Getting to know your readers through FeedBurner

Dear Friend,

As some of you might have noticed, recently I have a new feed - courtesy of Feedburner - from my sidebar that says: Subscribe in a reader. To be honest with you, I didn't see the purpose of having yet another feed, besides the default one we all have from Blogger (mine is http://hoctro.blogpost.com/feeds/posts/default .) But a recent feature from FeedBurner makes it all worthwhile. Feedburner now allows you to see who is coming to your site, what are they interested in reading, so on and so forth.

To start with, you need to go to their site:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home

Next, register an account with FeedBurner by clicking on the "Register" at the top right of its homepage:



Once you're done with registration, you'll be greeted with the Dashboard. Next, you need to enter your blog address in the box, and follow the instructions.



This is my dashboard's look at the moment, after Hoctro's Place is added:



After clicking on your feed's title, the "Analyze" tab is opened. Next, click on "Standard Stats", under "Services" on the left sidebar. The Standard Stats settings appear. In the "Choose One" dropdown, select Blogger:



A tutorial opens in a new popup window, you need to follow exactly what it says:



Essentially, what you have to do is to embed a piece of javascript code to your template, under the Blog widget, so FeedBurner could collect data on your blog.

Once you successfully embedded the code, leave it there for a couple of days, and you'll be able to see collected data later in a nice and easy-to-understand manner, through the newly added "Site stats" submenu. For example, from the Dashboard option, I know how many people visit my blog today, and what are the most popular posts:



There's a lot more in store, so if you have time, then register and see for yourself. You'll be amazed at the wealth of information FeedBurner could offer.

Have a wonderful day,

Hoctro