By Kevin Needham

When you visit the FeedBurner.com web site, they describe their service as this:

FeedBurner Allows weblog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of  their subscribers.

Now i’ll assume you understand RSS feeds ( See RSS Marketing ) and how they operate  and you know the  importance of offering a feed on your site.

In a nutshell, a feed from your site is the content, minus the sidebars or ads on your web page. If  some one sets up a newsreader account, over at Google or Bloglines for example (and there are many other reader services), they can subscribe to your website feed, as well as many other feeds from other websites, and view all the content, blended together using just their Feed Reader. They can get all their content together, in one location for daily digestion.

Wordpress blog software has a RSS Feed built right in to it, and it is awesome for sure, however it does not allow you the ability to track who is subscribed to your feed. It is a powerfull metric to know and track who is subscribed to your feed. It tells you how popular your blog is.

You need to encourage readers to subscribe to your feed regularly.

This is where Feedburner comes in. It will allow you to register your feed, and then provide you a new trackable link to send all potential feed subscribers to. Our new feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/FollowMyStartups so please visit and subscribe right now so you see how the whole system works.

At anytime I can log into my FeedBurner account, and access my statistics such as total subscribers, date of subscriptions, number of views and clicks on my posts, geographical locations of visitors and even an un-natural use pattern to see if anything is looking suspicious.

FeedBurner also provided me with funky code to put on my site, little graphic subscribe buttons that I added to my sidebar widgets using my PHP Code widget.

A great service, and free to use.

The final thing I did was remove the RSS subscribe code in my sidebar that was the default from wordpress.

I did not want both the Wordpress RSS feed buttons and the newly added, FeedBurner RSS subscribe buttons to both be on my pages.

It was not hard to find. I clicked on Apperance –> Editor and opened my sidebar.php file.

I found this code, and removed it:
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<div id=”subscribe”>

 <p><img style=”vertical-align:0px;” alt=”RSS” src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’);

?>/images/feed-icon-16×16.gif” /> &nbsp;<a href=”<?php bloginfo_rss(‘rss2_url’) ?>”><?php _e(‘Entries

RSS’); ?></a> &middot; <a href=”<?php bloginfo_rss(‘comments_rss2_url’) ?>”><?php _e(‘Comments RSS’);

?></a></p>

</div>

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From now on, I can log into my feedburned account and check the health of my website in a glance.

I hope this helps.

Please leave a comment and for goodness sakes, subscribe to the feed

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Kevin Needham is the founder of FollowMyStartUps.com
You can follow his antics while he creates new businesses
by following his RSS Feed.

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