When I left b5media, I had established a base of over 1300 feed subscribers on this blog. I was proud of that because, let’s face it, if you aren’t a news site breaking news all the time, people are not as inclined to subscribe to a feed.
The feed at that time was hosted via FeedBurner with whom the network had an enterprise account with. As a member blog of b5media, and one of the folks that tested and pushed FeedBurner on the network, my blog was one of the first hosted under their CNAME policy. The CNAME policy allowed us to brand feeds with b5media (http://feeds.b5media.com as opposed to http://feeds.feedburner.com).
Obviously, I had some branding concerns to deal with and I contacted FeedBurner for a solution that would allow me to take control of my feed and retain the subscriber base I had established over a period of time.
FB: Simple. We can transfer it under your Feedburner account if you’d like
Me: Yeah, let’s do that.
FB: Oh wait, your feed is under the Feedburner Ad Network and so because of financial logistics involved with b5media owning that feed URI, we cannot transfer it. But, you can burn a new feed, delete the old and use 30 day redirection to send people to the new feed.
Me: Okay, that makes sense.
And off I went. I burned the new feed, deleted the old with redirection, and looked at numbers over the next few days. My feed subscribers had dropped to almost a third of what they were (down to about 400 subscribers).
By the time I realized that I had been nipped in the bud by the CNAME issue, it was too late and all those subscribers were gone with no way to communicate to them about re-subscription.
Over the past 3 months, I have rebuilt to around 850 - still a large distance from where I was, but slowly getting there. If you haven’t re-subscribed yet, please do so now.
Takeaways
Feeds are our bread and butter in blogging. Knowing that there are people subscribed to a blog, provides direct value to bloggers. It helps us understand the dissemination of our content and the reach of our audience. We value page-views, obviously, but feed subscriptions may be the most tangible metric of actual reach available.
When you find a blogger that you enjoy, vote with your feet (or clicking finger) and add their blog to Google Reader or one of the other many feed readers (most of which are free). We really do appreciate it. It makes us feel that the work we’re putting in is actually making a difference.
Other feeds that we provide:
- Aaron Brazell
- Venture Files (Entrepreneurship)
- Wicked Marketing (Web Marketing)
- SuitCase (Tech Policy)
- Contenido Español (Spanish)
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
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FYI, I was subscribed to Technosailor using IE7 feeds before you made the transition with b5 and the feed stayed live, same in reverse, it now shows technosailor.feedburner.
Nothing changed on my end.
Keep up the great work.
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not so much. Also if people subscribed to the default WP theme it redirected
to the new feed when I made the switch. But those who subscribed to the
Feedburner feed seemed to have been left out in the cold when it went away.
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If this is older, I'm still sorry, but wanted to chime in that my subscription is good as well :)
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Klau and the light bulb went off in both our heads at the same time around
CNAMEing.
It is what it is. The numbers are coming back, but I'm still about 25% off
of what I was.
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