Saturday, June 20th, 2009
There’s a new service from the guys over at StumbleUpon that acts as a Twitter update client, a stat counter, a URL shorter and more all rolled into one. I’ve been using it for a couple days now, and it’s pretty cool. It’s still in private beta at the moment, but they post invite codes fairly often on their Twitter feed. It was developed with input from Tim Ferris of “The Four Hour Work Week” fame and it promises to take care of many of the issues that come with promoting your blog on Twitter. According to StumbleUpon, it is a…
…brand new short url service designed to drive more traffic to your site. Su.pr provides real time analytics for all of your generated links as well as the ability to post your Su.pr links to other social media services such as twitter and facebook.
Not only does it count how many clicks you recieve from Twitter, but also from StumbleUpon itself, which is handy. It keeps track of when you posted and how many clicks you recieved, so over time it can suggest when the most profitable time to tweet would be. What? You’ll be away from your computer at the most profitable tweeting time? No problem. Just schedule your tweet for later. Here’s a screenshot.
On the URL shortening side, the best features are still in the pipeline. The plan is to allow blog owners to use their own domain name rather than su.pr domain in the shortened URLs. They’re also going to allow site owners specify if they want a 301 redirect for SEO purposes.
All sorts of interesting things are happening with this application at the moment, so you might want to check it out.
Monday, June 15th, 2009
So to be honest, I don’t know the real advantages to using Feedburner to distribute your RSS feeds, but I’m about to find out. I know quite a few major Care to learn with me? I’m going to sign up for a Feedburner account, set it up, play around with it, and if I don’t see the benefits, I’ll go do some more research.
1. Claim your feed
Go to feedburner.com and sign in using your Google account. If you don’t have one, go ahead and get one (it’s free!). Type in your blog or feed address and hit next.
If you have a seperate feed for your comments, Feedburner will ask you which feed is your source. Choose your regular feed (not your comments feed) and continue. Next you’ll have the opportunity to change your feed title and feed address.
Make some changes if the defaults don’t suit you, then click next.
Record your new feed link. You’ll need it a little later on.
2. Feed stats
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. It looks like Feedburner is analytics for you RSS feeds. According to their website, they track:
- Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
- Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
- Clickthrough tracking
- Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
- Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
- Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone
They track a number of things by default, but give the option to enable additional tracking points. I’ve checked all the additional points (all two that is) except the one that involves podcasting, since I’m not doing any of that at the moment.
3. Integrate with Wordpress
Finally, they even offer a Wordpress plugin for easy integration.
Clicking the link will take you to a page with instructions for installing the plugin. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings>Feedburner and enter the feed URL that you recorded in step one and click Save.
4. Test it out
Alright, now that everything is set up, go visit your blog and click your RSS link. It should send you to your brand new Feedburner RSS feed. You can also visit Feedburner and login with your Google account to view your stats.
So it looks like the advantage to using Feedburner is that you can track your RSS subscribers. That’s definitely an essential part of understanding your traffic. I already use Google Analytics to track my website traffic (and I’ll write about that in the future) and now I’m glad I have Feedburner keeping track of my subscribers.
Do you use something other than Feedburner to publish your RSS feeds? Tell us a little about what you use and why in the comments below. Thanks!
