FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools in my Web 2.0 tool-belt. The main attraction here is FeedBurner's rich metrics, which will tell you a lot about how many are reading your feed, what aggregator they're using, etc. But dig a little deeper and there's much more you can do with this outstanding tool. Here are my favorite ten FeedBurner "hacks." There are many more here.
1) Use FeedBurner to Reformat Your Feeds
There are some existing news and blog feeds that are just plain old recalcitrant. You can't get them to load properly into certain readers no matter what you do. Worse, sometimes when you do get them to load the titles are too long for my liking. Take for example the example below - note the title.
This is where FeedBurner comes in. If you run the feed through FeedBurner you can then reformat the feed title/summary in the optimize section to neaten it up. Here's the result...
2) Track Podcast Downloads
If you're a podcaster you can use FeedBurner to track not just your subscribers, but your actual MP3 file downloads as well. There are instructions on how to do this in the FeedBurner forums.
3) Make Your Feeds More Social
FeedBurner's awesome Feedflare tools can add a bit of spice to your feeds by making them more interactive. For example, you can add "digg this" and "add to del.icio.us" links. You can find a full catalog of the nick nacks you can add to your feeds in the Optimize section for your feed. Don't like the order? Then re-arrange them.
4) Make Your Feed Yours
If you're serious about your blog or podcast you might want to make sure that the feed and not just the site is branded. FeedBurner has a service called MyBrand that allows publishers to serve their feeds from their own domain.
5) Track Your Stats with a Widget
As I mentioned at the top, FeedBurner is all about stats, stats and more stats. They're the Bill James of RSS. If you're a stats junkie you can track your data using a desktop widget. There are widgets for Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets and for the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard
6) Put Your Feed in Your Email Signature
Now that you have a FeedBurner RSS feed you should promote it on other Web sites and your email signature. FeedBurner offers a nice little gadget that will animate your headlines. There are instructions on the web on how to use this in Outlook 2003. Note this does not work with Gmail.
7) Splice in Your Bookmarks and Photos
If you're a Web 2.0 junkie like me you probably have bookmarks on del.icio.us and photos on Flickr. Using FeedBurner you can merge photos from these services into your main feed using the splicers in the Optimize section of your feed.
8) Use FeedBurner to Ping
Most major blog services ping one or more ping servers to help spread the word that your blog has updated. Pinging is a good idea because it gets indexes to spider your blog content more quickly. Two of the most popular tools for pinging are Pingomatic and Pingoat. Fortunately, if you're a FeedBurner user you can make pinging automatic using their Pingshot feature. Simply pre-load all of the sites you want to ping when your feed is updated and they will take care of the rest.
9) Turn Your Feed Into an Email Newsletter
As much as we love RSS, not everyone has joined the revolution yet. They still like receiving content via the trusty email newsletter. You can make everyone happy with FeedBurner. They will give you an email subscription box powered by Squeet that you can put on your blog or site. Once visitors submit their email address, they will receive daily email updates with your newest content. Look for this feature on the Publicize tab.
10) Move to FeedBurner Painlessly
If you haven't moved to FeedBurner because you're afraid you might lose all your subscribers, fear not. FeedBurner has instructions on how to redirect your feed so that this does not occur.
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