I use Feedburner to serve RSS feed of this blog and so do almost all the professional and amateur bloggers. Yet at times I come across bloggers, who aren’t leveraging feedburner and are instead relying upon the stock RSS feed built into wordpress, to reach out to their readers.
While there is nothing wrong with the stock RSS feed WordPress generates, Feedburner offers much more than just a simple RSS feed and can actually help you in your blogging endeavors, here is how:
1. Email subscriptions: With feedburner, you aren’t really limited to publishing only RSS feeds; you can also offer your readers, a simple option to subscribe to email updates, where they receive your blog posts in their mail box! This not only helps you reach out to an audience which might not be comfortable/familiar with RSS syndication, but also help you develop your email list, which you can later use for newsletters etc. (after getting approval from the readers of course).
2. Automatically post on twitter: Let’s face it, Twitter is big these days in the Social Media circles and what better way to promote your blog posts, then to automatically publish them to your twitter account, so that your twitter followers can easily keep up with your updates and in case you are an infrequent twitter user, help make your twitter account look active.
3. Adsense integration: Google Adsense is a great way to start making money online, especially when your blog is new or in case there aren’t too many good affiliate programs in your niche. Since Feedburner is owned by Google, Google allows you to integrate your feedburner RSS feed with your Adsense account and automatically integrate adsense ads into your RSS feed (hopefully one day they will do the same for email subscriptions) and help you make money off your feeds!
4. Help you track of RSS stats: Feedburner also helps you keep stats of the number of subscribers and how many click through etc. your feed is receiving. Something which wouldn’t be apparent to you, had you been using the usual RSS feed of WordPress.
5. URL and Host independent: While it is always best to keep the URL structure the same, sometimes it is imperative to change directory structure or maybe even a domain. In such a scenario, your feed would continue to be served through the same URL (provided you haven’t redirected it to your domain) and your subscribers wouldn’t have to re-subscribe. Similarly in case of hosting issue like server being down or while changing hosts, your site can become inaccessible to users, however with your feed being published by Feedburner, you can be sure, that your subscribers wouldn’t be inconvenienced by the outage and would still be able to read your blogposts.
While I can go on and on about how much Feedburner is good, I would leave the discussion to rest at this juncture and recommend you to check it out yourself and decide for yourself.
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