Have You Enabled These FeedBurner Settings for Your Blog Feeds?

FeedBurner (FB), now owned by Google, is indubitably the most popular feed syndication service out there. The tagline of FB is itself interesting: Get pro features gratis! Perhaps this is the only place where you can get professional services completely free. But are you really making use of all the features of FeedBurner? Here is a list of them that you really need to enable for your feeds.

You may also wish to see this article: Eight things all RSS feed publishers should remember.

1. Personal Message in Feeds

In order to set your personal message in FB feeds and to choose the theme of the feed, go to Optimize->Browser Friendly from the FB dashboard.

2. What's in Store for Podcasters

From the Optimize tab, choose SmartCast. If you are syndicating a podcast rather than a normal feed, you will find various special features here. You can set podcast images and most importantly, podcast search keywords. Make sure that you also set the copyright message.

3. Make Your Feed Universally Accessible

Are you worried that you are syndicating RSS 1.0 and a great number of your audience are using Atom feed readers? Different feed formats always worry publishers. But no longer! In FB, you have a feature that makes your feeds universally accessible in all browsers and platforms in any feed reader application. This is SmartFeed. Activate it from the Optimize tab.

4. Enable Social Bookmarking in Feeds

Go to Optimize->FeedFlare. This service, once activated, you can place social bookmarking links to your feed. If a reader wants to bookmark your feed item, he can do it from the feed reader itself.

One great advantage is that if you have enabled this, you can also track the traffic statistics of your blog from the FB interface.

5. Include Your Logo in the Feed

Using the Feed Image Burner from the Optimize tab, you can add a custom image to the feed. Choose Specify custom image URL and choose the location of your logo. It will be automatically placed in the feed. This is a very helpful for brand building.

6. Make Your Feed Appear to Come From Any Email Address

This is a very interesting aspect of FB feeds. If you have email subscription enabled, you have a lot of options to configure. Go to Publicize tab and choose Email Subscriptions. From this, choose Communication Preferences. You can set the email from which your feeds appear to be sent. If you are receiving CW feed through your email, you will see that it comes from an email address: noreply@cutewriting.blogspot.com. This is a non-existent email address, which just appears on your emails.

In the confirmation email body, you can set a personal message, which will be displayed whenever someone subscribes to your feed.

Go to Email Branding to see more options on formatting the feed text and putting in a logo in the feed. Also, the Delivery Options page lets you set the time when you want the delivery of your feeds done; you should optimize the delivery of the feeds according to the time zone of your readerspace.

7. Keep Your Feeds Healthy

Go to Troubleshootize and choose FeedMedic. If you find any problems in your feed syndication, go back to Tips and Tools and do the appropriate troubleshooting step.

8. Republishing Your Feed as HTML

Go to Publicize tab and choose BuzzBoost. This will help you republish your feed in HTML data which can be placed anywhere through a small JS widget. This is a highly useful area, since it helps you have different feeds for different topics of your blog and have more than five items listed in a recent entries Blogger widget.

Conclusion

Make sure you don't miss any of these cool services. Also, be sure to read the former articles on feeds. Subscribe to CW feed now, not to miss any more content.

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