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Put Feedburner to Work for You

If an RSS feed is already built in to WordPress and Blogger, why do you need to use Feedburner? Doesn’t that just add confusion and complexity? Doesn’t it add another hoop for your readers to jump through? Isn’t there a point where too many choices equal no action?

Feedburner can actually reduce clutter and confusion for your readers – while offering valuable behind the scenes services to you as a blog owner.

Your blog may have several different types of feeds – atom, RSS, RS2, etc. Feedburner consolidates your feeds and sends them all to one place – namely, Feedburner. It also allows your readers to instantly subscribe to your blog using their favorite reader – no need for a dozen or more RSS chicklets on your sidebar.

The feeds can be formatted so that they will look exactly like your blog, including photos and bold, italic, and colored fonts, rather than boring, hard to read chunks of plain text. And you can add De.licio.us and other bookmarking links to your feeds.

All of this is great for pleasing your readers.

The most important service Feedburner offers to blog owners, however, is statistical reports. Since all your feeds are consolidated and monitored by Feedburner, it is super simple to calculate RSS readership.

Feedburner now comes with a bonus – tracking reports that were formerly available only to paid subscribers became free when Google bought Feedburner earlier this year. By adding these Pro features to your feed reports, you can now see which posts are getting read and clicked on in your feeds, which links are followed, and even how your feed content is referenced on the web and used by non-subscribers.

Don’t confuse this service with Google Analytics. For the time being, you are best served by using both. Google Analytics will allow you to understand behavior on your blog (as well as tracking the number of visitors). Feedburner can do the same for your feeds. Without this service, you might never know that half of your followers even exist!

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Tags: feedburner, rss