Feedburner & RSS Feed - Part 1

In my previous post of Make money by increasing blog traffice, i had listed many methods that will help you to increasing blog traffic. There is still one important method that i am going to discuss with you more detail today. This is Feedburner and RSS Feed. Many newbie may heard about feeds or see the universal feed icon or these "chicklets" from the websits or blogs.
These icons above usually represent content in any format - test, audio or video - the purpose is for you to subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader.

So what is feedburner ? It is a technology program that controls XML, ATOM and RSS Feed quality control checker, as well as a professional distribution and tracking assistant, simplifying your web publisher work while extending your reach online.

I summaries the advantages of Feedburner as follows:

a. Traffic analysis / analytics for your feed - feed subscriber and usage statistics / metrics; you can even use Feedburner to track visitors to your blog or site, not just your feed, and get some useful info on most popular / top pages. etc
b. User-friendliness through browser-friendliness and reader-friendliness
c. Providing email subscriptions to your blog - which are also included in your statistics
d. Publicising your blog
e. Feedflare to enhance your feed and blog both
f. Making money through ads in your Feedburner feeds.

What are feeds ? Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere. Usually feeds has the format know as RSS or Atom. For RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or Rockdale. RSS is based on XML which is widely used standard for textual information exchange between applications on the internet. You can treat RSS feeds as plain text files and its designed for PC to PC communication.

By knowing the concept of feedburner and feeds, you will understand how the consumer can any time subscribing to feeds makes it possible to review a large amount of online content in short time possible. Whereas at the publisher end who make use of feeds permit instant distribution of content and the ability to make it "subscribable". Good things for feeds that helps to prevent spam filters, delayed distribution or search engine rankings problem.

Feed Reader, this is the feed reading applications known as "news aggregators" (Mostly text) or "podcatchers". There is also choice of reader working for mobile devices.

Alternative, we can also use online web-based service to track and manage feeds. The advantage is able to access your feed updates anywhere you can find a web browser. FeedBurner's services allow publishers who already have a feed to improve their understanding of and relationship with their audience. Once you have a working feed, run it through FeedBurner and realize a whole new set of benefits. In addition some social photo-sharing service eg Flickr also offer feeds of content you produce that others can retrieve.

Now you have idea of what feeds is and their function. And if you know how to apply it right for your blog or website, it will help you to drive in more traffic as you had never expected before.

My next post will be sharing with you how to put a common feed on your website or blog as to provide convenience for your audience to subscribe your content on line.