Posts Tagged ‘Feedburner’
Posted on September 19, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies
Feedburner: a blogger’s best friend
If you’re a blogger then you should be using Feedburner; a very powerful RSS publishing platform now owned by Google. The service is used by thousands of bloggers from around the world so that ten times that can read their content from the comfort of their own feed reader.
Feedburner has received much praise for its massive feature set but also criticism for its sometimes unreliable stats recording.
In this article I will be looking at some of the more interesting and popular features of Feedburner, but also the inevitable handicaps that a service is its scale naturally has.
Fantastic Features
- Easy set up - I wish most web services were so easy to configure. Once you have signed up for an account you simply put in your website URL on the front page and press next. You then, simply put in a couple of extra bits of information about your feed and the feed URL. That is how easy it should be to set up any web service you want to use.
- In for the long run - As I mentioned previously, Feedburner was acquired by Google not to long ago. Luckily for all its users, as if it were to go away so would all your subscribers. Now that they are owned by Google, we can we sure that the feeds will be accessible for a very, very long time.
- Adsense Integration - If you want to earn some money off the lazy lot who don’t bother to come to your site then Feedburner has a tool for you that easily ad a couple of adsense content and image ads.
- Its Free! - Best of all you can get everything that Feedburner offers without spending a dime. Though this wasn’t originally the case, since the Google purchase all the pro features are available to you.
Possible Problems
- Dependence - If you start to get a lot of people subscribed to your feed and Feedburner does something horrible that you don’t agree with, (like put in their terms of use that they own all your content) you are still kind of tied into the service unless you don’t mind leaving your readers out in the cold.
- Unreliable stats - One problem I hear all the time from people using Feedburner is that their stats don’t always make sense, or sometime they drop to zero every so often. If you need really reliable stats for advertisers etc, this might be a problem, even if it doesn’t happen very often.
- Web UI not great - When I say “not great” I mean it isn’t as good as it could be. Sometime things don’t seem to be in the right place or are not entirely obvious. There is some room for improvement here, some novice users might find it a bit hard to get their heads round at first. That said, there are some great guides to Feedburner out there.
From the horse’s mouth
Blogging Adventure uses Feedburner and so does my personal blog. For the year that I have been using it, I have had relatively little issues with the service and plan on using it for the foreseeable future.
The features that you’ll find me using are the email subscriptions, Feed ads and the chicklets.
If you’ve never used or heard of Feedburner before I recommend that you check it out and see if it can enhance your website or blog.
The Question For You:
If you use Feedburner why do you like it and what features do you like about it? Are you worried about the changes that Google has made the the advertising?
Posted on September 17, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies
Five Ways To Make Your Blog Posts More Reader Friendly
Simply due to the higher volume of blogs there is going to be better content out there.
The following are five, sure ways to make your content more interesting to your readers so you can be counted as being one of the few that have readable content:
1. Short and Snappy Phrases
People don’t have time to read an article with thousands of words (unless they’re very good). By getting straight to the point and cutting out all of the waffle you are allowing your reader to consume a lot more information in a lot less time.
And by giving your reader more time they might be more interested in leaving a comment and taking a bigger part in the community aspect of your blog.
2. Create an Introductory Paragraph
By doing this you are telling the reader what he is about to get in a nutshell and if you give them a bit of background information they will be more prepared to read what follows.
For instance, in my Feedburner article, I said who used the service and how it came to be purchased.
Remember though, you don’t want to tell the reader everything he is going to learn in the post, they’ll either be overwhelmed or not feel the need to read on.
3. Create Subheadings
You want to make your content as easily digestible as possible. You are splitting up the article so your reader can jump about or focus on one thing he or she is interested in.
Subheadings can be especially useful to a reader as it shows that (in most cases) you are considering another point and your article won’t be (hopefully) to biased if your comparing things. Just by looking at the subheadings your reader can see the points that you will be discussing.
4. Short Paragraphs
By having short paragraphs you allow your readers to skim content, this is very important as you’ll find your blog is only one of many and people don’t have time to pay the upmost attention to every word.
You can also separate your paragraphs up by using bullet points or numbering to convey key points. I have always found this very useful when reading blogs.
5. Use Pictures!
They not only help separate content but can also be used as a simpler way of displaying information
For instance, Glenn Wolsey documented which of his applications got the most usage, instead of writing it out in a paragraph he created a pie chart that made the information a lot easier to grasp.
If you take time to incorporate these five techniques in some form into your blog posts, I can guarantee that your readers will be thankful for it. Don’t feel the need to use them all at once, try different combinations and see which has a better effect!
Some of these methods might take a while to grasp, YOU have to decide when they are appropriate to use, I have just given a few examples.
The Question For You:
Do you have any to add to the list? How do you make your blog posts for reader friendly?
