Caution: Your Hungry Subscribers Might Not Be Getting Fed…

One of the most popular services out there for bloggers is Feedburner for a multitude of reasons, the biggest is the ability to track how many subscribers they have and the ability to offer their feed as an email subscription.

Chances are, if a person has subscribed to your feed, they WANT to hear (or see, rather) what you have to say.  They were interested in your content enough, to take the time to subscribe to your feed for updates on demand.

But some of your subscribers might not be receiving your content.  Unless you’re fortunate enough to have a subscriber base who will email you and let you know that it’s not working, you have no way of knowing that it’s not working.

Your subscribers think that you’re on hiatus or, worse, that you’ve abandoned your blog and if they are anything like me, if they see a blog that’s not updated regularly, they’ll unsubscribe to your feed the next time they clean out their reader.

Please don’t think that you’re exempt.  You’re not.  This could very well be happening to you.  It was happening to me.  And I didn’t even know it.

I had heard from two clients that their feeds weren’t working properly.  Because we just moved all of our hosted sites from the hosting company that must not be named to HostGator, I assumed that was part of the problem.  I uninstalled and reinstalled the FeedBurner plugin and checked the actual feeds but couldn’t find anything wrong with them.  I was baffled.  I didn’t know what the problem was, or how to fix it.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when I received an email from a friend, directing me to her blog that I determined the problem.

Were you aware that Google acquired Feedburner?

No?  Neither was I until yesterday.

And I ONLY knew because I read Connie’s blog post.

Like Connie stated in her post, I never received word from Feedburner that things were changing, but when I went to log into Feedburner, sure enough, I was greeted with this screen.  What’s ironic though is that Google acquired Feedburner in June of 2007.  I guess my question now is why are we now merging and why didn’t anyone email me to tell me that this change was taking place?

(graphic courtesy of SignatureWorx)

When I linked it with my Google account, my feeds were transferred but in the process, they were given a new URL as well.  They are supposed to redirect so that you don’t lose subscribers, however, before taking this action step, the feeds were, as Connie stated, going wild.

I’ve spent the morning fixing the feeds for my blogs, and those that I was aware of on the client front and I’m off to alert those that I know will have the same problem.

So hop to it, go check your feeds.  Make sure that you login to Feedburner and link your feedburner account to a Google account.  Then go and change your feed URLS to the new feed URL.  (Basically, they are adding a 2 to the URL… it will now look like this http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DesperatelySeekingWordPress)

And you should be good to go (and your subscribers will be happy again… :) )

Until next time…

Comments

  1. Cathy says:

    Hey – THANKS for posting this! It never occurred to me to let ya know!! You mean there are people that don’t babysit their feedburner stats daily? Waiting for that number to rise? Silly, girl. :D

  2. Jan Ross says:

    I just found you by way of Big Mama and am very interested in reading your blog because I’m switching my blog to WordPress soon. But, ironically, you don’t seem to have an RSS feed button on your blog. I just copied and pasted your url into my Google Reader which works, but others may not know to do that. Just a suggestion…

  3. mommyknows says:

    Eeek! It’s been a month or more now … I guess you didn’t get the email! Bummer.

  4. Jendi says:

    Thanks for the info!
    I hadn’t switched my feed to Google yet. I switched and changed the address. You saved me a bunch of subscribers.

  5. Online Website Editor says:

    thanks alot. I didn’t know that before either.

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