Webmaster tool recommendations: Feedburner
June 26th, 2008
Feedburner is a great tool for managing your RSS feeds, and lucky for you, it’s free to use! I admit I was a little late to the RSS/newsfeed party but I started using Feedburner a few months back and now I use it literally every day.
What does Feedburner do? For starters, it helps you track the number of folks who are reading your blog (or other RSS items). Typical analytics packages aren’t able to capture your feed readers since they don’t always visit your site through a traditional web browser. Feedburner also helps you understand which articles or items your readers are clicking to help you guage reader reactions - something that can be complicated using analytics alone.
The other great thing about Feedburner is that it organizes and simplifies your feeds into a single link. No need for the fruit salad approach to providing feeds (RSS, RSS2, Atom, etc.) with Feedburner - just let Feedburner do the necessary formatting to fit each reader’s needs.
Since Feedburner is owned by Google they are able to offer seamless integration with Google Adsense which helps you monetize your feeds. This is huge since folks reading your news in a reader typically aren’t seeing the ads that are on your site; Feedburner makes it happen. There are even tools for helping your optimize and publicize your feeds which can really help build up your subscriber base.
Feedburner is an amazing (free!) tool that any webmaster can use to manage RSS feeds with ease. Now if it could only write my blog for me, then it would be perfect! 
