Feedburner- Why Use it?

Although you automatically get an RSS feed with the blogging platforms feedburner offers many enhancements to the standard feed that make it worthwhile considering like:

Promotion- Like the headline animator you can see below. email subscriptions, ping service and others

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Optimisation- SmartFeed which. Translates your feed  into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors' feed reader application.

Analysis- Shows subscribers and breakdown of how they are accessing the feed. This is probably the main reason most people start using it.

Monetization - Currently not fully activate but will enable publishers to make money from their feeds.

How it Works

When you burn a feed with FeedBurner it effectively creates a copy of your existing feed. The existing feed remains in its previous location and visitors can continue to use it and subscribe to it.

However if they continue to subscribe/use your old feed then you have lost the advantages of having a FeedBurner feed. Because of this it is important to change all of your existing feed links to point to you FeedBurner feed and away from your existing feed.

These links generally appear in two places:

• The autodiscovery meta tag
• Manual links images on your site that you created.

Autodiscovery

Modern browsers Mozilla Firefox and IE7.0 can detect if a web page/blog offers an RSS feed by reading using a special meta tag. This tag is created automatically by most modern blogging software like Wordpress and Blogger.

This means that whether you wanted to or not you are probably publishing an RSS feed. Because this is currently pointing to your default location (not FeedBurner) it will need to be changed.

Manual Links

These are graphic or text links that you have placed on the page like the one below:

These are very easy to change but because they may be on several pages it can be time consuming.

Quitting Feedburner

One of the biggest problems I had with FeedBurner was that I was directing my subscribers to a domain that I didn't own. So what happens if I decide not to use FeedBurner but to go back to using the original feed?

Well fortunately there are solutions that you can emply in the inital setup that can overcome that and you will find them listed and explained in here in FeedBurner on your terms .

However due to the complication of the setup I will rely on the FeedBurner provided mechanism that will redirect the feed back when you quit as It means zero setup on my part.

That is nicely explained here in Ciao, FeedBurner

Web www.build-your-website.co.uk

Related Articles and Resources

• RSS Readers -RSS readers what types are available and which one is best for you?

• Publishing Your RSS Feed

• Get Your RSS Feed Listed Yahoo- In 5 Simple Steps you can get Your RSS Feed Listed Within Hours at Yahoo.

• Using RSS Feeds on A Web Page -How to include RSS feeds on your web pages using JavaScript, PHP etc

• RSS feed creation software- Online and desktop software for creating RSS feeds

• RSS and Blogs - RSS and Blogs what is the relation between the two why do blogs always have an RSS feed?

•  Feed Structure, Creation and Use - RSS feeds are are simple xml formatted files. Here we look at the structure and how to manually create/build a simple feed.