Frederick Giasson’s Weblog

Today I receive an email from Max. He ask me my opinion about an idea he had while reading my recent posts on feeds. There is the idea he shared with’ me in his email message:

Lately you’re writing good stuff about RSS feeds and their capabilities. So, I decided to express to you an idea I had about it. […] I’d like to know your opinion. […]

Some days ago I wrote that I don’t care if someone read my blog via browser, feed or whatsoever. Well, I changed my mind: RSS readers are special. They’re not casual readers; they decide to subscribe your site because they want to follow it. So, why don’t give ‘em more? This could be a way to promote RSS feeds use. […]

Here’s my idea: why don’t add to ordinary blog feeds another one, as a supplement? Many newspapers have a Sunday supplement, or similar. After all, a weblog is a kind of newspaper, for some aspects. The supplement should be strictly related to the blog, but not necessarily with the same arguments. It could be a monothematic dissertation, or simply something you don’t want to publish on the blog because not coherent enough.

The following could be the main goals of this concept:

****Only supplement feed subscribers could read those extra contents. –> Promotion of RSS feeds use, special treatment to those. ****

****Extra feed subscribers could be invited to contribute to this “magazine” via email or maybe by co-author account –> Interaction. ****

Technically I think it’s easy to do: just open a new blog, modify the template to not show the posts, then publish, promote the extra-feed, and it’s done.

Do you know if somebody has already done this?

Anyway, let me know what you think about it […]

Many interesting ideas are presents in this email. This (new?) idea is, at my sense, a really good way to promote your feed. Personally I think that feeds are more important then blogs. Why? Because they create the more direct link between you and your readers. In this sense, it’s always a good idea to promote it. This added value to your feed will certainly help to insist your blog’s visitors to subscribe to it. But there are two rules that you need to take into account: (1) you need to promote the fact that there are an added value to your feed’s content and (2) you need to basically have a good content to make this added value a real one at the eyes of your readers.

This said, I have an interrogation about this idea. As beautiful as it is, there is no archive of this feed only content. The added content will only be archived by your readers and possibly online services like Bloglines and NewsGator. It’s why blogs are interesting: everyone(thing) can keep an archive of it; Google cache, MSNSeach cache, etc, etc, etc. This is not a real problem in itself; it’s more a personal question that the bloggers will need to ask to him: do I need to put a part of the content I create available to only some subscribed readers or to all the Internet users? Depending of your goals you’ll answer differently to this question and finally find the whole idea more or less interesting.

There would be some technical problems to create such a feed, especially if you are using services like Radio, MovableType, Blogger, MSNSpaces, etc. The idea is to aggregate new content to existing feeds when users request the feed’s new posts. The only service I know that do this sort of thing is Feedburner. They give you the possibility to add things to you feed’s content. By example, they give you the opportunity to add a Del.icio.us feed to your blog’s feed. If you would like to implement this idea you’ll need to create such a service. This is not really complicated in itself but its works and times.

Finally, depending of your goals, you’ll find this idea really interesting or just another way to market your feed. The idea is really good; the only question is how it can be useful in your case.

Technoratie: [marketing] [feed] [rss] [promote] [idea]

All bloggers need to know who are reading them and where are they come from. Personally I’m checking my logs between 4 to 6 times a day. It’s a sort of compulsion, it’s a reward. But it’s more than this. It can be a way to discover who is linking to you, who discuss of your blog or posts. These traffic logs are a really interesting and useful to analysis. It can help you to upgrade your blog; to know who your readers are and what they are reading on your blog. You can track their movement through your posts, over time. Now how can you archive this?

Personally I’m using statcounter.com. This is the best, free, web traffic logging service I found. How it work? It’s easy. You sing-up for an account and after you can add many projects to this account. Then, if you have 2 or 3 blogs, you can have one account with one entry for each of them. Statcounter is basically a free system. You have a permanent counter of you page views, unique and returning visitors, with a related graph graduated by days, months or years. With this graph you can see the evolution of your blog, see peaks when you published a popular article, etc. There is the graph of my traffic since the first days of this blog:

With the free service you also have a traffic log of the 100 last visits of your project. It’s the must useful part of the service. With this information, you know the time, the OS and the browser used by your readers. You also know the resolution of their screens, the country they came from and, the most important, the pages they visit and the pages they come from. If you wish, you can pay to upgrade the length of this detailed log. Personally I don’t have the funds to pay for this and, for the moment, the 100 entries free log is enough for me. But if I would get more hits, I would consider the possibility to upgrade my account. What I personally appreciate with this service that other don’t give is the returning visitor counter. With this one, you know how many people, each day, are returning to your blog. There is a snippet of what look like the detailed log:

Many statistics are computed by the system with the detailed log:

With these statistics you can know everything about your readers. The path they took through your blog, the things they read, the time they spend, your popular pages, etc, etc. It’s most then important to know these things. It will give you the knowledge of what your readers are interested in without them saying it to you. Then it gives you hints of what to change on your blog to enhance the experience of your visitors.

There are two other things that I really like with the service. The first one is the possibility to put your IP address on the ban list. Then your visits will not be logged in the system. Is that not beautiful? Yes it is! The second thing is that you can show or hide the counter on your blog. If you wish, it can be totally invisible to your readers. It’s the first free system I saw that give you this opportunity.

Finally this system was not created for blog; it was for general purpose websites. But all his features are perfect to track the traffic post by post. For all his features, his statistics and his price I make him the best blog traffic tracking system I found.

Technoratie: [blog] [profiling] [analysis] [traffic] [statcounter]