I thought about how to start this blog for a while and finally decided that the best way to start posting would be to show at least some of my “achievements” so that you have proof that I’m not just talking but also have the experience to back it all up. I decided against posting Adsense or other earnings simply because I do not want to let the Internet know how much I earn. I know that this would probably the best way to establish my name but I think it’s to private to discuss.

I have to verify it by other means and one possibility is by posting statistics, be it feed readers or unique visitors.Feed Readers was the easiest to assemble which is why I decided to start with it. I’m using Feedburner on one of my websites to provide every feed reader in existence with my feed which has the advantage that I get statistics of how many readers I have.

Feedburner has this nice little chicklet they call it that displays the amount of feed readers for the previous day. This is one of the first things I’m looking for when visiting a new blog. I’m not saying that blogs with only a few readers are inferior but many readers normally means that good content is created on this blog.

I use it mainly to see how the amount of readers changes over time which is great if it’s on the rise. You get a confirmation that your hard work is having a positive result. It’s a process that takes time especially at the beginning though. It’s kinda sad to realize that you only have a few readers that read your feed but there are ways to change this quickly. More about this later.

The above graph is displaying the all time feed readers of a blog that I created in October 2005. You can see a steady increase of feed readers and a mighty jump in March 2007. This jump can be attributed to a plugin that I installed that would redirect all feeds to Feedburner thus making it possible to count these readers as well.

The plugin is called Feedburner Feedsmith. As you can see it took a while to get started which is a period that this blog is in right now. Every new blog has a certain period where almost nothing happens. You don’t get lots of comments, you don’t get a lot of new feed readers. This is exactly the period where many bloggers fail because they think it will go on like this forever. It won’t, believe me.

If you produce good content traffic will come, readers will come and comments will come. Oh, and the money comes as well if you decide to monetize your blog. There are shortcuts however and I will write about them. Today was just to show you that I have at least one blog with 6K feed readers, nothing more, nothing less.