As most of you are aware, Feedburner has two separate metrics by which they measure your feed — total subscribers and reach. The subscribers number shows the estimated number of subscriptions. The only real concrete number you have there is your email subscribers, but even then those subscribers could be filtering your messages to a junk folder or simply deleting it without reading. The real RSS metric is the reach of the blog.
The blog’s RSS feed reach tells how many of your subscribers actually took a look at the feed and what posts they read. You might have 35 subscribers who read the latest post, with 10 or so reading the previous post. What if you had 130 subscribers? That’s about a quarter of your possible reach. How could you possibly increase that reach?
How did you obtain your subscribers in the first place? Did you run a contest or were they all organic additions? If you ran a contest to gain subscribers, then the subscriber may have used a secondary email or filtered the feed out in their email software. It could be advantageous to contact your email subscribers one-by-one to create a dialog. This would help gauge their interest in your content. If you run a photography blog, then inquire about their needs. Find out what makes them tick. Do they need support on their particular digital camera model, photo development tricks, or software enhancements? Once you create that dialog with them, they’ll be more likely to interact with your content in the future.
All email subscribers are listed in your Feedburner account. You just have to dig a little to find them. Go to the Analyze tab –> Subscribers under the Feed Stats (on left) –> Scroll down to Email Subscription Services –> Click on it then open the link to Manage your Email Subscriber List. From here you can see every email subscriber in Feedburner, including their email’s status, like whether they’ve verified their subscription or not.
While I don’t condone using these emails to spam a copied letter, I do think it would be fine to send them one email asking them if they’ve returned to your site in a while, what they think of the content, how you could improve the content, and possibly if they remember how they found the site. Realistically most won’t respond, but many might. Those that do can help you improve your brand. I would only send one email though…don’t force the issue if they do not respond.
RSS Reader Subscribers
To increase the reach of those RSS subscriber readers who use a feed reader rather than emailed updates, the solution becomes much more difficult. The reach really is dependent on whether they check their RSS reader software or not. Once you have them open your feed, you need to keep them interested, so they survey all the information. I would also include branding logos inside the feed, which Feedburner allows, as well as a footer message to encourage their interaction with your site. I’ve seen this done quite artfully in the past. A little personal message enticing them to check out your new feature or site design can do the trick. At this point though, you’ve already accomplished what you set out to do — increase your reach.
Aside from stepping into someone’s office and pulling up their Google reader to your feed, there’s not much a blogger can do. We can make our content stand out a little from the other feeds in our readers, write quality content, and ask for feedback at regular intervals. Most of all we need to keep at writing content and the challenges that our blog presents.
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Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
Great Article. I always wondered what the significance of the “Reach” stats were. I’m going to reach out to my subscribers and see how it plays out.
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