How do you know how many people selected to RSS your blog?  Is there a way for me to track that?
- process guru

If you’re not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it’s a way of letting your readers subscribe to your blog. Rather than constantly checking your blog’s website to see if any posts have been added, they will be notified when there’s new content. Although the technology works very differently, it feels a lot like your favorite sites send you an email when they have something new. RSS feeds are included by default in every major blogging solution.

You can actually see how much activity your RSS feed is getting in your standard web traffic statistics. As far as your web servers logs are concerned, accessing the RSS feed is the same as accessing any other page on your website. The activity level shown there is misleading, though. 

When I subscribe to your RSS feed, I’m actually telling a piece of software to regularly check the site for me. So if my software is checking your website for new content every hour, that will show up as 24 hits in your server log even though I’m just one subscriber. Someone else may set their software to check for updates every 30 minutes. That person will contribute 48 hits in your server log. 

You can filter the results by unique visitors if your site analytics package allows that, but even those results may underestimate or (more likely) overestimate your actual number of subscribers. And that’s all assuming you’re someone who regularly gets into your website statistics, and very few people are. So what’s the solution?

While there is no 100% accurate method for tracking your subscribers that we know of, a good option is to filter your feed through FeedBurner. This service is owned by Google, is free to use, and is a good idea for anyone who’s serious about blogging. Rather than having your subscribers access your RSS feed directly off your web server they access FeedBurner, and FeedBurner communicates with your web server. The reward for this extra step is you get to take advantage of all the cool features of FeedBurner without needing to hire someone to build them specifically for your RSS feed.

Using FeedBurner has more advantages than we’ll get into here, but one of them is a reasonable estimate on the number of subscribers you have. While even this number isn’t completely accurate, it’s still useful. If you see your subscriber count according to FeedBurner doubles from one month to the next, it’s reasonable to assume that your real number of subscribers approximately doubled, too.