Make FeedBurner work for you

August 15th, 2005 at 8:30 am

Syndication feeds are very useful, and when it comes to statistics and tracking your RSS/Atom feeds, there is no better tool than Feedburner.

It’s amazing how simple it is to start using this feed conversion service. All you have to do is sign up with their free account and tell them where your feed is. From there, you will get many different tools and services you can use with your RSS/Atom feed, as long as you use FeedBurner to burn your feed.

Three main futures which you will get using FeedBurner are: Stats, Browser-Friendly Burner and SmartFeed™.

Stats

The most used FeedBurner future are stats collected on your feeds. They measure the general traffic level for your feed. They measure circulation or how many subscribers do you have, which news aggregators people use and what feed items subscribers most often “clickthrough” to read on your site.

Browser-Friendly Burner

Improves feed XML appearance if viewed in a browser.

SmartFeed™

Makes your feed work in any reader. You only need to publish one format of your feed. Feedburner takes that format and automatically makes your feed available in virtually any format required by modern news readers.

n addition to Stats, Browser-Friendly Burner and SmartFeed™ you should also be interested in Commerce Services (making money with RSS).

Google AdSense

This service allows anyone with a FeedBurner feed and an AdSense for feeds account to display ads automatically - no manual editing of RSS templates required. Ads are placed at the bottom of individual feed content items according to the content item length and ad frequency preferences you specify.

Amazon ID Burner

Inserts the Associates ID you specify into any Amazon.com links found in feed content.

Conclusion

Another benefit of Feedburner is the bandwidth saved by not serving up your own feeds. This savings could be significant to sites with high subscription volumes.

There are many other great services available. If you want to see them all just visit About FeedBurner.

If you publish some form of syndication feed, but haven’t checked out Feedburner, just go and do it.

Update, August 19th: I forgot to mention one very cool future which is called FeedCount™ chicklet. It is a dynamic graphic that always displays your feed’s current circulation, as calculated by FeedBurner. You can see it in action at the bottom of this site.

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17 Responses to “Make FeedBurner work for you”

Thanks for the tip; I’ll have to check feedburner out.

Comment by Blaine Moore | August 15th, 2005 #
Thank you very much, this is great! I had heard of feedburner but had no idea of all the stuff it could do! This will be very helpful, since one of my feeds is in atom, and it doesn’t seem to get picked up as well as my RSS feed. The statistics part sounds great too.

Comment by Pat | August 15th, 2005 #
I had no idea FeedBurner was so comprehensive! And I didn’t know that it had so much capability when it comes to inserting affiliate ads.

Must have another look at this! Thanks for the post!

Comment by Gerard McGarry | August 15th, 2005 #
What about the drawbacks of using Feedburner? Some people have said it’s a big mistake to turn your subscribers over to a third-party service you can’t control.

Comment by Steve Pavlina | August 15th, 2005 #
I can’t seem to see the past circulation. The only circulation stats available is the past 24 hours. Any hints?

Comment by yunasville | August 15th, 2005 #
There really are no drawbacks to Feedburner. I’ve been using the Feedburner service for about 2 months now. If you ever wanted to create your own news feed or podcast and you are not familiar with all the formatting involved, Feedburner does a great job for YOU. Thier support team is great so if you would run into any problems, they are always fast to respond and fix any problems you may have.

Comment by Chris | August 16th, 2005 #
Yunasville, when you are in your stats you can set your reporting range (upper right corner).

For the drawbacks of letting to manege your feeds to a third-party service there are some hard discussions on the net. The main subject is always what happens when you want to leave and manage your feeds on your own. FeedBurner will assist you and help you leave them. Read the full article - Ciao, FeedBurner.

Comment by Miha | August 16th, 2005 #
I took your advice and registered at Feedburner, and so far I’m one happy camper :)

Thanks for the tip!

Comment by Miha Hribar | August 16th, 2005 #
Been using FeedBurner for over a year now and I have to say it works great! A week ago I relocated my blog to another server, and while blog’s Url has changed, RSS feed’s remains the same, so - no need for readers to change address or resubscribe.
Another nice feature FeedBurner offers is geotagging your feed, which makes geo/map services like http://www.siblogs.com/map.aspx possible.

Comment by Andrej | August 16th, 2005 #
I’ve been using FeedBurner for a few months and had no problems with them, and I was really impressed when they posted a blog entry about how they’d deal with your feed if you decided you didn’t want to continue using their service.

I know a few people were reluctant to hand their feeds over before this, and it’s unusual and refreshing for a company to be so open about how to finish using them. (Link to the blog entry shown in Miha’s comment above).

Comment by Rob Lewis | August 17th, 2005 #
Thanks for the info and now i under more about feedburner

Comment by Qiu | August 18th, 2005 #
I love Feedburner as well and would love to be using Adsense for RSS but haven’t been able to get on the program.
Any hints?
Molly

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Comment by Vaughan Domitilla | October 21st, 2007 #
This is good information, These days many of the online frequent readers are referring to the Google Reader or Fast Reader to stay upto date with the latest development of any website or blog…

For those guys who are providing quality content its nessessry to have a RSS FEED and feed burner does a great job … Now that its aquired by Google… so we can expect … more improvement in its functionality in near future…..

Mark
Editor
http://www.212articles.com

Comment by Mark | May 14th, 2008 #