Feed Reader Amounts Dropping
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I know the amounts of readers in a feed is supposed to fluctuate, sometimes more than normal. But is it supposed to… constantly decrease?
On June 27 I had 50 readers of the Super Blogging feed. The next day, that dropped to 45. On June 29, I was at 42. Now I’m at 34 subscribers. I wanted to know if it’s natural for reader amounts of a feed to go down like this, without also going back up. Is it because my content isn’t as good as usual (I know I’ve been slacking a little), or is this normal?
The weird thing is, I just added the “subscribe to the feed” section in the top of the sidebar when my reader amounts started going down. That’s the opposite of what should have happened. So I don’t know what else I can do. Perhaps I can tack a little “subscribe” message to the bottom of each post, and hope that will do me some good. Has this ever happened to you, and if so, what did you do about it?
By the way, happy July! 
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1. July 2007 at 17:36
Hi, just found your blog through siteneighbors. Looks like you’ve got the hang of blogging.
1. July 2007 at 17:57
Thank you, glad you dropped by and checked out my blog!
1. July 2007 at 22:30
The longest drop I had was about 5 days straight. Then it bounced back. Sometimes Feedburner is not able to get correct numbers from the services on their list and this happens. Hope that helps.
1. July 2007 at 23:34
Hi Tay,
I wouldn’t be concerned about a slight drop over just a couple days. Your subscribers will go up again. If you’re not seeing much growth, that just means it’s time to try something new and different.
Keep up the great work,
Andrew
2. July 2007 at 01:09
Oh, I understand now. Thank you for the helpful explanation.
2. July 2007 at 01:10
All right. Maybe in a few days I will implement the addition of a “subscribe to this feed” to every post, and that might help. Thank you!
2. July 2007 at 10:18
I see drops all the time.. and it goes back up at the end of the day. Feedburner isn’t very accurate and it takes sometimes for them to count the real number of subscribers.
2. July 2007 at 14:46
Mine seems to only update once daily. After a few days of dropping, though, it’s gone back up again. Thanks for your help!
3. July 2007 at 00:58
Don’t mean to sound like an echo here, but I just wanted to share my sympathy with you on this one. I, too, find myself holding my breath when I go check my subscription rates. If I could just break 100, that’ll lessen the fretting, but in the long run, I know that if I maintain quality writing about things I care about, eventually it’ll catch up to my expectations.
3. July 2007 at 03:37
Oh, I wish I could break 100. It’ll be a while yet.
Yes, continuing to write good posts is key. I’ve sort of been lazy lately and slacking off, and I’ve only been posting up every other day or so. I really need to get back into writing a post every night and timestamping it for the morning!
10. July 2007 at 18:36
Hey,
Curious how you track your subscribers. I am on Blogger right now and am not sure I can do it with that type of setup. I saw one of your blogs had a link to some stats, I think I need to get that.
15. July 2007 at 13:25
I track my subscribers using Feedburner. You can use Feedburner if you have a Blogger blog (completely free or just hosted there), that’s what I did before I moved to Wordpress and got my own domain. All you’ve got to do is go to http://www.feedburner.com and sign up - it’s easy and very helpful.
I’m not sure which of my blogs you’re talking about that links to stats, do you know which it might be and what kind of stats it is linking to?
Thank you!
16. July 2007 at 10:27
Wow, I didn’t even have my RSS subscribe button on my new layout. Whoops.
Good thing I checked out this thread, huh?