Are your feed counts, hits and visits, and other performance statistics wilting in the dog days of August?
Did your subscriber growth rate hit a wall — oh, say, about a month or two ago?
Chill — it’s not just you.
One of my blogging peers emailed me last month complaining about a “glass ceiling” he felt like he’d hit — his subscriber list was growing strong all through the Spring, and then… [?] Now that he’d mentioned it, I was seeing the same plateau…
Then a third and a fourth colleague emailed me, wondering:
“What am I doing wrong? What happened? Where’d everybody go?”
Last week Chris Garrett wrote about the Summer Slump, and I had a “Doh!” moment — this is a known phenomenon that affects a lot of industries — people are taking their end of the summer vacations, Back to School is just around the corner…
If you check your feed subscriber counts every day like I do, then you know there are normal ups and downs all the time — a lot of the downs occurring on the weekends.
A quick diagnosis:
- Are you actually losing subscribers? As in, “unsubscribe” notifications?
- Are you posting less frequently — or less consistently?
- Have you perhaps strayed too far from your content focus?
If not, then you’re probably just witnessing the normal Summer Slump ChrisG wrote about.
Feedburner Feed Count Reporting Problems
Last week, PageCoach | Spiritual Blogging feed was also the “victim” of a 24 hour glitch in Feedburner’s database. (Check out last Thursday in the screenshot above… You can’t miss it!) This happened to a lot of people, but seemingly at random — I got up last Thursday morning and discovered ALL my email subscribers were … GONE!
[Panic!]
I’ve survived similar Feedburner statistical reporting errors a few times in the last year. (One of the reasons I’m not so keen on displaying their feed count chicklet — but certainly not the number one reason…)
If you experience a Feedburner glitch, don’t freak out!
In my experience, these glitches tend to work themselves out within the next 24 hour reporting cycle. Even though it looks like you have no email subscribers, if you go in through the “publicize” tab and check your email management screens, the list is still there — just not showing up in your summary totals.
- Some publishers reported email delivery time-frame delays.
- The articles I posted during this period were still successfully delivered to all email subscribers.
The next day the numbers were back to normal, but you can still see where the “hole” occurred in the above screenshot of the feed subscriber count for Spiritual Blogging — like a hateful gap-toothed grin…
Back to School
But maybe you have hit a bit of a wall, or maybe you’re been blogging for six months or a year and you’re ready to pump up the volume and build your blog subscriber list.
At the end of this week, I’m releasing a new “intermediate” level problogging tutorial called Build Your Blog Subscriber List. I think it’s my best so far, written in the same confessional “behind-the-screens” voice as my free report on The Top 5 Ways My Blogs Make Money. It’s shaping up to be 58 pages of my list building strategies and “secrets” — and best of all — it’s priced at under $40.
I’m really psyched about this new How-To — it’s comparable to six months worth of blogging at the rate I currently post new articles here … Stay tuned!
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
