FeedBurner 101 – What FeedBurner is, and Why You Want It

FeedBurner is a free service that provides two very important benefits:

• It makes it easier for people to subscribe to your blog
• You can see tracking data about your subscribers

But first, let’s make sure we know what FeedBurner is in the first place.

FeedBurner is a Better Way to Do RSS Feeds

FeedBurner gives you all kinds of wonderful functionality for your blog’s RSS feed that don’t come with RSS already. FeedBurner works by acting as a go-between. It takes your blog’s feed, does all this cool stuff with it, and then people can subscribe to the FeedBurner feed of your blog. That way, your subscribers get the jazzed-up version of your blog’s feed, instead of the ho-hum default version.

FeedBurner Makes it Easier for Readers to Subscribe

FeedBurner provides tools for making it easier for readers to subscribe to your blog. Not every blog design is made with getting subscriptions as a goal. The RSS icon or a way to subscribe by email are nowhere to be found. This hurts your chances of getting sign-ups. FeedBurner gives you HTML code you can paste into your blog theme’s template files or into a WordPress sidebar text widget. In fact, that’s how I do mine here on Remarkablogger and on Gateway Blogging.

FeedBurner gives you one very important feature: it lets readers subscribe to your blog by email. Your posts are delivered to a subscriber’s inbox instead of to an RSS reader. This is vital, because not everyone knows what RSS is or likes it. In fact, that could be the majority of your readers… or, would-be readers.

FeedBurner Gives You Subscriber Tracking

You can see how many subscribers you have by logging in to your FeedBurner account. You can see your email subscriber list, too (both kinds are counted together for total subscribers). You can see which of your posts got clicks. This is valuable feedback on how well you’re doing. For most of us, we want the most subscribers possible.

Learn More About FeedBurner

FeedBurner replaces the normal feed URL of your blog. It takes a bit of work to set it up. If you want to know about how to set up FeedBurner step-by-step, check out FeedBurner for WordPress: The Basics Nobody Told You About. All of my blog consulting clients get FeedBurner feeds created, set up, and integrated into their blog designs as standard.

Of course, if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Remarkablogger to receive free updates whenever I publish something new here. You don’t want to miss the next post! If RSS isn’t your thing, you can get posts by email. Just put your email address in the form in the upper-right corner of the page (safe and no spam ever).