This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner.
A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?
The day after I made this edit, our handy little blog here was mentioned in a Slashdot post resulting in a TON of visits. Not one new RSS subscriber came as a result. This was curious to me and then I received an email from a reader saying that our FeedBurner feed was showing an error. The feed was too big so no one could read or subscribe.
I logged into WordPress and changed the number of posts in the feed to a more reasonable number and fired off an email to FeedBurner support. They responded very quickly saying the feed was too big.
Lesson for the day? Don’t make big changes to your blog without talking to your blog person first!
The good news is that we’re still hovering at a little over 1000 subscribers, so at least it’s not a drop.
Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.
