When you are measuring what you are doing on any public platform, blog, podcast, or other process, the inclusion of your RSS statistics are an important addition to any statistics you are keeping. Here is an example of what I see here at Techwag.

The full on Feedburner stats for all time (going back two years) shows a good steady progressive growth in both readers and reach. The overall full time statistics shows that for every person who visits the blog in a day, I will get two people coming via RSS feeds.

This is the full on stats for Techwag for visitors to the blog over the last year. When used in conjunction with the RSS feed stats, that 2 for 1 number of RSS readers over actual visitors to the site comes into play.

When dealing with numbers and statistics, the number of readers you have is important if you are looking for sponsorships, or if you are looking to increase your online presence. Numbers matter, in that the more people who come and visit your blog or your web site means the more reach you have and the better ability you have of extending your presence in the online world. While my numbers are good, they are roughly average for a tier three blog, in that I am not the most popular person in the world, but have the potential through Google Adsense or other online advertising programs to make enough money to pay for hosting costs for the month.

These numbers though, the ability to say I reach some 10 to 16 thousand people a month via the blog and RSS feed means that I could actively looking for a sponsor of the web site. While I will not make a lot of money from a sponsor right now given the depressed market for advertising and sponsorship, this is still a good number to start with. That is something that will draw people’s attention, and depending on what you are asking for in terms of price, say 10 cents or even 1 cent per visitor or impression, this is a start to getting the traffic numbers you need for sponsorships, or increasing your advertising revenue. Realistically though, Adsense will never pay much, but sponsorships are a better avenue if you have the traffic numbers to support actively gaining a sponsor for your web site.

RSS feeds are an important component to how your blog works, and you might be surprised how many people are coming to your content by methods other than directly visiting the site you are making content. The problem of tracking both RSS, site visits, and then rolling them up into a coherent package for potential sponsors means you have to have the ability to track all the ways that people consume your content.

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