I recently joined two great services that are very useful to bloggers -- FeedBurner and BlogSnob. I'm a little late to the party on both, but better late than never.
FeedBurner solves the problem of figuring out how many people are reading your site via RSS. It allows you to seamlessly route your RSS feed(s) through FeedBurner and provides detailed traffic reporting. (At least I hope it's been seamless for those of you who are syndicating this site. Let me know if that hasn't been the case.) And of course it's free.
BlogSnob is sort of P2P advertising for blogs. It's similar to Google's AdWords in that it allows you to create advertising campaigns specific to a topic. In BlogSnob's case the topics are categories ('Business & Finance', 'Technology'..) as opposed to AdWords' keywords. Instead of bidding for ad placement, members of the network earn credits for displaying ads from the network. The more credits you get the more often your own ad(s) get displayed on other blogs. I just signed up this morning and have already found a coupe of interesting blogs via the ads appearing on my site.
And finally, a few people have asked me about the bump in traffic I'm experiencing since the Barron's mention. As has always been the case, you can see my traffic by clicking the site meter at the bottom of my pages (where the number of visitors is displayed). Just for kicks, here's snapshot of my daily traffic for the last month:
Nice uptrend, huh? You'll notice that the usual weekend lull has disappeared -- that's the Barron's traffic. So yesterday they sent me an extra 350 visitors versus the previous Saturday. Could I have just hit the tipping point? I'll post the chart again in a couple of weeks to see if my rate of growth changes.
Thanks for joining Blogsnob! Very much appreciated. Let us know if you have any questions about the service.