FeedBurner is a tool which allows your blog’s feed to be syndicated and subscribed to more easily to your readers. It really is a fantastic tool and i’ve no doubt you will already know about the site already since so many large blogs use it.
Basically, when you sign up to feedburner, your feed url goes to an easy to read page where readers can add your feed to their chosen rss reader.
As well as tracking stats and giving you other monitoring tools, the feature most blog owners use is displaying a feedburner tool called FeedCount which displays the number of readers you have. It also acts as a link which goes to your feed page.
Here is my feedcount display (ive used the standard colors for this example) :
The count may be different when you read this post however as i write this post it currently stands at 13 readers. This is a new blog so im actually pretty pleased about having 13 already.
However it raises the question – When should you publicly display your feedcount on your blog?
Clearly, when you have 0 readers it isn’t advisable to display it. A zero count gives the impression that your site isn’t worth subscribing to. Us homosapians are shallow creatures. Sad but true. We’re much more likely to subscribe to a feed that is popular and has a lot of readers than one that doesn’t.
It’s common sense isn’t it. If hundreds of people are subscribing to a blog then the blogger clearly writes good articles and updates pretty frequently. We know a zero count doesn’t look good so at what point should you display your count.
