Just a few days ago, I logged into my FeedBurner account to check out more of the services they’re offering. I was wishing then that I could avail of their Paid services (because I’m not really one to actually pay for these kinds of services) but lo and behold, my wish is granted! The StatsPRO and MyBrand services of FeedBurner are now free for everyone to use.
The StatsPRO allows you to view the number of site visitors who have viewed or clicked the specific items in your feed.
What does “Reach” tell us?
Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.
Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.
Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.
Now we can see the daily number of subscribers who interacted with our feed content. I’ve activated mine and so far I’m liking what I see.
How do you activate “Reach”?
You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.
MyBrand on the other hand allows you to use a feed address that bears your domain name. So instead of using http://feeds.feedburner.com/joniang, the feed URL for this blog can be something like http://feeds.joniang.com/myfeed. But don’t try that one, that’s just an example.
With MyBrand, you can have not only the feed but all-related resources such as stats tracking, ads, stylesheets, etc. located at your own domain. I wanted to try it but apparently I have to send an e-mail to FeedBurner first to request its activation. Hmm, I can try that some other time.
Where is MyBrand located?
The MyBrand service is located under the “My Account” tab after you’ve signed in.
When I first heard the news about Google acquiring FeedBurner, I thought it didn’t matter much. But now that they made the then paid services at Feedburner free for everyone to use, then I say I hope they acquire more sites soon. Lol.
If you have a host account and you’re looking into keeping and developing your blog for long term use, then WordPress is the way to go. Why? Off the top of my head, here are things I could think of:
- Since WordPress is Open-Source, it is FREE! Just go to their website, download the latest WordPress version, and install it in your own server. But if your hosting offers the Fantastico commercial script library, then you can just perform a WordPress one-click installation from your CPanel.
- There are tons of free themes to choose from! Web Tools Collection and the Theme Viewer have awesome WordPress themes selection.
- The many, many plugins (and continuously growing in number) are free for everyone to use. Plugins are my personal favorite. They make a blog more usable, accessible, highly customizable, and of course, fun! For a long list of working plugins, I recommend the Wordpress Plugin Database.
- WordPress adheres to W3C standards for XHTML and CSS. If your blog has valid XHTML and CSS, it will most likely appear all right when viewed using different standard-compliant browsers.
- With WordPress, you have the freedom to set the categories of your posts (add / delete / edit) and there’s no limit!
- Once you’ve successfully installed Wordpress, the standard RSS and Atom configurations for feed readers or Aggregators are automatically good to go.
- WordPress has a built-in trackback or pingback feature. Trackbacks or pingbacks lets another website know that your blog has an entry that references that particular website, and vice versa (It also notifies you when another website used your blog as reference).
- WordPress has the Codex! The WordPress Codex is a comprehensive tutorial website that helps you with everything you need to know to tweak your blog. I also find myself coming back to explore the Codex once in a while when I need something or when a client requests for a specific thing to appear in his or her blog.
- WordPress is not only for “blogging”. Since it’s a CMS, it’s also useful for corporate websites that need regular website updates. You can actually modify WordPress to not appear like a blog.
- Best of all, WordPress has a large user community. When you’re part of this community, you can be sure that interaction with other bloggers is easier and faster.
I’ve been using WordPress for more than a year now and I can say that I’m very pleased with it. WordPress allows me to have full control over my website. Whatever I need or want to do, there is almost always a solution.
And here’s something exciting: Ever since I set up my personal blog with WordPress, I’ve been able to (slowly but effectively) improve it in terms of backlinks, unique visits and page views, readership (well, not really. lol) and search-engine friendliness. I’m happy that my blog has reached that certain level of “worth” some advertisers are looking for. Thanks to my blog (which is powered by WordPress) I’ve been making some moolah on the side. 
