Five Benefits of FeedBurner
Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 9:00 am
RSS is an essential technology for successful blogging. Since most of your regular readers will want to subscribe to your blog’s feed, it is a good idea to gain some knowledge about RSS and the value it offers. I assume your blog is equipped with at least one RSS feed, but do you use FeedBurner?
Owned by Google, FeedBurner is a free service offering tools to help you make the most of your feed. Here are five things I enjoy most about “burning” my feeds:
- Keep count of your subscribers
I found it a little difficult to understand FeedBurner’s stats at first, but basically the number of individual subscribers to your feed is determined per day. Naturally, not everyone accesses their feedreaders daily, so the number of subscribers fluctuates. Over time, FeedBurner calculates the average number of people who access your feed daily
You are able to “burn” multiple feeds in one account on FeedBurner. - Change the location of your feed without losing your subscribers
I recently changed the URL of my RSS feed from http://blogsolid.com/ideas/feed to http://blogsolid.com/feed. My subscribers were none the wiser, since they are subscribed to the FeedBurner URL which remained constant at http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogsolid. - Browser Friendly
Feedburner dresses up your raw XML and presents it in a neat, formatted and readable fashion. - Feed Image Burner
Of course, as a designer, this is my favourite feature - add your logo to the top of the feed! - Email Subscriptions
Offer your fans the opportunity to receive updates to your blog by e-mail. Once again FeedBurner allows you to dolly it up with your logo and choice of colours.
I actually didn’t see this service at first as it is a little hidden on the site. You have to click on “Publicize” at the top, then “Email Subscriptions” is located in the sidebar.
Oh, apart from the functionality, I really enjoy the random dry humour on the FeedBurner site. The copywriters must have had the time of their lives. “My Feeds do the boogie woogie”. What, they do? Haha.
Know any FeedBurner tricks and tips? Please share your feedburning wisdom in the comments below.
Ryan Says:
September 14th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I’m still lost. I don’t see any advantage in using Feedburner over the default Wordpress RSS feed. I can add logos, redirect feeds etc. with the built in one. Plus my web host collects stats on my feeds for me, albeit on a monthly not daily basis, but I don’t think I’d use daily stats anyway. There’s a Wordpress plugin (I think) which allows your users to receive RSS notifications by email.
Or am I missing something here?
Blogsolid Says:
September 14th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Hi Ryan. You’re right - Feedburner is just one of many available tools. I enjoy using it, but I guess every blogger will find what works best for them!
redwall_hp Says:
September 14th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Don’t forget that it re-hosts your feed so it takes the stress off your server. If some maniac’s feed reader checks you feed every 2/5 of a second, then feedburner’s datacenter will take the hit instead of your shared hosting account. It’s also good for high-traffic sites like Smashing Magazine that get tons of traffic from Digg and need to save bandwidth in every way they can.
BlogBuzz September 15, 2007 » Webmaster-Source Says:
September 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
[…] Five Benefits of Feedburner: Don’t forget number 6! “it re-hosts your feed so it takes the stress off your server. If some maniac’s feed reader checks you feed every 2/5 of a second, then feedburner’s datacenter will take the hit instead of your shared hosting account. It’s also good for high-traffic sites like Smashing Magazine that get tons of traffic from Digg and need to save bandwidth in every way they can.” […]
Nicole Says:
September 17th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Good writeup. I am definitely a FeedBurner fan. I’ve been using it for a long while now, and I really love the features it has.
@Ryan:
For me, one of the biggest advantages over the default WP feed is simply that FeedBurner lets people auto-subscribe in the reader of their choice without having to use a WP plugin for it. The subscribe to email is a HUGE benefit for me. FeedBurner also has a slew of extra little features that make it nice to use, like adding advertisements into your feed. Yes, some of those things can be duplicated by using various WP plugins, but I’d rather have an all-in-one solution that’s as easy as FeedBurner is to use.
Jenny Says:
September 23rd, 2007 at 5:06 am
I use feedburner and am constantly getting error notices about my feed so I am always going in to fix it. So I think going with the default feed is better.
flashG Says:
October 31st, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Feedburner really works !! I only started using it 2 days back and now I have more than 50 subscribers. Now I can deliver my content more effectively and more targeted.
Paul Says:
January 5th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
There is also a feature on feedburner which allows you to use a URL of choice for your subscribers, so they dont even have to visit the Feedburner site. You do lose the ability to redirect if the RSS feed location changes though so be careful.
Andy Says:
February 15th, 2008 at 2:25 am
On that last point (from Paul on 1/5/08) if I switch the Original Feed (from Atom to RSS 2.0) but leave the Feed Address the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/alumnifutures) I won’t lose any subscribers, eh? It sounds like this is what Blogsolid is saying in point #2….
Linkbuilding and Indexing with RSS feeds | The Public Consultation Booth Says:
September 29th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[…] techy people don’t need to be told the benefits of feedburner, but there are a few hidden bonuses lurking around this free […]