Got burned with FeedBurner yet?

For blogs, there is one tool almost every blogger does come to use at one point of time to make the most out of his or her blog. It´s FeedBurner and there are good reasons to use it, whatever blogging platform you use.

FeedBurner is republishing your blogs RSS-Feed and adds some feature to it making it even more useful and user-friendlier.

Reasons to use FeedBurner
The most interesting reason to use FeedBurner is, that thy enable you to know how many people are subscribed to your RSS-Feed. As these readers are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, you should be interested in their number and how it has developed over time.

Your readers can easily subscribe to your Feed if it is handled by FeedBurner. They are offering a wide variety of services to use for reading your content. Starting with email or Newsgator, people can also use Bloglines or MyYahoo and many other services to keep up with your blog.

Best of all: Many bloggers do start their blogs on hosted platforms like Blogger, WordPress.com or whatever. They´d lose all of their subscribers when they decide to move the blog to its own domain as the URL of their RSS-Feed will change. No problem with FeedBurner here as this URL can stay the same as it is a FeedBurner URL like mine:

I could use this URL even if I´d move this blog to a domain totally different. Even though, I won´t do this.

Showing your subscriber count
Just yesterday, I put a litte chicklet to my sidebar, showing how many people are subscribing to my feed. At this moments there are:

There were discussions round the blogosphere whether bloggers should display subscriber count. I have chosen to display it now as the count is getting to a stable basis.

Do you think there is an effect on this? Are people more likely to subscribe when they see that many others have before?

FeedBurner FeedFlare
The FeedFlare feature adds some information to the end of each entry what can look like this:

This can make readers of your RSS-Feed click through to your site to leave a comment or something. Again, more visitors for your blog.
You can easily change these infos or add more of them to your feed. Just go to your FeedBurner-Account and click on Optimize and then FeedFlare. Select the items you want to show and that´s it.
There is even an API which lets you create your very own FeedFlares, I´m planning to write an own article about APIs in the future.

Subscription by E-Mail
FeedBurner also provides the possibiliy to let your readers receive an E-Mail whenever a new article is being posted. To not overcrowd your readers inbox, you can choose to send one E-Mail a day at a chosen timeframe. Just scroll down a little bit to find the 2 ways to subscribe to my blog.

I am offering the E-Mail option for my readers, but it does not seem to be accepted that much. This may be different for oher blogs, especially depending on their topics and their readers. For me, it´s only about 3% of all my subscribers using the option to follow my blog via E-Mail.

Do you offer E-Mail subscription on your blog? How does it work for you?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

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