Double Your RSS Readers In 24 Hours
Written By: admin Posted On: July 2, 2007 Tags:Okay, so the title is a bit deceiving. I’m talking about Feedburner’s Feedsmith plugin for Wordpress. If you don’t already have the Feedsmith plugin installed, now might be a good time to get that going.
Feedsmith redirects your blog’s automatic feed URL to Feedburner’s tracking system to give you a more accurate estimation of feed readers. If you display your reader count on your site with a chiclet, installing the plugin might be a quick way to amp up your numbers.
Since I have and always have used the Feedburner RSS URL, I doubted this would do much for me and waited for a while to install the plugin. I guess I was wrong…
So what happened?

















I’ve had this installed on my blog since I started - in its previous pre-Google incarnation. It works well…
I’ve been having issues recently though, with Google Reader subscribers vanishing without warning, only to reappear a few hours later! Something’s screwy - but I’m not sure what!
Like you, Scot, I’ve been using FeedBurner since I first realised what an RSS feed was. I haven’t made use of the plugin you mention though. I’ll give it a shot and see what happens.
Paul,
I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning that. I wonder what it is…
David,
Excited to see what your chiclet looks like tomorrow
This is good to know, I just recently started Feedburner on my blog. I’ll have to check out Feedsmith.
Haha, I tried activating the plugin, only to realise I have an older one installed from Steve Smith (lifted from his website where it no longer resides).
Good post though, prompted me to go get it (again).
I launched my blog initially without FeedBurner, so when I installed Feedsmith, I found an extra 30+ subscribers running off my direct feed.
I literally doubled too, and I love that plugin
I have Feedburner and have just installed the recommended plugin. I will see! Thank you for the info…..
I am a fan of any application that directs traffic to a central location for tracking.
[...] Are you using FeedBurner to push your RSS feed to your readers? If you’re not then this is why you should! [...]
[...] Scot Smith recently published a quick tip to increase your RSS subscriber count. [...]
I direct my feeds manually without using plugins. The only reason is that I like doing things manually which sometimes are simpler that relying on plugins which send out lots of call and might in the end make things slower or make the plugins section crammed full of things.
Hans,
That’s very clever. Would be interested in finding out how many readers the plugin by Steve reports against the numbers your system reports on the same blog.
That was a good read.
I’ll give it a try. And thanks for the comment, it was inspiring to know that someone bookmarked me.