Trader Mike

A lot of bloggers who use FeedBurner got a nice surprise this morning. One of the great features of FeedBurner is the stats they provide on the number of readers of a given RSS feed. The only problem is that for web-based newsreaders/aggregators they rely upon those services to report the number of actual subscribers to each feed. Some aggregators have been reporting the actual subscriber counts for years while others, like Google, have not. Yesterday Google announced that they were getting with the program and reporting actual subscriber counts from Google Reader as well as Google Personalized Homepage. (Here’s FeedBurner’s announcement.)

Here’s what happened to my …

No, I’m not flashing back to the days of R.I.F. and SchoolHouse Rock. As a follow up of sorts to yesterday’s tips for bloggers, I thought I’d offer some tips for weblog readers. Actually, much, if not all, of what I’m about to say will apply to anybody that does a lot of web surfing.

Prometheus 6 just wrote an article about increasing blog traffic. He gives some good general tips and also tells how certain events gained him incremental increases in readership. Because I’ve been asked about the topic a few times, I’ll post what I’ve been telling people through email.

As P6 pointed out, linking is incredibly important. I think I’ve seen it said as ‘links are the currency of the blogosphere’. Recently I’ve seen more than a few blogs that are written as if they’re hardcopy as opposed to an online, HTML document. For example why write ‘take a look at Technorati.com’ when you can write ‘take a look at Technorati.com‘. (edit to add: …