Subscribers dropped in Feedburner? Fear not, it's not you!

If you have noticed the last couple of days that your number of RSS subscribers in Feedburner has dropped below the usual weekend drop-off, it's not you! Don't worry! Cancel the panic! Your readers have not abandoned you!

Take a deep breath and look at your detailed statistics in Feedburner. There you will notice that Bloglines is reporting ZERO readers instead of your usual number of subscribers. If you factor in your typical Bloglines reader-count, you will see that your total subscriber-count is back to where you would expect it to be :-)

Tip #11: Add a SiteMap to the Google Webmaster Tool for Blogger blogs using Feedburner

This tip is for people who use Feedburner to burn their feeds, Blogger to write their blogs, and Google's Webmaster Tool to check up on their blog's health and status in the Google Search engine.


The Setup
It is common for Blogger users to submit their RSS.xml (or atom) file as a Site Map on Google's Webmaster tool. This works just fine, but when you use Feedburner to burn your feed, and you redirect Blogger's feed to point to Feedburner, then this approach stops working as a SiteMap option for the Google Webmaster tool.


The Solution
Step #1: Logon to the Google Webmaster tool and under Sitemaps, delete the existing rss.xml sitemap

Step #2: After it is deleted, select "Add a Sitemap" as usual, and instead of typing rss.xml, you type rss.xml?redirect=false. This allows the Google Webmaster Tool to access your original Blogger feed, before it gets processed by Feedburner.

Step #3: Follow the usual steps and you are done!


The "feeds/posts/default" approach won't work
Please note that some websites and blogs suggest that you use "feeds/posts/default". This won't work because the Google Webmaster Tool wants you to submit a file at the highest directory level. It will not let you enter this. So if you've already tried this and it didn't work, it's not you, it simply doesn't work :) Instead try the redirect=false approach and you will be fine!

Tip #7: BuzzBoost your blog, use the Blog Post Footer Luke

One of the comments found on blogs about blogging is that it might be a good idea to showcase some of your content at the end of a post, especially on individual post pages. The idea is that you want the reader to stay on your blog and discover more of your stories. This is particularly useful when a reader arrives to an individual post-page of your blog instead of the front page, and they may not be familiar with your blog. Having a few pointers at the end of the post may help the reader become more familiar with your stuff.

There are many ways to do this. You can create a list of links and put it in the footer using HTML. For example, the best of blog. You can also use scripts to find revelant posts, especially if you are on a blogging platform that is plug-in friendly. You can also put RSS feeds there, or use one of the RSS-to-Javascript services to post it right there.

But what caught my attention as an attention grabbing way to do this is using the BuzzBooster feature of Feedburner. For the purposes of this post I am assuming you are familiar with Feedburner. If not, please google it out, and pick it up from this sentence onwards :)

What's the benefit?
BuzzBoost allows you to present your feed as HTML. You can use this to promote your recent posts on your own blog or on some of our other blogs or even on some of your friends and partners blogs. BuzzBoost allows you a lot of flexibility. You can publish it as a list of posts, or a list of posts with a few words from each post, or even display the full feed. You can also add a link for people to subscribe to your feed which is always nice. You can also choose how many of your latest posts to feature, as few as 1 and as many as all. "All" being either "all" or the maximum your blog allows you to publish in a feed (eg Blogger has a limit of 25 but there is a workaround if you use "max-results=...").

Activating and Configuring BuzzBoost
To get to BuzzBoost, logon to your Feedburner account, then click on "Publicize" and then look in the left column for BuzzBoost. Click on that and you will find yourself on the BuzzBoost configuration page. By default this service is inactive, so you have to configure it and activate it. There are a number of customizations you can make as per that page. Don't be afraid to try them out and see how they look on your blog.

There is one downside however, the code is generated as a script whose configuration is stored on Feedburner, not the script/HTML on your blog. So can only you have one configuration per feed. This limitation is a bit disappointing because you could have created different types of BuzzBoosts depending on where your Feed-to-HTML is appearing.

Possible Configurations and Uses for your BuzzBoost

Promote your recent posts in a column of your own blog by only displaying a list of post titles

Promote your blog on one of your other blogs, or a friend's blog by displaying a list of titles and a few words per post.

Promote your feed at the end of your individual-page post. Here you can publish the entire feed since the page is much likely to be shorter compared to your columns. This has great potential. The reader has just finished reading or skimming the article and they are paging or scrolling down. If all they see is blank space in the middle of the page they may disappear. But if you post your latest posts, nicely done BuzzBoost style, the reader may start exploring more of your blog. You may gain a new regular reader with this! I know it may sound counterintuitive at first, but try it out and see how it looks both to your and to your readers!

Update
Please note that in some blogs such as Blogger there is a difference between the blog footer and the blog post footer.