An unexpected effect of blog subscribers
blogging June 14th. 2008, 1:46pm
Why is this man reacting in horror?
It’s because he’s learning that growing your blog subscribers can have a surprising effect!
And what is that effect?
Why does it happen?
Put simply, having more subscribers can decrease your blog’s page views (or hits). In fact, I’m seeing that effect to a certain extent here at Broadcasting Brain.
Many bloggers can tell you why this happens, but it can come as a surprise to those of us who are less experienced. In fact, it seems counterintuitive, but there can be a logical explanation.
For those of us who use Google Analytics, we know that it tracks three main sources of traffic sources (ways that people come to visit your blog):
Direct traffic - people who access your site through a browser bookmark or by typing in your blog’s URL.
Referring sites - people who click a link on someone else’s blog, website, or document to get to your blog
Search engines - people who click on your blog’s link in search engine results pages
However, none of these methods takes RSS publishing into account. The RSS feeds from your blog are available to be read by anyone using one of the popular RSS feed readers, including Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, and dozens of others. When someone subscribes to your blog, they can read most, perhaps all of your blog content through the reader, with the exception of your blog comments.
Subscribers are a wonderful thing. They are a vote of approval for your blog in general. I love them. My subscriber count has tripled during the past four months and I’m very proud of that.
There’s one little drawback of subscribers, though. Subscribers don’t always count as traffic on your blog.
Why is that? It’s because passive RSS activity (e.g. reading your blog post) doesn’t count as traffic. The only way it counts as traffic is if a subscriber actually clicks through to your blog instead of staying in the reader.
So, if your page views are decreasing while your subscriber counts are increasing, this can be both a good and a bad symptom.
Good, because you are converting people from being casual readers to subscribers. This is great!
Bad, because you might not be growing your readership beyond your subscriber list. This may indicate a need to do more advertising and promotion to get new eyeballs seeing your stuff.
In my case, my views are down for two primary reasons, or so I think:
1) Casual readers converting to subscribers.
2) Less referral traffic. My single largest source of views is StumbleUpon traffic. I used to try to promote my blog quite a bit through StumbleUpon, which has delivered some pretty good traffic to this blog. I’m not doing that so much anymore, referring instead on more organic promotion and growth. I don’t tend to promote the blog very much outside of Twitter and FriendFeed these days, so I’ve seen traffic drop.
However, this drop doesn’t bother me very much. You know why?
Because a lot of StumbleUpon or other social media traffic is transient and less likely to provide return visits. You get a lot of curiosity visits or, in some cases, random visits generated by StumbleUpon, but in a lot of cases most of my content doesn’t “stick” with a lot of StumbleUpon users. And that’s OK, I understand that.
It’s easy to put too much importance on stats, especially an a blog that’s not monetized, but it’s still worth checking.
So, views are down, but I’m not too worried about it. I know why it’s down (or at least I think I do) and that’s fine with me. Knowledge is power.
Hopefully this short article was useful to you.
Table of contents for Novice Social Media Tips
- An unexpected effect of blog subscribers
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On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 3 people and commented on 2 times hide-
And with patience, FriendFeed subscribers will become a source of new subscribers and traffic. And FriendFeed traffic will ultimately result in more direct site page views.
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So far FriendFeed bean berry good to me.
June 14th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Congrats on increasing your subscriber count! Increased subscribers reach a tipping point where it is your subscribers who are submitting your posts to social media. Increased subscribers also help increase… subscribers! Social proof, it’s called. People see a high subscriber count and they want in. Subscribers are more likely to link to you, which will have an effect on referral traffic.
So, overall, a higher subscriber count is one metric to pay attention to, much more so than page views.
Check out Why the Bleeding Edge of Social Media is Important for Tech Bloggers from Michael Martine | Remarkablogger
June 14th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
@Micheal - exactamundo, as the Fonz would say. Although I used to publish my subscriber count, I stopped doing it for awhile. I decided to wait until I was firmly above 200 subscribers before I went public again. I figured that 200 subs. was an adequate sign of social proof so back out the number came. And, fortunately, it continues to trend upward.
June 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I waited until it was over 500, but to each his own. Having it at less than 100 can act in a negative fashion and convince people you’re not worth it. Yes, it’s shallow, but people make snap judgments like that all the time.
One interesting phenomenon is that if everything else about the blog is rockin’ people will often assume a much higher subscriber count than what actually exists if they don’t see any numbers. In no way am I saying anybody should take down their subscriber count, but it’s food for thought.
Check out Why the Bleeding Edge of Social Media is Important for Tech Bloggers from Michael Martine | Remarkablogger
June 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
@Michael - yes, there are some pretty high profile bloggers who’ve kept their numbers secret.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I look forward to one day having subscriber problems. I am not there yet.
June 15th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
@Kudzu - it can happen!