What Is Feedburner and How Do You Get One?


Feedburner

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:

feedburner1

Once you redirect your feed via Feedburner, it looks like this:

feedburner2

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.

Related posts:

  1. Display Google Adsense in Feedburner RSS Feeds
  2. Market Your Feeds Better with FeedBurner
  3. How To Create A Custom FeedBurner Flare
  4. Mapping Default Wordpress RSS Feeds to Feedburner Feeds
  5. Wordpress Plugins – FeedBurner SiteStats Enabler

20 Responses to “What Is Feedburner and How Do You Get One?”

  1. Andrés Paredes on August 13th, 2007 2:53 am

    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.

  2. Gobala Krishnan on August 15th, 2007 6:24 pm

    You’re right, that’s the catch using third-party RSS feed managers.

  3. How To Create A Custom FeedBurner Flare | Blogging Tips on January 11th, 2008 3:16 pm

    [...] you know you can add a “Personal FeedFlare” or Custom Feed Flare to your FeedBurner account, and that it’s not that hard to [...]

  4. Aweber / Feedburner Integration is Good News For Marketers | Blogging Tips on February 2nd, 2008 12:24 pm

    [...] 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 [...]

  5. Lueni Blog on February 9th, 2008 5:10 pm

    Thanks for sharing this info.

    I still have a problem with how to get RSS Subscriber..

  6. Adam Moss on February 9th, 2008 6:41 pm

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 209715200 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 24 bytes) in /home/blogsell/public_html/tips/wp-content/plugins/linktrackr/linktrackr.php on line 533