Creating Better Content for Better Blog Traffic with FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a service, now owned by Google, that can help you study the blog traffic you get through your RSS feed. The insight you get from studying your statistics can help you better focus your content for your direct-to-blog visitors as well. In the past, I've written about how to increase your blog traffic with FeedBurner, but today, I thought I'd show you the indirect route to better traffic.

Which is, of course, writing better content.

If you haven't already,you'll want to create an account at FeedBurner, "burn" your feed, and wait at least seven days so that you'll have seven days worth of statistics to study.

The basic statistics are free,

Next, go to the default tab in your FeedBurner account, "Analyze". What we're going to do is pick a snapshot of time to study, normally the past 7 days or the past 20 days.

(The option for one day doesn't give enough data on its own for this type of study, and the option to show all the data available may not give the best results for a blog with varying levels of popularity.)

Once you've chosen the amount of time you're going to study, update the display to show you that time period. Next to the text "Feed Stats Dashboard", you'll see a drop down box that will allow you to change to the view for the last 7 days or the last 30 days. There should now be a graph directly under the "Feed Stats Dashboard" header.

Now that you've chosen a period of time to study, here's what we're looking for from the sample we're about to poll.

1- Which were the most popular blog posts?

2- Do they share a common thread?

3- Which were the least popular?

4- What blog posts had the most click thrus?

5- Are your posts being referenced by Google Blog Search or other outside sources? If so, is there a common theme?

Going back to the same page we were on, after the display updates to show you the data for the last 7 or 30 days, you'll see a heading called "Popular Feed Items". To find out the answers to the first four questions, follow the link on the same page marked "See more about your feed items ".

This takes you to a page which displays your most popular feed items and how often they were accessed. If you have the Total Stats upgrade, you can also see views and downloads. Click each item to see additional information.

Whether you have the pro version or not, studying the numbers of clicks through to the original item on your blog can give you a rough idea of which posts your readers are most interested in. Though the study is not absolute, by looking at the titles, you can estimate which are the ten most popular posts of the study.

If they have something in common, maybe your visitors are voting for some of your content over others with their attention. It's not an absolute, and you can only be sure by polling them, but it does give you an idea.

Just as importantly, you can see the kind of items that your readers tend to skip over. If you're reporting too much news, or doing too many lists, it may be evident from the position of the content on the page.

For the last part of this exercise, look on the left side of the page, under the header Feed Stats for the heading Uncommon Uses. Click on it to see how your content is being syndicated. One thing you may want to study is how your content is being found in Google Blog Search.

If you click the heading for the blogsearch.google.com line, you'll see the individual search strings that lead to your blog. When hovering over them, you may catch the keywords the link corresponds to, and by clicking on them, you can see how your site fares. You may see the same for Technorati.

FeedBurner gives you dozens of ways to analyze, optimize, publicize, or even monetize your content feed. Knowing how to study this information and what it means can help you write better content, which will mean more repeat visitors, and more new visitors who will want to subscribe.

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