Eblogger Tricks.com

This post is about Blogger (Blogspot) RSS feeds and about the benefits of burning your Blogger feeds at Feedburner.

What are RSS Feeds?

Your Blogger feeds (in most cases RSS and Atom) are a means of distributing the content of your blog to the world. Feeds make it possible to maximise exposure of your blog's content beyond a few visitors browsing your blog. Feeds can be subscribed to via web portals, news readers, or email. Feeds allow your blog content to be packaged into all sorts of widgets and gadgets and mobile devices that can be displayed just about anywhere.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and is a standardized web format used to create a document containing your blog posts, blog comments, or any other content on your blog you choose (images, music, videos, podcasts, etc). As Blogger offers built in RSS feeds, everytime you publish a post Blogger automatically adds your post to the default feeds. How much of your Blogger post is displayed in your feed depends on whether you have chosen to allow feeds in full or short format. To check and/or change this setting in Blogger, navigate to Settings --> Site Feeds of your blog.

Blogger automatically produces your blog´s feed in both Atom and RSS. RSS is rapidly becoming the preferred format for feeds (for instance, a lot of blog directories ask users to provide the URL of their RSS feed). Both Atom and RSS were developed to enable people to receive automatic updates of their favorite blogs and websites. While the formats are different they do pretty much the same job: they put out updated content from your blog in a format that can be easily read in feed readers.

The URL of Default Blogger Feeds

a) Default Blogger Post Feeds

Atom 1.0:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

RSS 2.0:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

b) Default Blogger Comments Feeds

Atom 1.0:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

RSS 2.0:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss

c) Default Blogger Label-Specific Feeds

Atom 1.0:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/-/labelname

RSS 2.0:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss/-/labelname

Encourage Visitors to Subscribe to Your Blogger Feeds

Whenever you see the familiar orange icon on a website it denotes a RSS feed. By adding this RSS icon to your Blogger blog and setting up a link to the feed of posts or other content of your blog you enable visitors to view your feed on click. If you have added the Subscription Links widget via Layout --> Page Elements --> Add a Gadget visitors are given the option to subscribe to both your posts and comment feeds in a reader like Google Reader, My Yahoo or Bloglines. Alternatively, you can burn your blog feeds using a free feedburning service like Feedburner.

Feed Readers are an Easy and Convenient Means for Readers to Keep Up-to-date

Your readers do not have to worry about manually saving your blog to their browser favorites anymore, as Atom and RSS feeds make it easy to subscribe to a feed reader instead. Rather than manually checking back to your site and trying to manage a bunch of bookmarks your visitors can choose to subscribe in a reader. Subscribing in a reader means they will automatically get the latest content without fear of missing any new entries.

Burning Blog Feeds at Feedburner

Burning your feeds with a feed burning service like Feedburner is one of the easiest ways to get subscriptions to your blog. Since the Feedburner service is now owned by Google you can can access it directly from your Google account. If you consider using Google AdSense as a means of monetizing your feeds you should most definitely burn said feeds. For more information about burning the feed of your Blogger blog at Feedburner please read my article How to Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner.

By burning the feeds of your blog at Feedburner you will be redirecting the Blogger default feeds to the new Feedburner feeds. By placing a link to your blog's feed you will give visitors instant access to your feed. If, for instance, there currently are 20 posts in your posts feed they will be able to browse all of them in chronological order complete with images, but without videos, etc.

If you happen to have a lot of articles in one particular group you can choose to burn label feeds as well. For instance, if you blog about fishing you might choose to have separate feeds for deep sea fishing and freshwater fishing.

Visitors also have the option to subscribe to any of your burned feeds in a variety of feed reader applications such as Google Reader, My Yahoo, Netvibes, and Bloglines. The advantage to the visitor of subscribing in a reader is that they do not have to keep visiting your blog to keep up with your latest posts. Instead they can read the most recent posts of all their favourite blogs from their reader which collects all their feed subscriptions into one central place.

The option to get updates via a web-based feed reader is becoming increasingly popular with visitors. Even though it means that the visitor may not be returning to your blog, your feeds nevertheless extend your blog's reach. Feedburner can provide accurate statistics about the number of subscribers to your feed as well as the type of reader they are using.

You can also place a Feedburner Feed Count button on your blog which displays the number of current subscribers. Adding a Feedburner Feed Count button is not a bad idea if your blog is attracting a sizeable readership. The purpose of adding such a button is not so much to brag about your success (although it is gratifying to see the number of readers climbing) but to lend more credibility to your blog.

Reasons for Burning a Blogger Feed at Feedburner

1. Feedburner Provides Tracking Statistics of Subscribers

There are many good reasons to burn the feeds of your blog at Feedburner, but the main one is the possibility to track your feeds to gain a better understanding of your blog's audience. Blog publishers who redirect their feeds can monitor their (hopefully!) growing readership.

It is useful to know how many people are opening and reading your feeds and how they are being used. Feedburner provides an easy method of tracking feeds that otherwise would be difficult to track. By redirecting your Blogger default feed to FeedBurner, important feed statistics such as the total number of subscribers, feed readers (aggregators) used, live hits, items used, uncommon uses, item views, item link clicks, and item enclosure downloads for podcast can be recorded and analysed.

2. Feedburner Enables You to Reach a Wider Audience

Feedburner is one of the best options when it comes to attracting more readers to your blog and plugging into a wider network of internet users than you might have on your own account.

3. Feedburner Offers Improved Presentation of Your Blog Feed

Another advantage of Feedburner is that it allows for clean visual formatting of your RSS feed for improved browser friendliness and presentation. Once burned, your feed will be more visually pleasing to readers. Improved presentation of your RSS feed is one of the best reasons to begin redirecting your blog feed to Feedburner. Moreover, your readers can select the reader they would like to use directly from the feed.

4. Feedburner Provides a Wide Range of Services

By burning your blog feeds at Feedburner you get access to a wide range of services like Podcasting and the choice and flexibility of participating in the Feedburner Ad Network. Feedburner allows you to easily analyse, publicize, optimize, and monetize your feed. Feed burning allows readers to subscribe regardless of what feed reader they are using.

This post has discussed Blogger RSS feeds and has outlined some of the benefits of burning your Blogger feeds at Feedburner. For instructions on burning your Blogger RSS feed at Feedburner please read my tutorial entitled How to Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner.

Good luck!