feed

Analyze Your Feed With Visuals

BlogPerfume Logo

BlogPerfume has developed a cool program called Feed Analysis which providers bloggers an at a glance view of just how well their FeedBurner feed is performing without having to do any sort of calculations on your own.

By the use of Feed Analysis, the number of subscribers for each month is neatly shown on the column chart. You can also view the number of subscribers, hits, views and clicks for every single day from the line chart. The best/worst day of the week is also available which is displayed on the pie chart. And also, Feed Analysis can give you an estimated value for your blog / site according to the number of your subscribers.

In order to use Feed Analysis, you need to visit the Feed Analysis page and scroll down to the text area box where you can type in your FeedBurner Feed URL. The box on the left is the amount of time and data that will appear in the graphs.

FeedAnalysis Input

Some important things to know before you use this tool. BlogPerfume states that, they do not store your data on their server. Everything is generated via the client side. Once you close your browser window, the data will disappear.

The application is free to use and if your blog is under 3 months old, the tool will still work. However, the prediction values may be a little off due to insufficient data.

Since this blog has been around for at least 6 months, thats the amount of time I chose.

After generating the report, I was greeted with a bunch of boxes that told me the same thing;YOU NEED TO UPGRADE YOUR FLASH PLAYER. Thanks for letting me know. After visiting the Adobe Flash Player website and upgrading my player, I ended up seeing a bunch of beautiful graphs and charts which highlighted my success or lack thereof.

Here are the results of my analyzed feedburner feed.

FeedStats

  • Estimated 1 Banner Ads Value: $7 / month
  • Estimated Blog Worth: $417 – $834
  • Monthly Increase Range: 16-30 Average Increase / Month: 23
  • Total Increase(Last 3 Months): 61 Monthly Increase(Last 3 Months): 20
  • Growth Rate (Last Month): 13.01%
  • Average Subscribers (Current Month): 139
  • Predicted Subscribers After 3 Months: 201
  • Predicted Subscribers After 6 Months: 290
  • Predicted Subscribers After 12 Months: 603
  • Best Day of A Week: Tuesday
  • Worst Day of A Week: Saturday

Feed Analysis may not be complete and perfect at the moment because it is in an early stage. We need your opinions and suggestions so that Feed Analysis can evolve to provide more accurate stats and prediction. Any suggestions and opinions are welcome. If you have amazing formulas, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us directly.

If you’re interested in viewing my specific report, complete with graphs and visuals, click here. BlogPerfume is also quick to remind us that the data may be incomplete, due to the tool being at an early stage of development. If you happen to use the Feed Analysis tool on your own blog, I’d be interested in knowing your results.

AddToAny Bookmarking Widget

AddToAny.com Logo

Looks like the WordPress Plugin called ShareThis has some competition in the form of a widget. AddToAny is a service that you can use to make it easy for your visitors to subscribe to your content. Creating a button for your site is easy. There are two types of buttons you can make. One for your specific webpage or, for your RSS feed. For my example, I’m using my RSS feed.

AddToAny Feed Button Creation

Once you type in your information, you can obtain the javascript code by clicking on the GET BUTTON CODE button. Here is what my example looks like: Subscribe

Once of the cool things about this button is that when you hover over it, a big list of bookmarking services are presented as links. This makes it easy for you to cover alot of ground by using one image, instead of having a different image for each service which would make your blog look like a mess.

AddToAny works pretty much in the same way that AddThis.com works. AddThis.com is the one I use and have used for quite some time. I use that in conjunction with ShareThis so there shouldn’t be any issues in saving a particular item on this blog to a bookmarking service or feed reader of your choice.

a2a_linkname=”Jeffro2pt0 – A Blog About Stuff”;a2a_linkurl=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jeffro2pt0″;

Is The BlogRush Over With?

My BlogRush Stats

When I initially became aware of BlogRush and it’s associated claims of rushing traffic to blogs, I became extremely interested. As a blogger myself, I’m always looking into new ways to generate traffic. As we now know, BlogRush has itself experienced a rush, a rush that I believe is bigger than any smalltime blogger currently using their widget, has experienced. Their system is simple and at face value looks like it would work for everyone, but after reviewing my stats, it looks like it won’t work for me.

My BlogRush Impressions

Out of 2,401 impressions or appearances on various sites, only 4 people have clicked a headline attributed to my site. If you ask me, that’s not exactly a rush of traffic. Now I know it could be possible that the headlines to my articles suck, but is that really the case? My blog is currently competing within the Computers and Internet category and I myself have clicked on a few of the links within the widget on and have found some really cool sites. However, till this day, I have yet to see any of my posts appearing on anyone else’s widget. I even spent half an hour, clicking on various posts from one widget to the next, and I never saw one post from my site.

It’s also worth mentioning that I have checked both my Entry pages, and my Exit pages for the widget url. As we’ve seen earlier, at least 4 people have used the article headline on the widget as an entrance page to my site. However, there are 25 hits for the widget url being used as an exit page. Although I don’t know how many of those exits are attributed to myself, I really feel as if I’m doing everyone else a favor, by having this widget published on my site versus helping myself out.

The only people that seem to be benefiting from this service are the big blogs who most likely have quite a few referrals. BlogRush has stated in their latest email that:

We’ll soon be adding a bonus credit system that gives certain bonuses only to our low traffic members since they need the help the most!

That may be enough to help us small timers out, but only time will tell. So far, I’m experiencing lack luster results with BlogRush and apparently, these people are too although I’m not sure why Darren is using Blogrush as his blog gets enough traffic as it is.

ProBlogger.Net

Nusuni

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BlogRush What Is This New BuzzWord

BlogRush.com LogoTheres a new buzzword in town that is sweeping across the blogosphere like wildfire, but what is it? That word is, BlogRush. A new way of generating traffic to your site or blog.

As I was monitoring my RSS feeds on a very early Saturday morning, I read a post that discussed BlogRush and what it was suppose to do. I saved it in my news bin as I was interested and wanted to give it a try. Here we are, two days later and this BlogRush widget is appearing on just about every site that can be considered a blog.

Background Info:

BlogRush in it’s simplest form is a content syndication network. If you add the widget to your blog, your own site will appear on other blogs with the widget installed. I know it may sound like one of those other blog advertising deals but this service dives into the equation a bit deeper.

BlogRush.com Widget

BlogRush works like this. Users signup and install the widget and display it somewhere on their site. If your site receives 100pageviews a day, your blog links will appear 100 times on other BlogRush widgets across the network. That’s great and all, but here comes the juicy part. If a user who is browsing your site clicks on the tab underneath the widget that reads ADD YOUR BLOG POSTS FOR FREE and they signup for an account, that user is added to your own BlogRush account as a referal. Now, when that user installs the widget to their site, your blog content will appear on that users widget 100 times in addition to the 100 times your site would appear across the network. As you add more referrals to your account and gain more traffic to your site, your traffic grows exponentially.

What I’ve Noticed:

Throughout the day on Saturday, I noticed that the same links would appear on my BlogRush widget, no matter how many times I refreshed the page. I think this was due to the lack of websites that were added to the same category as mine. However, the links have changed each time I have loaded my front page today, so that problem appears to be fixed. I also want to let you know that I myself, have clicked on a few of the links that appear on the widget that is published on this blog because they have been relevant and interesting. So in a sense, I have demonstrated to myself how this syndication network works.

Since displaying the widget, I can attest to seeing at least 5 people who were visiting this site who were referred by a BlogRush widget. The reason for this varies. Either the headlines to my articles suck or, it was early in the adoption phase. Considering this widget is gaining in popularity extremely fast, I expect to see the referral links increasing as time goes by.

Improvements Needed:

I’d like the ability to edit the width of the widget. The one on this site is just a pixel or 2 too big and it’s crunching the left sidebar. Right now, there is no way to edit the size of the widget. There are also no reports or stats as of yet. Apparently, that part of the service is still under construction. At first, I wanted to suggest a way for us to customize which sites appear on the widgets based on tags, but I have to admit, the BlogRush algorithm seems to be doing a pretty good job displaying related content.

At times, there are blog headlines that appear in my widget which seem screwed up. The headlines appear as all question marks as if I don’t have the language pack the headline was written in. It could also be the case that the blog entry was spam. Speaking of blog spam, it will be interesting to see if BlogRush actually syndicates blogspam which in my opinion would send this service back to where it came from.

Conclusion:

This service has come out of no where and is really taking the blogging world by storm. John Reese hit the nail on the head with this service although, I’m not sure what the revenue model is just yet. If you own a blog or a website and you need traffic, definitely give this service a try. It’s free, it’s easy to install, and so far, it seems to be working. If you would like to take part in this blogging phenomenon, be sure to visit BlogRush.com and sign up for your own free account.

If you are currently using BlogRush, I’d be very interested in hearing your experience with it thus far.

Zeusbox Releases Free FeedIcon Set

ZeusBox LogoZeusbox has released a free RSS Feed icon set under the Creative Commons 3 license. The icon set contains 34 PNG icons which range in size from 16 pixels to 32 pixels. Zeusbox has stated that they will update the icon set, so if you have any requests, be sure to visit their site and leave a comment. Zeusbox asks that the requested icons be related to FEEDs. You can download this stylish icon pack by clicking here.

Icons Included In The Pack