I honestly enjoy plugging resources that I feel would benefit many people. A resource that not many of my visitors are aware of is a nifty little site named FeedBurner.
This site was created to make blog publishing easier for many people around the world. What FeedBurner can do for you is take your weblog’s RSS feed and turn it into a more user-friendly resource. When people tend to load an RSS feed directly, they are given a bunch of rubbish that can only be properly read with a special RSS based program. When running your feed through FeedBurner, however, the work is done for you.
A major upside to using FeedBurner is it’s simplicity. You can easily track all of your statistics through your own personal administration panel. You can also publish as many personal RSS feeds as you please. Say you’re an avid blogger and own approximately 10 blogs on the internet that you update on a regular basis. FeedBurner gives you the ability to keep track of all of these blogs under one single login. No, you can not blog from feedburner but if you are someone who bounces from domain to domain, feedburner makes your life very simple.
A dear friend of mine changes domains on an almost regular basis. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever known her to have the same domain name for more than six months, and even then that’s kind of a ball-park-give/take estimate. She was lucky enough to have many people subscribed to her RSS feed, however she had to constantly notify the users that her RSS feed has now changed and from there – they had to go and update their bookmarks. It can be really annoying having to keep updating your URL. FeedBurner is the only site that allows you to have a single URL that can be updated without changing it’s output.
For example, you have the feedburner address of:
feeds.feedburner.com/MyCoolSite
Up until yesterday your website address was mycoolsite.com. You’re now known as ubercoolwebsite.com
What do you do from here? Log into FeedBurner.com and edit the preferences of MyCoolSite, update your RSS address to the new ubercoolwebsite.com/?rss address and that’s all the work that needs to be done. No more forcing your subscribers to do the updating, you’re the only one who has to do it now. You update everything for them, not visa-versa. Sure, it’s great to have some kind of interaction on your website but that’s what the comments are for, RSS feeds aren’t meant to drive your subscribers crazy!
Speaking of subscribers – FeedBurner allows you to see just how many people are subscribing to your feed. As of right now I can tell you that there are over 100 people subscribed to my RSS feed. How do I know this? My control panel on FeedBurner told me! I log in, check the statistics and the first thing I see is a detailed list of who’s subscribed to my feed, it’s pretty cool! This site has only officially been launched for 3 days and already 100 people have found me interesting enough to the point of keeping my URL in their bookmarks.
But what about the people who know nothing about RSS feeds? What about the people who just can’t be bothered with excess links being thrown all over the place? It’s simple! FeedBurner offers your visitors the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed through an email address. Whenever your website is updated your subscriber is then emailed with a direct link to your newest entry – what a way to keep people coming back for more, eh?
So if you’re looking for an easier way to get your name out there through your blog, and have people coming back for more, sign up for FeedBurner.com, you won’t regret it – trust me!
And if you happened to have liked what I said here, please feel free to subscribe to any of my own personal feeds! You can find the URL for this website on the sidebar. I update regularly and if I ever did change domains you’d easily come with me without having to update anything on your part!