Feedburner Feeding Frenzy

December 8, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

As well as our regular RSS/ATOM/XML web feeds we also have to consider a Feedburner Feed.

I must admit I was a bit baffled about Feedburner when i first heard about it, I mean doesn’t our regular RSS feeds do the job. Well it does, but a Feedburner feed is a smarter way to managing a feed.

Feedburner is a service that was acquired by Google back in 2007 for $100 million, so now you can get it from your Google box of tricks. It essential takes your regular RSS feeds and channels them in a different way and lets you see who’s subscribing. Here are some of the advantages:

The Feedburner feed takes over the management of distributing the feed to your subscribers which is a good thing as you will not incur the bandwidth usage making Feedburner take the hit, they obviously have to poll you but that will just be one source not multiple ones.

The RSS feed can converted to more of a http, browser appearance when converted from your RSS XML look and feel. So it can go from this;

Feedburner-RSS-style

to this,

Feedburner-HTML-style

Feedburner offers an analytic service so you can track who is subscribing, where they are subscribing from and what items/articles they are clicking on.

You can add Adsense you your feed to hopefully monetize it.

The feed can be pinged to RSS and search directories that subscribe to Feedburners feeds, you just need to enable ‘pingshot’ from  the Publicise tab of your Feedburner option tab.

feedburner-pingshot

So to get a Feedburner feed sign up at Google or feedburner.com which is one and the same.

Your traditional RSS feed address is:

http://www.yoururl/feed/  and Feedburner converts that to:http://feeds.feedburner.com/yoururl

So when distributing your feed be sure to give the Feedburner URL. There is a guide on how to do redirect RSS feeds from certain blogging software such as Blogger and TypePad on Google help. For WordPress use the plug in FD Feedburner Plugin for the redirection.

All in all it makes perfect sense to do it, you get to know who is interested in you, less bandwidth on your server, the potential to monetize the feed and the ability to increase your traffic through the pingshot service. Everyone’s a winner.