If you have a blog, do you ever feel like you are writing articles and posting them out to the world, and never quite sure if anyone is reading them? Your knowledge is being shared, but it would be nice to know it’s actually being read right? Although there is no fool proof way to know how many people are subscribed to your feed, Feedburner is a great place to start.

Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in.  You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.

The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.

Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.

From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

What does it tell you?

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.

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