They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, I wonder how much a video is worth? It’s neat timing that Gary posted about RSS just as I was looking to do the same thing. Since he beat me to it, I figure I will try to one up him with this video that explains RSS in plain English.
As hard it maybe to believe, a large percentage of blog readers do not know what RSS is. If you can educated these readers to the advantages of using RSS, you stand a much greater chance of getting them to subscribe and increasing your RSS count. This video does a great job at that. As a matter of fact, I may add a “What is RSS?” link under my RSS button and link to this post. There’s another idea to increase RSS subscription.
Why The RSS Subscription Number Changes Everyday
Every wonder why the RSS number changes everyday? Yesterday, the number was 9,135 and today it’s 8,863. Have that many people subscribed and then unsubscribed to the blog in one day? The answer is no.
The FeedBurner chicklet represents the number of people who read your blog with some kind of RSS reader in a 24 hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators (including RSS by Email) that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access the feed.
The number goes up and down because not everyone checks their RSS readers on a daily basis. The number generally goes down on weekends because people are out shopping/playing/doing whatever instead of being on the computer. A decrease in the number does not mean readers have unsubscribed from your feed. It just mean not as many readers accessed the feed that day.
In order for me to win this RSS competition with Shoemoney, not only do I need to get new readers to subscribe to my feed, I need them to check the feed everyday in order for them to be counted. I can get 100,000 people to subscribe to my feed but if those people don’t check the feed again within a 24 hour period, the feed counter goes to zero.
Now that you know how to counter works, please check my feed everyday! 😈