Whether you have 15 RSS readers, 150 or 15,000, keeping track of who is reading your RSS feed, what they're clicking on, and whether you're getting more traction or less over time is an extremely popular past time. This evening, fellow B-List blogger Steven Hodson of WinExtra highlighted a new service aimed to make us addicts just a tad more obsessive.The new service, titled BlogPerfume, analyzes your Feedburner statistics and shows your rate of growth, expected total subscribers over the next 12 months, and even lets you know what the best day is to attract new converts to your feed. (See their announcement here)
As you can see from my first run at the service, it looks like we've more than quintupled the number of RSS feed subscribers since the beginning of the year, adding just under 20 new per month, including a growth of 57% over the last three months. Of course, if I don't keep blogging or adding interesting content, this number will surely decrease.
BlogPerfume confirms much of what we already knew. Saturdays are pretty slow. They're slow for Google Reader posts, and they're slow on TechMeme, and they're slow for RSS converts. Mondays tend to in contrast be both the beginning of the work week and the beginning of a new feed's relationship.
The service also slurps Feedburner's raw hits, clicks and subscriber data, to show total accesses of your feed, and if stories were deemed interesting enough to gain a click-through. Unsurprisingly, the growth in total subscribers to my feed has resulted in a multiplier effect on the growth in total hits, thanks to multiple posts per day and frequent checking by subscribers.
While it doesn't offer a dramatic increase in information when contrasted to my Feedburner statistics, Blog Perfume makes the data available to anybody who wants to view the stats for a popular RSS feed, as well as pretty charts.
Aiming to see how your growth compares to others on your block? Just copy their Feedburner URL and get started. Here are some likely popular ones as examples:
* TechCrunch
* Guy Kawasaki
* Marshall Kirkpatrick