How to Syndicate Your Blog - Meet My Two Most Important Subscribers

A couple of weeks ago, I added Feedburner to the sidebar of my ActiveRain blog.  If you aren't familiar with this service, it allows you to syndicate your blog via email without the requirement of a specific feed reader.  In other words (simpler words), someone can sign up and receive all of your new "public" posts by email.  My wife and mom were my first guinea pigs, and I signed up myself just to see the format, which I really like, since it seems to keep both the formatting and images intact.

I have been watching the stats page at Feedburner, wondering if they were working properly.  Later, Darren Rowse (Problogger) mentioned on Twitter that he heard they were stuck, which I think may be true, since I know that I am not showing up as a subscriber there, nor is my wife.  Wow - the first two sentences of this paragraph managed to make me feel both smart and connected and pretty geeky.  But I digress...

The cool part about Feedburner is that I do have 2 subscribers whose names I don't recognize.  They aren't members of ActiveRain, and they aren't in my immediate group of friends or family.  Instead, these are actual CONSUMERS who chose to subscribe to my blog.  As such, I am very pleased to see them on the list.  I only have their email addresses at this point, but I know that their names are Brenda and David, and I love them both.  Sorry - couldn't help myself. 

I have been blessed with a large following here on ActiveRain, with 938 subscribers as of this writing, but David and Brenda (and hopefully many others which will follow) hold a special place in my heart.

Recently, I began to get an inkling of just how much "reach" my blog actually has, when my wife saw a friend who it turns out regularly reads my blog, then later met a random lady who also claimed to be a reader of mine.  Of course, they never comment on anything to my knowledge, so I had no way of knowing this.  It made me feel great.

A few days ago, a neighbor of mine who is an agent emailed me to ask some questions about joining AR, and she mentioned "It is funny that you live just a few doors down the street and I find out more about you from your blog than anywhere."  Again, I had no idea that she even knew I had a blog, much less that she was regularly reading my posts.

I would definitely recommend setting up Feedburner if you haven't already done so.  I only wish that I had done it sooner. 

If you are curious about how to add the Feedburner subscription form to your blog, you can visit Justin Smith's post on this topic here:

How to SuperCharge Your Activerain Blog With Feedburner (Part 2)

Have a great week!