Social Media PowerBlogs

Google FeedBurner is an excellent service that lets you offer a wide variety of different RSS feeds from your blog with ease and it also lets you keep track of RSS subscriptions.

The basic service is free!
When you go to the FeedBurner home page, the first thing you see is “Ready to burn your feed? Start here.”
Enter your feed name and then you can use the wide variety of services that FeedBurner offers.

Here are my Top 10 reasons for using the FeedBurner service:-

Add FeedBurner Subscriber Buttons to your site.

Add a generic RSS button, or choose from lots of others such as ones for Google Reader, Pageflakes, Bloglines, etc. Just pick the button you want, your blogging platform, and Feedburner gives you the HTML

Track your subscriber stats.

Feedburner lets you see just how many people are reading your feed each day. But not only who is reading, but where they are coming from, what browser they are using, what type of feed reader they used, and many other stats. If you can tell which feed readers your readers are using to access your feed, then you can make sure that the reader is easily available and maybe add it to your sidebar for ease of access for your users.
You can also track your visitors to your blog by adding some code to your blog template. Although most people stick to other analytical methods like Google Analytics.

Consolidate your feed tracking.

If you have a Blogger blog, Feedburner has added the ability to redirect all your blog feeds to the one you burn with FeedBurner.
The advantage of this is that you can get a more accurate view of how many subscribers you have, and how they are reading your content.

Allow your readers to subscribe by email.

This gives your readers another option for receiving your content. Many people that are interested in getting your feed in their inbox probably aren’t able to read your blog on a regular basis, and want to use the email option to stay up to date. FeedBurner gives you a widget you can add to your blog, and then lets you see exactly who is subscribing to your feed via email, and how many times the feed is being read each day via email.
Gives your readers yet another method of reading your content.

Put a FeedBurner Headline Animator in your emails and on your blog.

This is a great feature that you can add to your emails and blog, that gives your blog’s name and scrolls the title to your latest posts, with a link to them. I use this as my signature for forums.
It also has a subscriber button for the feed.

Wordpress Plugins.

The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin automatically redirects any of your feeds to FeedBurner.  You can also create a comments feed, and have this directed to FeedBurner too.

FeedBurner FeedFlare.

This feature allows you to place a simple footer at the bottom of your post, allowing your readers to email, tag, share and act on the content you publish, by including services such as email, email author, Technorati link, subscribe to feed, and more.
This can be useful if a reader has not previously subscribed, but enjoys a particular post it could prompt them to subscribe if the link is right there for them.
Read more HERE about FeedBurner FeedFlare.

FeedBurner Link Splicer, and FeedBurner Photo Splicer.

This service lets you send links you have added to bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, and photos from sites such as Flickr. Both your bookmarks and photos will be merged with your blog feed.

FeedBurner BuzzBoost

FeedBurner BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as HTML.  You can promote your blog on other sites that you manage, via a snippet of code.

FeedBurner Podcasts.

On this blog I use the Odiogo Plugin to enable readers to listen to my posts.  They can also subscribe to the Podcast feed, and download recordings if they so wish.  This feed can also be directed to my FeedBurner feed, enabling complete integration of my feeds, and the ability to track statistics on where all my subscribers come from.

So If you want to get serious about optimizing your blog’s feed, Feedburner has all the tools you will ever need.

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