How to get the most out of your RSS Feeds and FeedBurner?

For those who don't know what a RSS Feed is, you should first watch this short video.



Perfect, now that everyone knows what we're talking about, let's get down to blogging business.

Now a days, every blog theme or template by default ensures the author his posts will reach out some readers such as Google Reader via RSS or ATOM feeds. However if you feel your voice and interests should be read by more people, you might consider using other free services like (Google) FeedBurner enabling features that can be added to your blog rss feed and subscription as well as tracking traffic received via feed.

Optimizing, redirecting and personalizing your feeds

Title/Description. First step should be personalizing your FeedBurner account by going to the feature called Title/Description burner (under "Optimize" tab) that can be used to change the default title of your feed. Use this to add the punch line or blog description to make your feed more attractive.

Full Feed. Second step would be publishing full feeds, switching from partial feed to full feed. People don't like having to do an extra click just to read the entire article. Here's an interesting experiment on this matter.

FeedFlare is another feature of FeedBurner that helps you to add your social sharing and bookmarking links on the footer of your RSS posts. This way readers can share your posts on their social networks just by clicking on the social bookmarks.

Smartfeed makes your feeds accessible not only from browsers, but also from mobile phones, various gadgets and widgets. With SmartFeed you don’t need to bother about compatibility of your feeds across different platforms, Feedburner will take care of it for you. To activate it: “Activate” button on the SmartFeed service page. You can find SmartFeed options page following this path: “Optimize/Services/SmartFeed”.

Socialize helps distribute your feed via social networks, with the first network being Twitter. If you use Blogger, you can already connect your feed to Buzz via the "Connected Sites" link in Buzz.

Offer email subscriptions. Feedburner will automatically send out regular emails to your email subscribers whenever new content is posted. If this feature is enabled, it is important to customize the confirmation email by putting a logo (for example). Also set the delivery option after finding out when your blog readers are most active. You can track the user activity by using Google Analytics.

Feed Image Burner service. Just like the previous emails personalization, it is important to do so with your feeds as well, since numerous modern RSS readers can display a special image associated with the feed. To activate it: "Optimize/Services/Feed Image Burner" and select "Specify custom image URL" in the “Image Source” dropdown. You can use FeedCount there, as suggested by Feedburner, or simply fill out the form with your site’s logo URL, site title and URL. For maximum compatibility it’s not recommended to use an image more than 144 pixels tall or wide.

Other tips. These tips can be a bit more subjective, nevertheless I think it's important to put them out there. Keywords and important text should be in bold, this makes the post more attractive. Avoid underlined text, in my opinion, it can be confused with links.


There are some more technical plugins but then we would be going into gueek-blogging-underground-universe, and let me tell you we don't want to do that, right?

By the way

I've been reading about how to blog, what are the rules of blogging and what brings success to a blog... and I realized the secret is that there is no secret. Take this experienced blogger word for granted: "Each successful blog has its uniqueness. It might be the personality or voice of the blogger, the topic, the design, the fact that they were first, that they’re funny, that they’re comprehensive and thoughtful, that they post 100 times a day, or that they post once a month… But each of them is unique somehow".

Bottom line is: find your own path and make the most out of what you've got.

Good luck.