Actual Site Visitors or Subscribers to your blog

Posted by Colin

December 14, 2007

I was thinking today what is best to have with regards to your blog, actual site visitors or subscribers.

When I check my site stats I use Feedburner, this tells me how many people are subscribed and how many visitors I have had. I do tend to check the number of subscribers first as this for me is an indication of loyal readers. The problem is how many are just feeds to websites or to even Feedburner itself. When you register your site to Feedburner you automatically get 1 subscription, so this is a false positive.

In theory then you can increase you own subscriber numbers just by registering your blog with websites that depend on RSS feeds for content.

When it comes to actual site visitors this also can be a false negative as FeedBurner appears to also register you as the blog owner as a visitor. Maybe Feedburner should use the blog owner IP address (if static) to determine if it is a valid visitor. I have also used statscounter.com in the past and it was easier to determine if I was the visitor but it was still counted.

Having actual site visitors is better from a money making point of view as they are more likely to click on an external link or an ad. You could always place ads within your feeds to compensate for this when it comes to subscribers. FeedBurner gives you the option to place Adsense ads within your feeds. Maybe the reason why some people like to have feeds only is so that they only get the content, instead of all the ads. Also maybe they just don’t have the time to go to your site everyday to check for new posts. For me I subscribe to a blog when I like the authors style, information contained in the post and the frequency.

So really I think that having a combination of actual site visitors and subscribers is good and it depends on the actual individual themselves which one they prefer.

What’s Your Point of View ?

Please leave me a comment or even start a new discussion in the forum.

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