Bloglines subscribers

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Sometime over the weekend, the number of people who subscribe to this blog using Bloglines hit 100. Now, I realize that isn’t a big total compared to some other places, however the significance of it, for me, is that is just about the same number of actual visits to the page on a daily basis. So that means there are now just about as many people reading the RSS feed of these posts just on the Bloglines service, than actually come to the page on a typical day. Based on other traffic patterns I would say there are probably just as many people using other aggregators to read the feed as actually come to the page too. So, my best guess is that 2 out of 3 people who read the posts to this blog, do not visit the site.

According to most marketers, that probably means I’m doing a crappy job, but I don’t think so. First of all, this isn’t a commercial site. While it would be nice if 300 people per day saw the Amazon links that I use to help fund a charitable donation by coming to the site, it’s not now, and won’t ever be, the main purpose of this site. When I go back and think about the reasons I started this blog, the desire to share ideas, to become part of a larger tech community because of the lack of a peer network in my workplace, the ability to both post helpful information and get good, informative feedback from readers, those things are being accomplished. I envisioned a small group of IT guys in similar situations to me, using the site to network and share resources. I never dreamed that a few hundred people would be reading every day.

Can you imagine how many of those people would read if I made them come to the site every day instead of providing a feed? Would you?

Yeah RSS keeps my traffic lower than it might otherwise be, but it allows for more feedback and more shared information, which was the point of this whole thing when I started way back. So I may not be a marketing success, but I have been more successful than I ever dreamed at doing what I set out to do, and I’m pretty happy about that. 🙂

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