Should you or should you not show the subscribers number badge?
For those of you using Feedburner as an RSS feed provider, you know you can add a small badge to your site showing exactly how many subscribers you have. Or actually, how many people have read your feed on the previous day. But, is it always a good idea to post this thing on your site? Let’s see…
I’ve noticed new blogs having put this badge on even though they have like 5-10 subscribers. That’s not the way to do it my friends. Imagine, who would want to join a feed only read by so few people?
Most of your visitors won’t know your blog is new, and when they’ll see that small number of readers will immediately think the blog is no worth it. So they won’t join your feed. It’s just psychological. That’s why i recommend not to post that badge until you get a decent number of subscribers, somewhere around 250 would be OK i guess.
The bad way and the good way to use the RSS badge
On the other hand, the psychological effect works in the other way too. If a visitor comes upon a site with a huge number of subscribers he will consider joining it too, as if it has so many readers, there must be something interesting about it. So, here’s the case in which the badge is useful.
Like you can see, the badge is not posted on this site, thus meaning i don’t quite have that many RSS subscribers yet. But, this blog is only 2 months old, and i think i’m doing pretty alright. But, if you want to join my feed, please do so. You won’t regret it 
Tags: badge, feed, Feedburner, RSS, subscribers
Exactly, I have a pretty high number of subscribers although my blog is some month and a half old but I still don’t show my feedburners stats on my blog. I’ll do it when I’ll gain some 1,000 subscribers.
I find it kind of hard to reach 1000 subscribers to soon. I’ll give it like 1 year or more for a normal blog. But good luck in achieving this Daniel. You’re thinking big
Thanks, I’m also not expecting to reach that number in a short period of time, perhaps a year or so.
Oct 8th, 2007 at 11:10 am
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