Savvy Affiliate

If you aren’t currently using FeedBurner, here is why you should.

Until recently the number of subscribers a blog had was an interesting stat, and little more.  Knowing that number made for some nice bragging around the blogosphere, but didn’t do too much to make money.  That has all changed, now knowing your stats can mean money in the bank.  Space on your site is valuable, and worth money.  But exactly how much money is it worth?  What is your reach? With sites such as ReviewMe and other methods of monetizing your feeds taking off knowing how many subscribers your blog has is an essential bit of information in order to extract maximum value from your site.

For the average blogger Feedburner will do little for them except give them accurate stats on how many people are reading their blog, and by what method they are reading it.  But those stats are worth $100 million dollars.  At least Google thinks so, in their deal to buy Feedburner.

Luckily, as important as feedburner can be to a website, it as just as easy to set up.  You can simply go to Feedburner and input the URL of your RSS feed to set up your feedburner account.  (If you are using wordpress you have an RSS feed, check out www.yourblog.com/feed or www.yourblog.com/Atom) 

It’s that simple, now I’m done right?  Well not quite, you have to force people to use that feed.  But once again it isn’t as hard as it sounds.  There are two ways that you can make sure that everyone uses your feedburner feed instead of using the feed published by your blog.

The hard way to do that is to play games with your .htaccess file.  This works but can be frustrating.  Worse, especially on Godaddy hosting, is that .htaccess modifications don’t always update right away.  They can often take an hour or more to take effect.  Thus you can make the right mods, not know it, and try something else.

The easy way to set up feedburner is to use this plugin. Download it, plug it in, and any user who goes to the feed your site publishes will be automatically redirected to the feedburner feed.  A word of warning however, my redirect took a couple of hours to take effect, so if it doesn’t work right away for you leave it on, come back in a day and see if it is redirecting.