RSS is an essential technology for successful blogging. Since most of your regular readers will want to subscribe to your blog’s feed, it is a good idea to gain some knowledge about RSS and the value it offers. I assume your blog is equipped with at least one RSS feed, but do you use FeedBurner?
Owned by Google, FeedBurner is a free service offering tools to help you make the most of your feed. Here are five things I enjoy most about “burning” my feeds: 
- Keep count of your subscribers
I found it a little difficult to understand FeedBurner’s stats at first, but basically the number of individual subscribers to your feed is determinedper day. Naturally, not everyone accesses their feedreaders daily, so the number of subscribers fluctuates. Over time, FeedBurner calculates the average number of people who access your feed daily
You are able to “burn” multiple feeds in one account on FeedBurner. - Change the location of your feed without losing your subscribers
I recently changed the URL of my RSS feed from http://blogsolid.com/ideas/feed to http://blogsolid.com/feed. My subscribers were none the wiser, since they are subscribed to the FeedBurner URL which remained constant athttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogsolid. - Browser Friendly
Feedburner dresses up your raw XML and presents it in a neat, formatted and readable fashion. - Feed Image Burner
Of course, as a designer, this is my favourite feature – add your logo to the top of the feed! - Email Subscriptions
Offer your fans the opportunity to receive updates to your blog by e-mail. Once again FeedBurner allows you to dolly it up with your logo and choice of colours.
I actually didn’t see this service at first as it is a little hidden on the site. You have to click on “Publicize” at the top, then “Email Subscriptions” is located in the sidebar.
Oh, apart from the functionality, I really enjoy the random dry humour on the FeedBurner site. The copywriters must have had the time of their lives. “My Feeds do the boogie woogie”. What, they do? Haha.
Know any FeedBurner tricks and tips? Please share your feedburning wisdom in the comments below.
