Back when there were issues with feeds, where different blog platforms were pushing their own feed, many users became frustrated because their feed reader didn’t support the feed type.
But then services like Feedburner began to crop up. They were able to bridge that gap by allowing bloggers to “burn” their feed into other varieties. Since then Feedburner has become must more than a feed translation service.
And while Feedburner’s offerings can be helpful to bloggers one begins to wonder if there is a price bloggers are paying to use the service?
By price I don’t mean an actual cost. A Feedburner account is free, and it only takes minutes to burn a feed. Plus Feedburner has a series of widgets you can use to help promote your feed. But some people are beginning to wonder if the benefits of Feedburner outweigh the costs.
But before I get into that let’s take a look at what Feedburner has to offer
Burning a Feed
Adding a feed to Feedburner (also known as burning a feed) is very simple. All you need to do is add the URL of your feed to the homepage:
And follow some configuration steps. During the configuration you have some options you can choose. However you can also activate these options at a later date if you decide you want to.
As you can see, Feedburner isn’t just for bloggers. They also help podcasters as well.
So let’s take a look at the options:
Publicize
You can choose to publicize your feed using Feedburner. There are many ways you can do this, however the one I recommend above all else is the “PingShot.”
PingShot notifies some of the top blog services that you have an update on your blog. These include Technorati, My Yahoo, and Bloglines. Plus you can add up to 5 more services such as Ping-o-matic, Newsgator, Google blogsearch and more.
Once you have a Feedburner feed set up it is as simple as activating the PingShot service to have these sites notified of an update. No other configuration is required.
Other ways to publicize your blog include a headline animator, which shows off the last 5 posts of your blog, BuzzBoost, which recreates your XML or Atom feed into an HTML page, FeedCount, which displays your readership, and more.
Optimize
Feedburner has many ways you can optimize your feed to make it look better, and even perhaps increase readership on your site. These include SmartFeed which ensures maximum compatibility which translates your feed “on the fly” to a format compatible with your visitors feed reader. That way, whether you have an atom or XML feed it will be compatible with the visitors reader.
FeedFlare gives your readers options when viewing the feed. It embeds links into the feed which allow them to email the post, save it to a variety of services such as Facebook and del.ico.us, Digg it or Stumble it.
There are also options for Geotagging, splicing photos and links, events and more.
Analyze
Feedburner also has a simple analytics package which can give you stats on readership you may not get from your regular analytics package.
With Feedburner stats you can get subscription data to show the number of readers accessing your feed, as well as a breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, clickthrough tracking, enclosure downloads (if you podcast) live hits and uncommon uses (for example if your feed is being re-used by other sites).
Monetize
Should you wish to, you can add advertising to your feed and site using the Feedburner Ad Network. As the site owner you have control over what ads are placed on your site and feed, and you can deactivate them at any time.
Payout is usually based on a CPM method which means the more views your site and/or feed get, the more money you can make.
What’s the Downside?
By now you’re probably thinking to yourself “this sounds pretty good, I better get in on it” but before you do I’d just like to talk a bit about that concern that I mentioned at the beginning of this article.
While Feedburner does offer you a lot of free stuff, what you may be giving up are direct links to your feed’s source and maybe even your site.
Much like an affiliate program doesn’t transfer link popularity, the feed URLs from Feedburner also do not transfer link popularity. That means that if someone says “check out this site’s feed” and links to the Feedburner feed instead of your XML or Atom feed, then Feedburner gains credit for that link.
But if you feel that the loss of potential link popularity is worth the trade-off (and most people do) then I highly recommend Feedburner. It has lots of useful widgets and add-ons which can improve your site, and the analytics provide some great insight into your readership which other analytics don’t give.
