RSS Syndication Services And Directories You Should Be Using: FeedBurner
RSS syndication is much more than a little orange icon on your blog. Sure social network marketing systems like WordPress pretty much handle everything you need as far as RSS goes, but only at the most basic level. To compete in tight markets and increase both your visibility and market share, you must utilize more advanced RSS features than what comes out of the box with WordPress. This article will be the first of a few that will outline the more important tools and services that can help give your site an edge over your competition.
RSS Management And Distribution Service FeedBurner
In my post RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained I told you about the RSS services that I use to great effect. Here I am going to go into greater detail about FeedBurner as well as sharing with you the results of multiple tests I performed to see just how much benefit is derived from “burning your feed”.
FeedBurner – once looked at as the finest RSS distribution network, FeedBurner has been propelled into the stratosphere since its acquisition by Google for 100 million big ones. FeedBurner was started with 1 million in capital in 2004. They got another 9 million in funding in 2005, built up their services and subscribers and turned a 90 million profit two years later. Man I love the Internet!
Six months ago I ran a demo on two different blogs. The first I manually submitted the RSS 2.0 feeds to directories and utilized the Google Sitemap Plugin for WordPress by Arne Brachhold along with pingomatic to keep the major search engines and directories up to date with the blog. I had focused this blog on 10 specific keyword phrases.
The second blog also had 10 specific keyword sets and a very similar visibility index. In other words there was nearly the same amount of SERP results for both keyword sets. I submitted the feed with the default location within WordPress, i.e. domain.com/blog/feed. The second blog relied solely on FeedBurner as its means of feed management and updating. It also used pingomatic, but only the stock RPC service that is within WordPress.
After 2 months it was clear that the FeedBurner site had not only better placement, but more traffic outside of search engines. At this point I was convinced that there was no downside to having an outside domain control the RSS feed. In fact the FeedBurner page that was my RSS feed had equal Page Rank to my blog home page when PR was first issued.
The other site had equal Page Rank, but I expected that since both sites had equal inbound links. Even if Google hadn’t purchased FeedBurner, I would still be using it to manage all my RSS feeds based upon this study.
So what is FeedBurner and how can it help you? The first thing that attracted me to FeedBurner was the analytics. If you read my blog you know that I feel website analytics is one of the most important aspects of website management. FeedBurner has very complete analytics that tells you all about your subscribers. I knew that they had a great network since so many blogs I read used them to manage their feeds. After setting up an account I started “burning” feeds. Burning is their term for the services they provide which include publicizing your content and making it easier for people to subscribe to it. Another great aspect is the ability to optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be read by subscribers wherever they are.
I can’t stress enough how important the optimization aspect of FeedBurner is. If you have ever submitted your feeds to directories, the first thing you will find is not every directory complies to RSS 2.0 or Atom. Some don’t show the description properly, or say you don’t have a description and don’t accept the feed. I found this to be a problem on many real estate RSS directories that didn’t understand the WordPress feed, even though it is in the proper XML format.
FeedBurner eliminates all those formatting issues and sends out your feed the same way to everybody regardless of how they use the feed. We have already talked about their analytics so finally they have an advertising network that allows you to make some money through your feed. I suspect that this is why Google bought FeedBurner. Obviously AdWords will be their manager for the RSS feed ads.
The bottom line here is if you weren’t using FeedBurner to manage your RSS, you should. Now more than ever FeedBurner is a powerful ally in the Social Network Marketing arena.
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Great article! Have you used feedburners rss to email service yet? I see you talk about feedblitz, but not feedburners. Have you had problems with it?
John,
Yes I am testing FeedBurners rss to email on my wife’s site http://www.homesadvisory.com. Out of the box it looks better than FeedBlitz’s free service. I am getting ready to upgrade her FeedBurner package and see if it has the same functionality that feedblitz has. I use feedblitz on this site, with both the turbo and pro packages. I also am beta-testing the newsletter feature which has a lot of potential.
I will keep everyone informed on how the test progresses.
Hello,
Feedburner has started with the email syndication but it does not work. I have signed up and they have not contact information to write to them. They do not send your emails out and I was redirected time and time again to forums with several (25 or more) other users having the same problem. So they need to work that out and have contact information so that users are able to contact them if they are in need. Thanks
Breck,
I have heard similar problems. Google recently moved Feedburner feeds from the original feedburner.com domain to google.com. I recommend that you update your system to point to the new URL so that more than 1 redirect won’t be required.
Once you have established that the URL is correct, make sure that within the publicize tab, you have the rss to email set up and you are using the new feedburner email ID since the old one will re-direct again which causes problems.
I am still using FeedBlitz to handle my rss to email, but that is more about my being lazy than anything else. I am using FeedBurner on all of my clients sites and had a lot of problems getting the feeds to display properly on top of the rss to email issues. If you have corrected the URL issue and it is still not working let me know and I will post a tutorial on how to resolve it. The first step is in assuring the feedburner ID is right and the feedburner id is right within the publicize section. You should also be doing all of this through your Google Webmaster Tools and not Feedburner.
Finally, the best thing is to make sure that the entire post is being sent out and not just the title and an excerpt. You will also see that if you are using smart feed or feed flair, that it makes other feedburner things not work so it is wise to look at all your feedburner settings and make sure there are no conflicts.