What Is Feedburner and How Do You Get One?
You may have heard about a tool called Feedburner (www.feedburner.com). But what is it, exactly, and do you need one?
To put is in simple terms, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default wordpress feed, and adds more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself.
If you’ve already had your blog up for some time, chances are your readers may have already subscribed to your default RSS feed. Since you’re using Feedburner, it’s a good idea to make sure everyone is reading the same RSS feed.
Here’s how a default Wordpress feed looks like in Firefox:
Once you redirect your feed via Feedburner, it looks like this:
Once you’re set-up with Feedburner, you can activate all the cool functions, such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email, and also the Feedburner “Flares”.
Flares allow you to add functionality to your feeds, and there are a couple of good ones you’ll definately need to drive more repeat visitors to your blog:
Once you’ve activated the Flares, they will appear in your RSS feed.
There’s only one disadvantage of using Feedburner: you lose control of your RSS feed.
Imagine if you already have thousands of subscribers via Feedburner, and you decide to stop using it (or switch to a similar service) for whatever reason. You won’t be able to tranfer those readers to your new service easily as your Feedburner version has already been published on the Internet on tons of different sites and sources.
That fact aside, using Feedburner will ultimately make your life a whole lot easier. To sign-up, just go to www.Feedburner.com.
18 Responses to “What Is Feedburner and How Do You Get One?”
I have that problem with feedburner and feeddblitz “…magine if you already have thousands of subscribers via Feedburner, and you decide to stop using it (or switch to a similar service) for whatever reason. You won’t be able to tranfer those readers to your new service easily as your Feedburner” My web design site is built with Joomla CMS, users like to suscribe via the Joomla suscribers component, but importing users to Feedburner is very burocratic, with Feedblitz you have more control of your feeds and you can import export users, the problem: you have to pay for a premium account.
You’re right, that’s the catch using third-party RSS feed managers.
[...] you know you can add a “Personal FeedFlare” or Custom Feed Flare to your FeedBurner account, and that it’s not that hard to [...]
[...] bloggers like Yaro Starak, Alex Sysoeff and me aren’t 100% pure bloggers who depend solely on FeedBurner, pure blog traffic or even pure blog monetization for that matter. We have our own products that [...]
Thanks for sharing this info.
I still have a problem with how to get RSS Subscriber..
Feedburner is quite hard to demystify.. I’m still not entirely sure if it’s a beneficial or restricting application. I wrote a small article about it too:
I agree the Flare functionality is useful though.
[...] the subscribe buttons and search form is neatly laid out right on top, with support for Feedburner RSS and email [...]
[...] Answer: For those who don’t know what Feedburner is, check out this page explaining what it is, check out the Feedburner site or subscribe to the blog via RSS to see it in action (the subtly of [...]
Yeah.. I still have problems with my Feedburner even after 2 tries… Still trying to solve the problem.
Feedburner is a very messy thing, be warned. All your work can go down the rain…
I am trying to get help from someone at Feedburner or Google (who seems bought feedburner last year) and several days have paassed without any reply… very poor customer service or maybe I shall say no customer service at all – you are on your own here…
One example:
When I enter my email in Google and then go to Feedburner, Feedburner
displays a message saying “Welcome back, [my email].”. When I insert
later my email, in order to recover my password, it says “email
address you entered was not found on feedburner.[my email]. Please try
again.”???!!! So, first recognizes my email and says welcome back,
then says it does not recognize it???
I cannot get access to my Feedburner account, cannot check who has subscribed or not, cannot import or export contact…
Avoid Feedburner if you care for your subscribers data…
can someone please help?
I ended up here trying to find out if Feedburner is a good idea. I thought it would be; however, when I signed up for an account it didn’t show ANY of my subscribers and I was afraid my current 116 subscribers would suddenly not get my feed, so I deleted my account there until I could get more info. What can you tell me about this?
great informative post thanks i want to use feedburner at http://guidepk.info give me any idea about it
So Miguel what other service do you suggest other then feedburner if you have one? Are you having that problem using google account?
Thank you for helping me to understand the work of Feedburner
Thanks! for the help, at first it was difficult to understand why I would need a feedburner. Now I understand.
I was ready to sign up but after reading the comments, Ive change my mind. Does anyone have a suggestion as to who to use?
Thank you for you comments.
Luiz
So far feedburner has been great for me. I started out using it and it is fine. Really makes my feed look good.
great content thank you