There’s a post by Maki on Dosh Dosh that’s starting a new blog meme regarding feed counts. The ultimate purpose of the meme is to conduct a study of the effects of revealing feed counts on blogs by way of the FeedBurner subscriber count chicklet. I’m finding this whole idea very interesting and I have to thank Adnan at Blogtrepreneur for not only pointing me to Dosh Dosh, but encouraging me to show off my subscriber count in the first place.

FreshBlogger really isn’t that old, but has grown at a steady pace during the seven months or so it’s been around. Yes, there are older posts imported from my Blogger blog, but this domain doesn’t go back that far. Anyway, I’ve had the FeedBurner chicklet up since shortly after a conversation with Adnan about whether to display it or not. At the time, there were fewer than a hundred subscribers and I thought that revealing this fact might have a negative impact on overall credibility of the blog.

Adnan, on the other hand, thought it might encourage visitors to subscribe if they saw it. Needless to say, his argument won out and appears to be accurate. The number of subscribers had been growing slowly for the first few months of this blog’s existence, but with the subscriber count displayed, this number started going up a little more quickly. According to FeedBurner’s statistics, there were 807 subscribers to FreshBlogger as of yesterday.

You can see in the graphic that the number of subscribers jumped at one point from around 180 to well over 700. It had been hovering at the lower number and growing by a few subscribers a week for a while. I’ve posted on this jump before and I still believe that the numbers may be somewhat inflated, but for the sake of this article, I would tend to agree that having the chicklet displayed does tend to encourage visitors to subscribe. If nothing else, it may remind them that they can subscribe.

Maki is of the opinion that readers should subscribe because of the content and not because of the perceived popularity of the blog. I can understand this sentiment, but I think most readers wouldn’t subscribe to a blog just because it’s popular or has a high subscriber count displayed. While popularity does tend to boost the general sense of a blog’s authority, the content and regularity of posting are the most important factors determining whether I’ll subscribe to a feed. I believe most blog visitors apply a similar criteria.

Towards the end of the article, Maki includes three questions:

How long did it take you to reach the current feed count? Was the growth gradual? Any notable external factors?

I’ve discussed this above and also in an earlier post that I link to.

Apart from displaying subscription buttons, what other ways (if any) do you use to encourage your readers to subscribe to your blog feed?

Other than displaying the FeedBurner chicklet and the email subscription box, I haven’t done anything special to encourage readers to subscribe.

In your opinion, what is the most effective way to increase your feed subscription?

The best way to increase feed subscriptions is to provide good, valuable content and do it on a consistent basis. That will get visitors to subscribe, but good basic SEO and traffic building techniques will get them to visit in the first place.

This is really a great issue for discussion. Thanks go out to Maki at Dosh Dosh for writing the post and starting the new FeedBurner chicklet blog meme.

I’m going to tag:

Adnan at Blogtrepreneur

Others may be added later because my internet seems to be puking…