FeedBurner Helps

“FeedBurner? What is FeedBurner? How do I use it? What do I do, burn feeds?” Those are a few questions I got in response when I took a small poll of about 15 people. Four of them already knew about this growing service, and the others got this same speech:

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

I use FeedBurner for my own blog and it has some great features:

• Smartfeed - which makes your (news) feed rss, rdf and atom compatible.
• Browser-friendly burner - to make my feed look pretty if you accidentally open it in firefox or internet explorer.
• Link splicer - to dump my del.icio.us bookmarks on a daily basis.
• Creative commons license burner - to ensure content is protected.

The people at FeedBurner have done a superb job of creating a service that takes over the job of managing your RSS feed by giving you great stats (charts, graphs tables) on your subscribers, click throughs, browsers, bots and more; and that is just the free service! If you pay for the premium service there are even more bells and whistles. It also makes doing podcasts a snap, auto-links your Amazon links with your Amazon Assoc Id, serves up your Google AdSense feed ads and more. It also makes sure that the widest range of readers and aggregates can read your feed.

To use FeedBurner, simply sign up and show FeedBurner where your RSS feed is. They consume it and generate a slick agnostic feed that any aggregator can receive. It’s as simple as that. The interface is easy on the eyes, simple, and a joy to work with. FeedBurner is free, but if you want more (and I must stress that the free service gives you plenty,) the premium price is just $4-16/month.