Author:Tinu AbayomiPaul
FeedBurner is a free service that allows you to track your feed traffic and all kinds of other fun stuff. It won't create a feed for you from scratch as often believed - rather it wraps itself snugly around a feed you bring in and adds its services therein. It has a few premium options for the serious feed publisher, too.
People ask me all the time if I suggest that they use FeedBurner’s plethora
of free feed enhancement tools. I have always answered a resounding “Yes!” – But
lately FeedBurner has moved itself to a whole new level.
Did I mention most of these tools are free, and can help increase the traffic
you get to your blog, by using your feed? Don’t believe me – go to
http://www.feedburner.com
and see for yourself. Tell ‘em Tinu sent you.
They have no idea who I am but it’ll be fun, I promise.
So enough with the warm-up already, and let’s start talking about some of these
incredible features.
Increasing Your Blog Traffic with FeedBurner
Blog Traffic Increaser # 1- Give others permission - or shake the no-no finger
with the Creative Commons option, found under the Publicize tab in your
FeedBurner dashboard.
It will pop in the logo if you like, and explain what permissions others have to
use your feed. Being clear about what permissions others have to use your feed
will encourage them to display your headlines on their site – or let them know
that they must link to you to cite your views.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 2- Turn your feed into a newsletter with Feedblitz or
Squeet under Publicize/Email Subscriptions.
This turns your feed into a newsletter. It even gives you a subscribe form for
your site. Now you now have a(nother) ezine option to go with your blog without
any extra work.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 3- Use the Browser-Friendly version, combined with
FeedFlare to explain what an RSS Feed is.
First on the Optimize tab, the Browser-Friendly version turns your RSS feed into
a web page, so that when new people click on your feed without knowing what it
is, they’ll find out how to use it. All you do is link to the FeedBurner version
of your feed, instead of your default feed address. FeedBurner will even help
you with this.
But before we talk about that, here’s an extra tip: under the FeedFlare option
on the Optimize tab, you’ll find the Personal Flare section. If you click one of
the links given, you will see one called “Get Email Updates”. Once you have the
Email Subscription option enabled, you can enable that link in your feed to
provide the option to subscribe to your updates via email.
We'll come back to FeedFlare later.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 4- Make your feed compatible with all feed subscription
services with SmartFeed.
Maybe you have an Atom feed in a world that uses RSS more often. Perhaps the
tool you’re using utilizes an older version of RSS, and you’re just getting
around to turning on your feed, so don’t want to switch. If you look on the
Optimize tab in FeedBurner, you’ll find a tool that will convert your feed on
the fly to any version the end user’s tool is asking for.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 5- Import pictures and links with Photo Splicer and
Link Splicer
Under Optimize, look for these two options to help you jazz up your feed with
your suggestions from Furl, del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 or Bloglines.
The Photosplicer will also let you drop images into your feed using Flickr,
BuzzNet or Webshots.
The more of a resource your feed is, the more your subscribers will want to use
it. I find that reminding my feed users that they’ll get even more treats than
when they visit the blog gets more of them to subscribe – which also brings them
back to my blog more often.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 6 - Get your audience to help send you even more
traffic with FeedFlare.
Within the Optimize section, you’ll find one of the top three innovations from
FeedBurner, as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve ever been to a blog that has
options that make it easy to add a post to your del.icio.us, Digg or Technorati
page, then you were probably green with envy, as I was, if you didn’t have the
time or the technical expertise to add those fabulous hacks to your site.
Well I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to find the days in your schedule
to reverse engineer all those little tweaks, nor do you need to become a techie
if you have no idea what all that HTML code in your blog’s template does.
Using FeedFlare, you can now do all of these things yourself for your feed
without touching a line of code.
The exciting thing about this is that you can get your visitors to help you
spread the word about your blog.
Blog Traffic Increaser # 7 - Notify all RSS and Blog tracking services
automatically with PingShot.
Another one of the Optimize tools will free up your time by pinging all the top
blog notification sites when you update, by following your feed. If you feel
that all the pings slow your blog posting time down, or your blog won’t allow
you to customize what services get pinged, this is a lifesaver.
There are several dozen more ways to increase your traffic with FeedBurner, not
to mention all the little tricks you can use to maximize the traffic FeedBurner
can generate, analyze or optimize for you. You’ve got to hustle on over to
FeedBurner to use these (mostly) free feed tools before you can enjoy their
benefits, and there’s no time like the present.
Copyright © 2006 Tinu AbayomiPaul
Want 14 More Ways to Get More Blog Traffic with FeedBurner? Download the PDF
file at
http://www.rescueyourblog.com – and get the other 14 Blog Traffic Increasers
for Free.
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