Master Your Feed: Feedburner Tips and Tricks
January 6, 2008 – 8:00 pmFeedburner is one of the best feed burning services that offers various tools that can help bloggers distribute their content to the online public via RSS.
Sadly, most of its unique features have gone unnoticed by the blogging community. Thus, this post will show you some of Feedburner tips and tricks that you probably miss out, based on the settings available on the Feedburner dashboard.
21 Feedburner Tips and Tricks:
You need to access your feed details first before you can access all these settings.
1- Turn “FeedStats Pro” on to get more details on your site performance for free. Previously, this was a pay-to-use feature.
(Analyze tab -> Services -> Feedburner Stats Pro)
2- Export your Feedburner stats to Microsoft Excel or CSV format.
(Analyze tab -> View -> Export to Excel / CSV)
3- Get a quick view of your feeds from the FeedBurner dashboard. Useful to test out new feed settings.
(Optimize tab -> View -> Your Feed)
4- Change FeedBurner “Browser Friendly” landing page to another theme. Useful if most of your subscribers are coming from your own country (language based themes).
(Optimize tab -> Services -> Browser Friendly -> Appearance Options -> Theme)
5- Use “Add to Any Feed Reader” chicklets as your subscription options. This will open up all of the feed subscription options once a potential subscriber click on it.
(Optimize -> Services -> Browser Friendly -> Appearance Options -> Subscription Options -> “Add to Any FeedReader” icon)
6- Add more feed flare to your feed with “Personal Feed Flare“. There are actually more flares than the default ones. Check out the FeedFlare Catalog.
(Optimize -> Services -> FeedFlare -> Personal FeedFlare -> Add New Flare)
7- If you want to share your online bookmarks (e.g Del.icio.us) with your readers, you can burn it inside your feed with “Link Splicer“.
(Optimize -> Services -> Link Splicer -> Link Service: <choose the service here>)
8- Insert Flickr photos inside your feed with “Photo Splicer“. You can also show photos from a certain tags that relates to your blog.
(Optimize -> Services -> Photo Splicer -> Photo Service: Flickr)
9- Add your own image (logo, icons etc.) inside your feed with “Feed Image Burner“). Useful to differentiate your feeds with others.
(Optimize -> Services -> Feed Image Burner)
10- If you just want to use your feed as a “teaser”, you can use “Summary Burner” for this purpose.
(Optimize -> Services -> Summary Burner)
11- Create a “Headline Animator“, a rotating banner that promote 5 of your latest post that you can use to promote your feed on forums, websites and more.
(Publicize -> Services -> Headline Animator)
12- Create a “BuzzBoost” from your feed and show off your latest blog content (in HTML) on another blog of yours. Useful to cross promote contents across your blogs.
(Publicize -> Services -> BuzzBoost)
13- Please your feed email subscribers. Enhance your feed’s email with your own, creative email HTML appearance (change URLs, add a logo, fonts etc.) with “Email Branding“.
(Publicize -> Services -> Email Subscriptions -> Email Branding -> HTML Email Appearance)
14- Instead of using a static FeedCount chicklet to show off your feed circulation numbers, why don’t you opt for an animated FeedCount chicklet?
(Publicize -> Services -> Feed Count -> Chicklet Style: Animated )
15- Add some copyright to your feed content with the Creative Commons license.
(Publicize -> Services -> Creative Commons)
16- If for some reason you want your feed available to a certain group of people only, password protect your feed with the “Password Protector”.
(Publicize -> Services -> Password Protector)
17- Don’t let splogs steal your feed content. Block splogs from accessing your feeds by disabling access via Yahoo! Pipes.
(Publicize -> Services -> NoIndex: “Indicate that your feed should not be used by Yahoo! Pipes”)
18- If FeedBurner takes too long to update your feeds with your latest blog content (more than one hour), and you have tried everything else but still it does not work, you can try to resync your feed with the “Resync Now!” button..
(Troubleshootize -> Tips and Tools -> Resync Now Button)
19- Problems displaying your feed and don’t know why it happens? “FeedMedic” is a quick way to check out 6 of the latest problems related to your feeds (connection problems, feed validity, etc.).
(Troubleshootize -> Reports -> FeedMedic)
20- Use “MyBrand Pro” to change your FeedBurner address from e.g http://feeds.feedburner.com/techmalaya to http://techmalaya.com/techmalaya . Looks much cooler with some personal touches, right? (You need to have permission to modify your DNS entry to do this).
(FeedBurner front page -> My Account -> Service -> MyBrand)
21- Have “FeedBulletin” send you updates of your feed’s health directly to your email address. The information is actually grabbed from the FeedMedic service (check no.19 above).
(FeedBurner front page -> My Account -> Service -> FeedBulletin)
Do you know more any tips / tricks? Share it here by leaving some comments below!
Tags: feedburner, feed, feeds, feed reader, feedreader tips, rss, rss tips
You come again! Maybe it is the right time to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for the support!
7 Responses to “Master Your Feed: Feedburner Tips and Tricks”
good! well written.
somehow I only choose to use 2 of their features. the rest is too good.
By NoktahHitam on Jan 7, 2008
@NoktahHitam: I hope you try out the other features too, buddy!
By Syahid Ali on Jan 9, 2008
Interesting Tips. Thanks!
By Hungry Hacker on Dec 11, 2008
That’s quite a list of features! I’m currently publishing a three part series about how to use FeedBurner to its greatest, but only included the few features under Optimize and Publicize (second and third posts, respectively) that I actually use. The first article is at http://silverpenpub.net/technology/burn-your-feed-with-feedburner if you’re interested.
By Matthew on Jan 7, 2009
Perfect work, very helpful. Thanks.
By aawartan.org on Jul 24, 2009
Thank you so much I discovered new things of feedburner.
By Aaqil Mahmood on Nov 17, 2009