{"id":42,"date":"2008-03-16T20:41:07","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T01:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/2008\/03\/16\/use-feedburner-to-manage-rss-email-subscriptions\/"},"modified":"2008-03-16T20:41:07","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T01:41:07","slug":"use-feedburner-to-manage-rss-email-subscriptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/2008\/03\/16\/use-feedburner-to-manage-rss-email-subscriptions\/","title":{"rendered":"Use FeedBurner to Manage RSS &#038; Email Subscriptions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So you have your blog set up. Maybe you even have a few fans read your blog regularly and wait eagerly for your next post to go live (come on, I know you gabeanderson.com 6.0 fans are out there somewhere, right?). Then your readers start asking you about RSS feeds and email subscriptions. <\/p>\n<p>Wait a minute&#8230; RS-what? If you&#8217;re not sure what RSS is (hint: it stands for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/RSS_(file_format)\">Really Simple Syndication<\/a> and allows people to read your blog without going to your blog), take a minute to check out the first tab in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.articulate.com\/community\/blogdemo\/web2\/engage.html\">this interaction<\/a> that my coworker Tom pulled together for his post on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.articulate.com\/rapid-elearning\/5-ways-web-20-can-make-you-a-better-e-learning-designer\/\">5 Ways Web 2.0 Can Make You a Better E-Learning Designer<\/a> (the video, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commoncraft.com\/rss_plain_english\">RSS in Plain English<\/a>, was created by commoncraft). <\/p>\n<p>Now that you know what RSS is all about and why it&#8217;s a good thing to offer it to your readers via your blog, I&#8217;d encourage you to sign up for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedburner.com\">FeedBurner<\/a> account and send all your feed traffic through it. <\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedburner.com\"><img border=0 src='http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/snag-1782.png' alt='FeedBurner' \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>OK, but you&#8217;re probably wondering why it&#8217;s better to use FeedBurner than just leveraging the default RSS link that you get with blogging tools like WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger, right? Fair enough. <\/p>\n<p>Once you set up your account, you&#8217;ll see that FeedBurner gives you 4 major ways to interact with and promote your feed: <strong>Analyze<\/strong>, <strong>Optimize<\/strong>, <strong>Publicize<\/strong>, and <strong>Monetize<\/strong>. With that in mind, here are some reasons I like to direct my RSS feed through FeedBurner for my readers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Thanks to the the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedburner.com\/fb\/a\/help\/wordpress_quickstart\">FeedBurner-WordPress plugin<\/a> I have installed, I don&#8217;t have to worry about which RSS link to use (all variations of my RSS feed go through FeedBurner).<\/li>\n<li>I can give you the option to get my feed via <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/gabeanderson\">RSS feed<\/a> (note the FeedBurner page that makes sign-up a snap) and\/or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedburner.com\/fb\/a\/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1632371&#038;loc=en_US\">email subscription<\/a> (no more than 1 email per day). <\/li>\n<li>I can rest assured that all RSS and email subscriptions are being managed accurately and from a single source. <\/li>\n<li>I can get overview and detailed stats on how many subscribers I have for both RSS and email, and see how you&#8217;re accessing my blog (referral stats, browser type, country, your feed reader, and lots more). <\/li>\n<li>I can tell FeedBurner to automatically ping services like <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/\">Technorati<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloglines.com\/\">Bloglines<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsgator.com\/\">NewsGator<\/a> whenever I publish a new entry, which helps to expand my potential readership by exposing my content on those highly trafficked sites.<\/li>\n<li>I can choose to show off how many readers I have with the FeedBurner FeedCount, which is a trusted and accurate measure of the popularity of a blog. For example, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/\">TechCrunch<\/a> proudly displays that it has 698,000 readers. I don&#8217;t have nearly that many, so I&#8217;m not going to show off (yet).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what my Feed Stats Dashboard looks like:<\/p>\n<p><center><img src='http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/snag-1783.png' alt='Feed Stats Dashboard' \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Finally, note how at the end of this post (and every other), I give you the option to subscribe to my blog (I added that text and the links in my WordPress &#8220;Main Index Page&#8221; and &#8220;Single Post&#8221; templates). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So you have your blog set up. Maybe you even have a few fans read your blog regularly and wait eagerly for your next post to go live (come on, I know you gabeanderson.com 6.0 fans are out there somewhere, right?). Then your readers start asking you about RSS feeds and email subscriptions. Wait a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-web-apps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}