Mar 29, 2011

10 Benefits of Firing up your Blog with Feedburner

10 Benefits of Google FeedburnerNo doubt you would have heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is a way for interested visitors to get your new content sent to them rather than having to come to your site. If you want to make your RSS feed even more effective then using Google’s free Feedburner service is essential to your traffic building strategy.

What are the benefits of Feedburner?

WIth Google Feedburner you can:

1. ‘Burn’ multiple feeds to your blog for your main content, comments, categories, tags and authors depending how you want to serve your visitors

2. Get a true estimate of readership through number of subscribers and statistics – initially this can be confusing as it looks at visitors per day to your feed. However you will be able to see how many people are clicking on feed links, which stories they are reading and how many subscribers you have

3. Make your feed funky by adding your logo to the feed and on emails sent to email subscribers

4. Add social media and bookmarking links to your feed making it easier for people to share your content

5. Include advertisements to your feed if you want to monetise it using Google Adsense.

5. Feedburner re-hosts your feed so if you get lots of traffic your server doesn’t take the hit. Someone could inadvertently check your feed every second which would crucify your site!

6. It’s an all in one plugin which is simple to use and allows people to auto-subscribe in the reader of their choice. So rather than use 3 or 4 plugins which will slow down your site, Feedburner multi-tasks for you.

7. Maintain a permanent RSS feed address. Possibly one of the best benefits as it allows you to change blogging platforms or your RSS feed URL without disrupting your readers interface through the Feedburner URL

8. Make sure your content is readable as Feedburner is browser and reader friendly – whatever browser or reader your visitors use Feedburner can handle it.

9. Publicise your blog using the many tools available

10. Set up Feedburner to automatically ping Technorati and other online directories, search engines etc. which will need to know when you’ve posted something new so that it will show up in search engines

To sum up Feedburner allows you to build both your visibility and credibility online by keeping in touch with your target audience on a regular basis. Remember that the more time they spend reading your material the more likely they are to use your services or buy your product.

So now you know why Feedburner is useful you can subscribe to See a Man About a Blog by email (see top right sidebar) and get my next post on how to add it to your site sent direct to your inbox!

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic, RSS for Blogging 15 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,