Benefit of FeedBurner

Recently a reader asked me what the benefit of using FeedBurner is.

Please explain the benefit of offering my feed through feedburner, instead of giving feed directly. I recently signed up with them and they gave me an URL and asked to publish on my blog for offering subscription through that URL. What benefit will I get by offering their URL, instead of using my own which is mydomain.com/feed ?

After answering, I thought of putting up my reply here too for my readers with the same question. Here goes…

The default RSS/Atom feed does a good job of letting your readers know when you publish a new post, but when it comes to statistics and tracking your RSS/Atom feeds, there is no better tool than FeedBurner.

It is amazing how simple it is to start using this feed conversion service. All you have to do is sign up with their free account and tell them where your feed is. From there, you will get many different tools and services you can use with your RSS/Atom feed, as long as you use FeedBurner to burn your feed.

To use their services you have to use their URL. The URL looks like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/johntp

Some of the top services that FeedBurner offers are:

Email Subscriptions

Give your readers another way to keep up with your blog by placing an email subscription form on your site and turn your feed into a newsletter with Feedblitz. This service can be found under Publicize.

Browser Friendly

The Browser-Friendly service turns your RSS feed into a web page, so that when people new to RSS click on your feed, they will find out how to use it. All you do is link to the FeedBurner version of your feed, instead of your default feed address. FeedBurner will even help you with this.

It makes it easy for your potential subscribers to preview and subscribe to your feed. This service can be found under Optimize tab.

SmartFeed

This tool will convert your feed on the fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitor’s feed reader application. This service can be found under Optimize tab.

Link Splicer

Using this service you can share links from Furl, del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 or Bloglines with your readers. This can be useful for you because the more of a resource your feed is, the more your subscribers will want to use it. You can find this service under Optimize tab.

Photo Splicer

The Photosplicer service will let you drop images into your feed using Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots. This can also be found under Optimize tab.

FeedFlare

FeedFlare gives your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish. FeedFlare should be placed at the bottom of each post, helping you to spread the word about your blog.

Creative Commons

With Creative Commons you can set permissions that explain what others have to follow to use your feed. Making it clear about what permissions others have to follow to use your feed will encourage them to display your headlines on their site.
With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit and only on the conditions you specify. This service can be found under the Publicize tab.

PingShot

PingShot will free up your time by automatically pinging all the top blog notification sites when you update. This is a surely a time saver. PingShot can be found under publicize tab.
BuzzBoost

BuzzBoost helps you to promote your blog on another site. Very useful if you have more than one site and you want readers of one site to know about the other.
BuzzBoost is found under the publicize tab.

Headline Animator

Create an animated GIF images that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s a rotating banner for promoting your own work. It can be found under the publicize tab.

FeedCount

FeedCount is another cool way to promote your feed. You can choose between dynamic or static graphic that always displays your feed’s current circulation, as calculated by FeedBurner.It can be found under the publicize tab.

Chicklet Chooser

Promote your FeedBurner feed directly on your website by placing HTML that Chicklet Chooser automatically generates for you in your site templates to help users easily subscribe to your feed.It can be found under the publicize tab.

FeedBurner offers many other good services too. I highly recommend that you sign up with them.