Beginner’s Blog

Last week Darren from ProBlogger and Rachel from Cre8d design talked about using a FeedBurner for their blogs. The main reason for using this service - is tracking the stats of your feed subscribers. But there are many more reasons to use it, that go unnoticed by even most experienced Bloggers. I think that FeedBurner is a must for anyone thinking about Blogging career. And it can do much more then track your stats. So here’s the list of reasons to use FeedBurner for your Blog:

1. Know who reads your feed. If you have a Blog, a lot of regular readers do not go to your site. Instead they prefer to subscribe to Blog’s feed directly. The are lots and lots of different feed readers: Bloglines, FeedDeemon, Firefox Live Bookmarks, Opera RSS Reader, just to name a few. And there’s usually 4 types of different feeds that your blogging software creates: Atom, RSS, RDF and RSS 2. Different users use different Feed Readers and different feed formats. There’s no way for you to know how many readers use what. The only possibility to know the rough size of your total audience is to provide just excerpts of your posts in the feed, so readers have to click on the links to read full articles. But that is pretty inconvenient for your visitors and still doesn’t solve a problem. I know quite a few people who simply delete incomplete feeds from their browsers. That means that you may even lose some readers if you are not providing full feed and it doesn’t matter how good your content is. FeedBurner solves this problem at once.  At least for WordPress, but I think it should be true for other platforms as well. FeedBurner lets you convert all your feeds into a single one and track it through their SmartFeed service. After switching this feature on, complete view of your audience becomes available at once.

2. Make your feed interactive. With FeedFlare service you can give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish. FeedFlare allows your subscribers to easily e-mail posts to friends, send e-mail to you, bookmark posts, display number of blogs that link to you through Technorati, and display the number of comments to your posts. With the new version of FeedFlare, released last week, you can easily add these features to your main blog.
All of those are good ways to promote your blog. If someone e-mails your post, the recipient is very likely to visit your site and, maybe, like it. If enough people tag your post on Delicious, you can even make it to their most popular page and that will do wonders for your visibility. If a post has a lot of comments, that might give readers a reason to visit your site, and maybe click on some ads.
Big deal, some might say. I had “add to delicious” option on my first blog - Blogdotes -from the beginning. And I installed “e-mail this post” feature on my blog, as well. But I never could make it work properly and installation process was a nightmare. This is possibly the reason of why I don’t see these features on many popular blogs. As Rick Klau, on of the people behind the FeedFlare says: FeedFlare is big. Really big. And there’s many more great things to come. Go read his post to see the details.

3. Start a newsletter with FeedBlitz service, without any additional effort from your side. As Darren says: “Most readers don’t care they are reading a Blog. “Most reader’s don’t know what syndication, RSS, Atom, feeds and Feed Readers are”, I might add. So when they accidentally get on your site through Google, but forget to bookmark it, they might never find you again. Even if they liked what you had to say. But one thing that they are familiar with - is e-mail subscription form. With FeedBlitz they can now subscribe to your blog through e-mail. So by enabling this service you have the beginnings of a newsletter. And you can double your blog’s stock with newsletter.

4. Promote your blogs through your entire network. If you run several blogs you can add headlines from one blog to your other blogs with Headline Animator. That way, interested readers from one site can easily find your other blogs. You can see this feature at work on the right toolbar on this page.

5. Ping up to 9 selected services, when you publish your posts. I know that most blogging platforms do this automatically. Also you can ping a number of them manually. But there’s no such thing as too many pings, in this case. So you can automate this thing with FeedBurner’s PingShot service. I was having a problem with Technorati - they stopped picking up my posts few days after I launched my blog. This is familiar issue in blogosphere. But they started picking up my posts again, when I activated PingShot service. It might not work for everyone, but it worked for me.

6. Monetize your blog. With FeedBurner you can add Google AdSense ads, automatically insert your Amazon Associates ID into catalog item links found in your feed, or place ads through FeedBurner Ad network. Granted, you have to have at least 500 subscribers to use most of monetization options, but if you have that, why let another earning opportunity go to waist.

7. Improve the looks of your feed. If you are concerned with the branding of your blog, you can add a logo or any other small image with Feed Image Burner, insert photos from Flickr, Buzznet, or Webshots with PhotoSplicer, or add your links feed from various popular link collection services with LinkSplicer. That will surely make your feed stand out from the crowd.

All of these services are free. So, if you don’t have FeedBurner account, go and get it. IMHO, FeedBurner is one of the first services that you should apply for, when starting a blog. If you already have an account, but don’t use these services, go explore them. I am sure you will like at least some.