The Rise and Fall of Blog Subscribers. Do you use Feedburner to burn your blog’s RSS feeds? That’s no surprise. Many blogs do — and with little wonder. Feedburner integrates so many useful tracking, marketing, and optimization tools — it’s almost ridiculous to blog and NOT use Feedburner!

When you’re in your Feedburner console, it’s easy to see the rise and fall of your own blog subscribers under the “Analyze” tab.  Now, click on the “Publicize” tab. If you’ve activated either “FeedCount” or “Awareness API” — you’re in for a treat.

Go visit FeedCompare. This site lets you compare the subscription history of any Feedburner feed that has either the “Publicize” or “Awareness API” option activated. You can check your own feed’s subscriber rate over time — and maybe even spy on a few competitors!

What this means. You can check the accuracy of the subscriber claims of quite a few Feedburner feeds.  Many times, bloggers deliberately check the “Publicize” or “Awareness API” option — often because they want to show off their superb subscriber numbers.

But a few times, I’ve caught a few sites that have been, ah, fudging their numbers, shall we say? In order to sell advertising, a few blogs boast higher numbers of subscribers than they actually have. FeedCompare lets you accurately check subscriber claims.

If you’d rather not have your own subscriber numbers be available to the general public, you’ll want to uncheck the appropriate options in your Feedburner dashboard. But if you’re selling advertising based on subscribers and growth — it’s a good idea to publish your subscriber numbers, anyway.

And, of course — if you’re selling numbers — you need to be honest about your numbers! Being open and transparent can help you — if you have a great story to tell!

How else will you use  tools like Feed Compare?

If you use Google Analytics, here’s one more thing to put on your to-do list:

Replace your old Urchin.js code with the new Google ga.js code.

When you log into Google Analytics, you might miss this new bit – it’s buried.

It only took a few minutes to add the new Google Analytics tracking code to two CMS-driven sites a few days ago. Google swears the new code will offer better features in time.

Oddly, I found this feature when I was setting up a brand new site with Google Analytics. I thought it was odd that they offered a choice, but there you go. I picked the new code, and hopefully, I won’t have to look back…