Feedburner Tips

If you are not running your feed through Feedburner, you are missing out on great information to help you cater your content to your audience.

I used to be a big advocate of not using Feedburner when RSS news feeds first became important several years ago. I did not want to lose my domain branding on my feed by having it be wrapped by Feedburner.

But now, I recommend that you use Feedburner as feed stats at the PRO level are free now that Feedburner has been purchased by Google. It's easy to create a free account. You simply enter in the URL for your blog in Feedburner and it creates a new feed URL for you. If you are using Blogger, you enter this new feed address in the feed tab of the settings. For WordPress users it is more complicated. Typically I will hard code the feed into the meta tags, but you may actually now be able to find a plug-in that will allow you to install the Feedburner feed automatically from one of my last plug-in searches. I haven't checked it out yet, so if you have, leave me a comment.

I monitor my Feedburner stats to see what is happening in regards to broad subscribership. Remember however, Feedburner only provides stats on your RSS or Atom feed. It does not provide page views when people visit your blog using their browser or a link from your website. So, you will still need to review stats like Google Analytics or Urchin for the full picture of the popularity of your blog.

It is important to understand that according to industry reports that still only 7% of all readers are reading blogs via feeds so your real traffic will still be coming in via a browser. So make sure you have regular web stats enabled for your blog to track all of your traffic.

Feedburner, I Love You

Don't you? Are you using Feedburner? I have made the jump for this blog to feedburner. It used to be that I totally wanted all my URLs to carry my own site brand and so I have really balked at embracing Feedburner's applications. But for Blog-World Watch I am trying out everything new.

I have to say that the ability to read some statistics on your feed is a good thing and that is one of the things that Feedburner allows you to do. Although your feed becomes a new beast, has a Feedburner URL now I am not worried about that for this blog. I am using a custom domain from Blogspot for this blog, the Feedburner URLs, and the new Blogger.com interface, so I have thrown my fixation on site branding right out the window for this test and blog.

There are a few really neat things that I like about Feedburner and here they are:

1. Statistics - finally that you can understand. Still only 10% of Web-World is using feeds to view information. Wish it was higher, but RSS technology has still not been widely embraced.
2. Love the integrated new Blogger.com widgets. Want to add a chicklet? Feedburner makes it super point and click easy.
3. Make your feed automatically available for any news reader. No more RSS flavor choices. Will you go with Atom or RSS 2.0? Feedburner does it all for you with auto-sensing so you don't ever loose anyone for a technology mis-match.
4. Allow your blog readers to subscribe to posts via email. Get your blog information the good old fashioned way - by email. I haven't added this feature yet to this blog, but will most likely in the near future. I use that feature for sites that I am paying my ghost bloggers to write for so that I can monitor their posts and do like it, but you know what I am ready to write and ready to stop fooling around with my template.

So if you've been hanging back from Feedburner due to the URL branding thing, now's the time to let go of that and embrace some of the great new technology that Feedburner provides.