Committed Hearts and Minds

Committed Hearts and Minds

Reader Comments (10)

  1. Did Leonardo really say that? Good for him.

    I’ve found another site, http://www.micromotives.com, that has a great deal of interesting research on these and other phenomena that you talk about. It’s about time the scientists came out from behind their “foolish fortress” of copyright that so hampers the free flow of information.

    Again, a great post. Thanks.

  2. I’ve already made the commitment of a subscription to this blog. Not sure what prompted me to subscribe, but this post certainly puts to rest any subscriber’s regret.

    An excellent point, though. That it’s easy to forget your subscribers in pursuit page views.

    What methods are available to track blog subscriptions, by the way?

  3. Bravo!

    That is *so* perfectly put: Building a loyal subscriber base is the key.

    I am at a loss of words. I want to ruminate over this before I make any further committment on any side of the topic.

    That, in essence is the strength of the argument. Inch-perfect, if I might say so.

    Regards,
    Shri.

  4. Great point, Brian. It reassures us little bloggers out there, lost in the long tail…it’s not the number of readers that is so important, it’s the number of quality, targeted, ideal, potential customers and readers who count. And a good way of tracking them would be number of Feedblitz or other subscription sign ups. So many blogs don’t use such a service…and they should.

  5. Hi Alan, I’ll be discussing both list-building and tracking in depth in the near future, but to briefly answer your question:

    Use Feedburner for your feed so you can get a RSS subscriber count. Also you can use Feedblitz to offer an email alternative for your readers. Feedblitz has an arrangement with Feedburner so if you’re using both, you can count all subscribers with the Feedburner interface.

    There are also ways to redirect your existing subscribers that signed up with your source feed through Feedburner so you are not leaving current readers out. How you do this depends on your blogging platform, but there’s a great WordPress plugin if you are on WP. The Feedburner forums have some great info on this.

    Shri, you are too kind. Better save this up for when (not if) I say something ridiculous! 🙂

    Patsi, I think we were commenting at the same time, but you’re right.  There’s not enough attention being paid to subscriber acquisition and care.  It reminds me a little bit of Web 1.0, until the crash.  When that happened, for the most part only the people who had loyal subscriber lists survived and thrived.

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