Quick Tip: Ping Feedburner
If you’re a blogger and know how Feedburner works, you’re already ahead of the game. There’s nothing better than knowing exactly how many people have subscribed to your feed (other than google reader). If you aren’t using Feedburner to publish your feed, seriously, you need to do it NOW! (oh, and use this plugin too to get all your old subscribers using your new feed)
But one of the most frustrating things about Feedburner is the fact that it isn’t nearly as instant as your Wordpress feed, and therefore can take quite some time to actually push your new content to all your subscribers, since Feedburner only checks periodically for new feed items.
The most frustrating thing of all, being a reader of a few dozen blogs myself, is having to wait for new content to arrive in my google reader! Why is this so frustrating? Simple. There’s an easy way for you to let Feedburner know that you’ve published a new article. (Perry Noble, I’m talking to you!)
From your Wordpress dashboard, click the “Options” tab, then choose sub-option “Writing”. Down at the bottom of the page, you should see a heading called “Update Services” with an input text box below. There is probably already an entry in there to let pingomatic.com know that you have new content, but we want to alert Feedburner. So enter the following URL on a new line in that box:
http://ping.feedburner.com/
This will ping Feedburner so that it knows of your new content.
There you go. Hopefully this will help in making sure all your feed readers are immediately alerted to you new content. An updated reader is a happy reader!
While we’re on the subject, why don’t you subscribe to my feed or sign up for my email feed to receive a daily email with content from this blog!
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
Comments
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
You said it:
I have never understood how this is an acceptable sacrifice in the interests of knowing the number of subscribers, a statistic?
I should add that this occurs not because of pinging or not, but because of the delay with feedburner processing.
Ever now and again they have problems, and it is the subscribers who miss out.
Why not just serve up the ordinary feeds direct from wordpress and use your site stats to determine the number of subscribers?
David,
I do consider it a benefit to have feedburner do all my feeds. There’s no good way of keeping track of how many unique subscribers you have. Sure your stats will tell you how many times /feed was accessed, but you have to do some serious math and homework to find out how many of those were bots, repeat checkers, search engine follows, etc. Feedburner does that for you.
And yes, there is a delay in the Feedburner processing, but I usually see my post show up about 5 minutes after I publish and ping. Not bad. This is not the case if you simply rely on FB to “check” whenever it wants to.
Cool, whatever works for you.
How well are you doing towards your 6 month subscription target?
Pretty good so far. Almost half way there. I’ve doubled the amount of subscriptions in a little over a week. Plus I’ve got some new ideas and incentives for new subscribers coming soon. I’m not in a big rush and want to make sure I stay paced since I still have a ways to go til 6 months.
Where I’m coming up short is unique site visitors. We’ve had some really good traffic numbers the last couple weeks, but I’m not doing a good enough job of getting more NEW visitors. Looks like we MIGHT get to 2500 uniques this month, but will more than likely flatline around the 2000 mark same as December. Not quite the 3,000 I was hoping for.
No worries though, patience is a virtue.