Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	January 25, 2007

Whether you stream your content through a blog, news feed, podcast, or all of the above, shouldn't you know who your loyal subjects are?

Having a legitimate RSS feed for your website is one of the most important steps you take when building your publishing brand online. For that matter, since you spend so much time putting your content together, whether you stream a blog, news feed, podcast, or all of the above, shouldn't you know who your loyal subjects are?

Feedburner.com is the world's largest feed management provider, which means, basically, they track the RSS activity on your site via a newly burned link that they provide.

How it works:

For free, Feedburner tracks:

• Subscribers—daily totals and history
• Feed reader applications used to access your feed
• Uncommon uses, including resyndication
• Item link clicks (clickthrough tracking)

If you want to pay the $4.99 to $15.99 a month (depending on the amount of feeds you have) to upgrade to PRO, you can also add in:

• Reach tracking (the number of people who have viewed or clicked the content in your feed)
• Aggregate Item Use (overview and history of total item use across your feed)
• Single Item Use (views and clicks of a single item over time)

Download our Online Publishing Secrets special report for FREE and learn the seven Internet marketing strategies that magazine and newsletter publishers are using to make money online

Feedburner gives you a Feedburner URL that should replace the URL you currently give out. That means all of those little "chicklets" (that's techie talk for RSS Button) have got to be reprogrammed. No worries though, they've got that covered. In "Chicklet Chooser" you can get buttons for over 18 different RSS readers. If you really want to get your collection going, you can also use this RSS Button Creator to make over 34 different "chicklets". Just make sure you use that new Feedburner URL!

What else?

Still not convinced? How about this; not only is it a behind the scenes miracle worker for you, but it adds a little magic for your users as well. Instead of getting that confusing raw XML page ("What did I click?! What happened?!") when clicking on your RSS link, using FeedBurner's "BrowserFriendly" tool, they'll get a nice clean user-friendly page. On this page they'll find easy to click buttons that automatically add your feed to their preferred RSS reader. How's that for hands-free?

It also lets you add features like "email this", as well as giving your content a helping hand by enabling users to submit your content to popular user-generated websites with "digg this" and "add to del.icio.us" links, amongst many others.

Also, dont forget to add your new Feedburner URL to your head tag so that people's browsers can detect your RSS feed. It should look something like this:

Your RSS Title" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourusername">

So go check out Feedburner.com, and if your site is ad-driven, you might want to check out the Feedburner Ad Network too.

I know, we had you at hello.

Now, don't forget to add Mequoda Daily to your RSS reader! (We're watching!)