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Will Your Blog Traffic Stop If Feedburner Disappears?
Will Your Blog Traffic Come to a Standstill if Feedburner Really Disappears?
I’ve been reading various sources for the past few weeks that Feedburner may be shutting down come October, 2012. It’s interesting to see if it really will go away. Some say it could be a tactic to get some RSS companies to get bloggers to pay for their RSS services. So should we all abandon Feedburner now or wait and see what will happen? I’d like to explore options to be ready if and when the time comes. I don’t want my blog to be feedless, do you?
Feed burner shutting down? #feedburner #podcasting geeknewscentral.com/2012/09/03/fee…
— Lawrence Snow (@lawrence_snow) September 5, 2012
For my Blogger Friends – great info on #FeedBurner & the future of it! Thx @phollows for sharing bit.ly/Qgqhp9 #Blog
— Girlfriendology (@Girlfriendology) September 4, 2012
I really love Feedburner – it’s been easy to set-up and easy to check stats. It’s a great way to follow other blogs and sign up via email or your reader. I’m not looking forward to having to change to another service. Many of the other RSS options NOT free either. Feedburner has been a great blog traffic source for me over the year.
Other RSS Options For You To Drive Blog Traffic
Some of the other options for readers to follow you via feeds include:
- Feedblitz – They offer a 30 day trial period before you must pay for this service. Your number of email subscribers determine the price you pay monthly for this feed service.
- MailChimp – MailChimp has a RSS option. This one appears to be Free and since I’ve signed up for their services (But yet to use) I may test this one out.
- WordPress Built-in Feeds – WordPress does offer some RSS built-in feeds. It will depend on which theme you have – it may or may not be compatible.
What else can you do to drive blog traffic without being stuck in a major traffic jam?
- Be sure you know who your subscribers are on Feedburner
- Keep an up to date email list
- Have your Plan B ready from the above list
- Use the Follow available on several blog formats- Networked Blogs, etc.
Getting By With The Help Of My Twitter Friends
Twitter Friends To The Rescue
The past few days part of my feed was down. It was just driving me nuts. I had emailed feedburner about it but you know how long that probably will take to receive an answer? So I received a comment on my blog yesterday that confirmed a suspicion about plug-in issues I was having since the 3.2.2 upgrade.
I was going nuts over it!
To the rescue came my Twitter friends! Have I not mentioned before how I love Twitter? It’s just the place to be to meet people with the same interests and goals as yourself. It’s a quick and easy way to have conversations, fix problems, share and have some fun along the way.
@lisapatb I set up a new account on feedburner, attached to a new gmail account, that’s set up to forward anything to my ‘original’ cont
— Jan Bierens (@JanBierens) April 26, 2012
and from there it went to here with other Twitter friends to the rescue:
@lisapatb @janbierens @mayuradesilva they always say to backup and deactivate plug insbefore upgrade. Maybe its a bad plug in?
— Bren(@PibblesNMe) April 26, 2012
And after many more discussions and an hour of time, BINGO – the issue was found!
@lisapatb Click on Feed Title > Publicize > Password Protector. Is it active? If it’s active, it might be the problem.
— Mayura De Silva (@MayuraDeSilva) April 27, 2012
You can subscribe to my feed anyway you like.
So what were all the issues that you can learn from my mistakes?
- Before you update a new upgrade on WordPress – Back up everything with the export button (you should do this all the time) It’s easy
- Before you update that new upgrade – de-activate your plug-ins and -re-activate after the upgrade
- Test everything after the upgrade – some plug-ins may not work and you may need different ones
- Different themes will work differently with the upgrades – not all themes are made the same
- Feedburner – make sure your publicize button is turned on – something so simple but yet makes a big difference
- Keep a copy handy of your feedburner URL and name so you don’t have to keep going back and forth (like I had)
