Product Review: Use FeedBurner to supercharge your RSS feed

Ahh, the good old saying, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it.” Google’s FeedBurner service helps solve this problem with your RSS feeds (What the hell is RSS?), and it adds some really cool features along with it.

How it works

When you sign up for FeedBurner, you give it your RSS feed’s address, and FeedBurner gives you a new feed address to replace it with. When people subscribe to your new FeedBurner address, the service starts tracking subscriptions. This process is called “burning your feed.” Don’t worry, nothing is set on fire. ;)

There are plugins for the different blog platforms that allow you to redirect your current subscribers to your new FeedBurner address so you can start tracking immediately.

Track your feed’s subscribers

A day after you’re set up, you can start reporting on how many people are subscribed to your feed. The first thing you see when you sign in is a report of the last 30 days of activity. This is nice because you can see if your actions (or inactions) are causing new people to subscribe, or, worse yet, causing people to unsubscribe.

You can click on each of the bars in the dashboard report to get a report on activities for that given day. Here’s an example for activity on my blog:

As you can see, I had 22 subscribers on January 28, and 1 person viewed my entry called Columbus Digital Adobe User Group[1].

FeedBurner does much more than reporting!

I’m not going to list every feature that FeedBurner offers, but here are some other cool things the service offers that I think are very valuable. Quite honestly, I haven’t explored the other features, so you may even find something cool that I’m unaware of.

Email subscriptions

Some people may prefer to sign up for an email digest of your posts and articles. FeedBurner manages all of this for you and gives you a snippet of code to post in your blog’s sidebar or on a separate “sign up” page that you can insert a link to. You can use FeedBurner to brand the emails with your logo and font colors. It also allows for you to choose a time of day to send out the daily digest. (Stay tuned for optimal times to send emails in a future Glass Case post.)

Great uptime and portability

With FeedBurner, your feed will always be up, even if your blog goes down. I trust Google’s ability to keep their services running, even over my own abilities.

Also, if your blog moves addresses one day, your feed won’t. You just point FeedBurner to the new feed address, and your subscribers will be none the wiser!

Automatic blog service pinging

FeedBurner can take care of “pinging” major blog communities every time it detects that you have a new article. This means that FeedBurner alerts popular blog communities like Technorati, My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Blog Search for you automagically. Automatic exposure for all of your entries!

Code stuff

FeedBurner is obsessed with RSS feeds, and you aren’t. Hell, I’m not even obsessed with RSS feed code either, and I’m a web geek! They can automatically make sure that your feed is displaying the correct code so that it works in most feed readers. It’s nice to have one less thing to worry about.

I’m a FeedBurner fanatic

Yes, I heart FeedBurner. I think I’m even going to send out for some of their swag [via Wayback Machine] so I can proudly post it on the cover of my laptop.

I hope you can find the same value in the service that I have. Let us know in the comments if you find any more hidden gems that I didn’t mention.

[1]: This post doesn’t exist anymore, so I’m now linking to the Wayback Machine archive.