What is FeedBurner?
FeedBurner is a Chicago based company that offers "the biggest, baddest advertising network for blogs and RSS feeds you’ll find anywhere on the planet." This statement comes directly from the FeedBurner blog. FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. A ton of Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers to promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Internet / Web 2.0. And they where right, FeedBurner had become popular enough to be bought by Google in 2007. FeedBurner is todays most popular distributer of RSS. RSS offers you many ways to monetize your work and to drive traffic to your blog or website. Read in this article what RSS is and what it can do for you.
What is RSS?
RSS Feeds are a relatively new way for website owners and webmasters to easily distribute their content far beyond the usual website visitors using web browsers. RSS Feeds permit subscription to regular updates. Although RSS has been around for a while now, it’s true potential has only come to work in recent years. Whenever you update your blog, a headline and a heading of your article will be delivered automatically to all subscribers via a web portal, news reader, or by email. A major advantage of RSS Feeds is for site content to be easily packaged into so called widgets, gadgets, mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display podcasts, blogs and news headlines wherever and whenever you like.
Widgets are available at the FeedBurner website and at blogging tools websites. There are also plug-ins for WordPress blogs available what makes quickly adapting FeedBurner to you blog very easy.
The latest technology evolution in online publishing and Web 2.0 have made it much easier to keep track of large numbers of favorite websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each blog manually for new posts or receiving heps of update e-mails. Users can now streamline their interests by subscribing to specific content feeds and aggregating this information in one place to be read when and where ever they feel like.
Why Do You Need RSS?
RSS or Real Simple Syndication will get your web content out to the world. RSS lets you syndicate your content with other blogs or websites. If you want to increase the traffic and especially targeted traffic to your web site or blog without paying for it, RSS will help you to achieve your goal. There are far more advantages than disadvantages to have a free account on FeedBurner.
- Consumer Advantage: Subscribing to feeds makes it possible for consumers to review a large amount of online content in a very short time without cluttering your inbox. There are many ways to easily subscribe to a feed and it will less than a minute to permanently stay informed. If a blog or website offers e-mail subscription to it’s RSS feed, you will find it almost certainly on the home page of the site.The subscriber gets presented with a headline and the heading of every new article published. upon clicking the link, the user will be brought directly to the article on the blog, not to the FeedBurner RSS feed page.
- Publisher Advantage: Besides incredible insight into RSS statistics and consumer behavior , RSS feeds permit the publisher instant distribution of content through blogs or podcasts and the possibility to get a vast amount of subscriptions and build up a permanent reader community who can also directly interact at the feed. There is also the great chance of monetizing an RSS Feed (Under construction) by allowing Google AdSense to be shown with your content. That is if it will ever work, but read below.
- Advertiser Advantage (Under construction): The plan is that Google Adsense ads should finally work on FeedBurner, the fact though is, it doesn’t! – At least for now it doesn’t. The FeedBurner website states; quote: "Advertising in feeds overcomes many of the shortcomings that traditional marketing channels encounter including Spam filters, delayed distribution, search engine rankings, and general inbox noise". So that would be a good thing and one expected that it would work just fine with Google and FeedBurner merging into one company. But maybe this is exactly the problem, one hand doesn’t know what the other does. At the FeedBurner dashboard your are encouraged to monetize your feed. After you finished setting it up and finding out that it doesn’t work as advertised and you never receive the promised confirmation e-mail, you may start checking around in forums at Google and FeedBurner. I can tell you right now what you will find and save you some time once more. Google has a one-pager help file stating that this program is in a beta version and might not work after all.
Conclusion:
Even though the not working ads give me a little setback, the overall experience with FeedBurner is throughout fantastic. The navigation and setup of the dashboard are great and user friendly arranged. To take advantage of all the features FeedBurner offers to optimize, analyze, publicize, monetize and even ‘troubleshootize’ and set it all up, you better take a half day of from work. There are many tools that will help your publications to be read by a much larger audience than you would ever have imagined. In my humble opinion every serious blogger, webmaster or Internet marketer needs to have a FeedBurner account nowadays for one reason or the other, you can just not afford not to and that is why Google couldn’t possibly resist this sweet fruit hanging right in front of their nose .
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