You may have heard about a tool called Feedburner (www.feedburner.com). But what is it, exactly, and do you need one?
To put is in simple terms, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default wordpress feed, and adds more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself.
If you’ve already had your blog up for some time, chances are your readers may have already subscribed to your default RSS feed. Since you’re using Feedburner, it’s a good idea to make sure everyone is reading the same RSS feed.
Here’s how a default Wordpress feed looks like in Firefox:
Once you redirect your feed via Feedburner, it looks like this:
Once you’re set-up with Feedburner, you can activate all the cool functions, such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email, and also the Feedburner “Flares”.
Flares allow you to add functionality to your feeds, and there are a couple of good ones you’ll definately need to drive more repeat visitors to your blog:
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I have that problem with feedburner and feeddblitz “…magine if you already have thousands of subscribers via Feedburner, and you decide to stop using it (or switch to a similar service) for whatever reason. You won’t be able to tranfer those readers to your new service easily as your Feedburner” My web design site is built with Joomla CMS, users like to suscribe via the Joomla suscribers component, but importing users to Feedburner is very burocratic, with Feedblitz you have more control of your feeds and you can import export users, the problem: you have to pay for a premium account.
You’re right, that’s the catch using third-party RSS feed managers.
Thanks for sharing this info.
I still have a problem with how to get RSS Subscriber..
Feedburner is quite hard to demystify.. I’m still not entirely sure if it’s a beneficial or restricting application. I wrote a small article about it too:
I agree the Flare functionality is useful though.
Yeah.. I still have problems with my Feedburner even after 2 tries… Still trying to solve the problem.
Feedburner is a very messy thing, be warned. All your work can go down the rain…
I am trying to get help from someone at Feedburner or Google (who seems bought feedburner last year) and several days have paassed without any reply… very poor customer service or maybe I shall say no customer service at all – you are on your own here…
One example:
When I enter my email in Google and then go to Feedburner, Feedburner
displays a message saying “Welcome back, [my email].”. When I insert
later my email, in order to recover my password, it says “email
address you entered was not found on feedburner.[my email]. Please try
again.”???!!! So, first recognizes my email and says welcome back,
then says it does not recognize it???
I cannot get access to my Feedburner account, cannot check who has subscribed or not, cannot import or export contact…
Avoid Feedburner if you care for your subscribers data…
can someone please help?