Do I need to use FeedBurner? Does it help?

« How to start earning through Google Adwords ? • FeedFlare: Add Interactivity in your Feeds »

Do I need to use FeedBurner? Does it help?

By Pankaj May 15, 2007 filed in Internet Marketing

If you ask me, I would say ‘Yes’ for sure. Reasons? Keep reading…

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

The above text is written in FeedBurner’s About FeedBurner page and this is exactly what FeedBurner does. It allows you to manage and customize your RSS feeds in order to give you more control over them. If youe are not sure about the terms like feeds, RSS, aggregator etc, head straight to the following posts made earlier by us
So what are Feeds, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers? and How does an RSS Feed help ?

Now its time to understand its benifits …

- It is free. Well, almost as you need to pay little bit ($5/month at the time of writing) in order to get more detailed statistics.
- It is an easy to use service.

Statistics, and lots of it
- It allows us to know how many people are reading our feeds and what software (aggregator) they are using.
- It tells us which posts are getting the most click throughs, that is which content your readers are reading .Though for this service you need to upgrade from free services to premium service.
- Lets us know about any uncommon uses of the feed.
- View the hits made to the feed and also who ( as in search engine bots or web browsers) . These hits doesn’t add to your subscribers list and rightly so, nevertheless a good statistic to know anyone.

Feed Usability
- Allows you to change the title and description of your feed.
- Allows you to place an image from the URL into your feeds to give it more personal touch.
- A Browser friendly page instead of complex xml feeds (mostly understood by geeks). This helps in increasing the readership as your feed page doesn’t get mistaken as an error by seeing the raw XML.
- Using the browser friendly page, readers can directly subscriber to many popular aggregators such as Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader etc. Which relates down to that users don’t have to copy and paste the feed URL on their aggregators.
- FeedFlare component helps in adding interactivity to your feeds, by allowing your reader to act on your content without visiting the blog. This is achieved by adding a simple footer in each of your posts which includes the links to digg.com, del.ico.us, emails etc.
- FeedBurner seamlessly manages all types of feeds (ATOM, RSS, RDF) automatically as it translates your feed on the fly into a format compatible with your visitors hence improving the chances of more subscription.
- Using LinkSplicer and PhotoSplicer, you can share your links (Digg, Furl, del.ico.us etc) and photos (from Flickr, Buzznet or Webshots) in your feeds.
- Allows your reader to subscribe to your feeds using email. FeedBurner supports FeedBlitz and Rmail along with its own. This is really a great service to the readers who don’t use or have access to any aggregator.

Podcasting
FeedBurner makes podcasting very easy. One it can configure your feed to handle enclosures. Second it provides additional fields in which you can add the info you’ll need for iTunes. If you want, the feedburner will also submit your podcast feed to Yahoo podcasts.

FeedBurner Ad Network
FeedBurner has its own FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) though participation in FAN is only by invitation so if you are one of those bloggers who enjoys huge readership then you can monetize your content as well.

Many more ..
- FeedBurner caches your feed hence it can reduce the load on your server and can save your bandwidth usage (especially noticeable on heavy traffic blogs)
- Provides you with small HTML/JavaScript code (they call it chicklets) which can be easily put in your blog to attract readers.
- If you are not already using Google Analytics / StatCounter for your website statistics, you can use the one provided by FeedBurner.

So if you are not using FeedBurner to publish (they call it burning) your feeds, act now and discover the benefits of FeedBurner.