There are other similar services like FeedBurner, but I recommend FeedBurner as it’s the only feed customizing service I use. What is FeedBurner? In short, it’s a mean to publish your online (blog) contents, so that your readers can subscribe to your feed and read your site updates via the RSS / feed reader.

No doubt that a lot of blogging platform like Blogspot, WordPress, etc has its own built-in feed feature. But why should we even border to “burn” our feed? Because you can customize how your feed content be presented to your subscribers and you can get more benefits like getting your feed stats.

I hereby pinpoint some great features you can get once you add your feed to FeedBurner:

• Easy-to-remember feed URL
• Get number of subscribers
• Get live hits statistic (readers geographical location)
• Know your readers preference via popular item (blog post) listing
• Show feed count widget on blog
• Allow email subscription
• Customize how your feed content look like in feed reader
• Customize how your feed content look like (color, styling) in email
• Associate your Google Adsense account to monetize your feed
• Make it easier to promote your blog (will talk about this in the next upcoming post)
• and many more..

Ready to burn your feed? What are you waiting for? Get FeedBurner now, it’s FREE. Also check out the quickstart guides on how to setup your blog feed with FeedBurner.

Tags: feed

I always encourage everyone to get site updates via the RSS reader. As a blog reader, you can save up a lot of time and just sit down in front of your feed reader, let it grab all the latest updates of your favorite blogs/websites. As a blogger, you can let the RSS feature send updates automatically to your subscribers, keep them up-to-date with your blog.

Now, how are you going to impress your reader to subscribe to your feed (RSS)? Make your RSS icon as attractive as possible, make it obvious to your readers. Sometimes, I find not so straight forward to locate a blog’s feed. Once, I wanted to subscribe to a blog but it really took me few minutes to look for the orange RSS icon.

There are plenty of RSS icons available for downloads. Here is a collection of great RSS icons that I found from the Internet.

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Tags: feed, icon, rss

The RSS button, usually in orange can be found in almost every blog. Many newbie will just ignore this wonderful tool just because they don’t really know what does it mean. Here is a simple explanation on the RSS feed.

We only have 24 hours a day, which we need to spend time on our daily routines, accompanying our family members, as well as reading blogs or blogging. We wouldn’t want to waste extra time by checking updates from our favorite blogs one by one – the so called “blog hopping“.

Some people may argue that they prefer blog hopping, visiting their favorite blogs one by one just to check for updates. Some claim that if there isn’t any updates, they will still leave a message in the chat box. The real intention behind the message usually indicate the owner something like “Oh! Hi there, I was here before and hope you can hop over to my blog too.” I used to do that too for a short period of time. It did boost up some traffic. In fact, that’s what most blog hoppers really want. They may not even read your blog content but just leave a “hi hi” message and hoping that you will head back to them. Most of the time, it works. [...more]

Tags: feed, freeware, rss, traffic