is simply this: I get a decent number of hits via my RSS feed. My email feed is pathetic. I wonder if I did away altogether with my feed would that forcing readers to click on my site help me in my monetization efforts or would it cause me to lose readers all around?

Don't forget to subscribe to A Blog about Nothing's RSS feed!

Tags: Blogging, feedburner, rss