Since I’ve taken the plunge and actually posted my FeedBurner subscriber badge on the site, it has motivated (more like obsessed) me to work hard at getting more subscribers. Since I’ve been watching this I’ve noticed a trend that is quite interesting. I’ve been hovering in the mid 30s for quite some time now and so last week I decided that I would try to shoot for 40 subscribers by the end of the week. I don’t know why it just seemed like a reasonable goal and something that I wanted to accomplish.
The numbers go up and down a bit and I didn’t think I would make it, but low and behold Saturday morning the number was a big shiny 40 smiling back at me. w00t! Needless to say I was very happy about that. Of course I would have no such luck in sharing this with the working world, because come Monday morning the number actually plummeted to 24. Ouch! That’s almost half.
After a bit of research I realized that the FeedBurner subscriber number is lagging a day or two behind, which makes sense because it has to calculate that number from all kinds of different sensors. So what does this tell me about my site? Well, being a techy/geek site my readership consists mainly of the Monday through Friday cubicle clones. So during the week while my readers are refreshing their feeds the number builds up for the weekend. Then nobody updates during the weekend so the number calculations head South for the Monday.
Well, I don’t know if you learned anything from this or not. But here’s a nice graph to look at. Studies show that 4 out of 5 Americans will believe anything you say if you show them a graph. 😉
