It looks like my traffic has more than doubled since the first week! From 5 visitors to 12 isn’t too much to get excited over though. I’ve gotten a little traffic from social media sites like Twitter and StumbleUpon, and the rest is from people typeing “Alex Mansfield” into Google (probably just other people named Alex Mansfield, there are a bunch of us). I also had my first iPhone visitor this week, which was sort of cool. Also, according to the Hubspot Website Grader, which grades website SEO/marketing effectiveness, I improved my score from 45/100 to 57/100. So to keep you up to date on what I’ve been doing with this blog, it looks like I’ll need to be writing a post on social media and link building in the near future. Good stuff.
Two Weeks
June 16, 2009
I just subscribed to your RSS feed and noticed you aren’t using Feedburner.
Any particular reason?
Feedburner is a great way of keeping track of RSS Subscriber stats.
Just something for you to consider.
Best of luck in your blogging endeavors!
😀
Actually, I just set up Feedburner the other day. However, I used a plugin to handle it on the WordPress side rather than edit the theme, since I’m not planning on keeping this theme. It seems that rather than change the link itself, it just redirects. So if you click the RSS feed link it will redirect to Feedburner. But if you just copy the link target, you get the WordPress feed. Guess I need to go in and change it in the theme. Did you use a plugin or put it straight into the theme?
I hardcoded it into the theme. It is actually not that hard and has several benefits. For example.
When I subscribe to a blog, it isn’t because they have a shiny RSS button. It’s because I like the content. I normally click on the RSS icon in the address bar. That is what I did and it doesn’t go to your feedburner page. Hardcoding it into your theme also allows many automated services to nab your feedburner RSS feed instead of your WordPress RSS feed.
So. Like I said, it isn’t hard at all to hard code your feedburner into the theme. I’m pretty sure I know what plugin you’re using. That takes care of all the links. But not that icon in the address bar. If you add this:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS Feed” href=”YOUR FEEDBURNER URL” />
to the <head> and remove the old, then you’ll be covered.
Perfect. Thanks. I’ll add that to my post on setting up Feedburner, if you don’t mind.