I’ve had several emails asking for explanations of RSS feeds and Feedburner. While the concept of RSS is pretty easy, there really isn’t a great way for a new blogger to learn about it. Hopefully this will help.
RSS stands for RDF Site Summary, but it’s better known as Really Simple Syndication. Basically it’s a standardized format for republishing things like blog posts, news articles, and images or video. Most of the time, your blog’s RSS feed is published to www.yourdomain.com/feed/, though that varies depending on where your blog is hosted and how your blog is set up.
Let’s say you want to know when a website is updated with new content, but you don’t want to visit the site every day looking for new things to read. By subscribing to the site’s RSS feed, you’ll receive new content automatically, either through your email or in an RSS reader.
RSS reader? What’s that?
An RSS reader is just a website you can go to when you want to read all the blogs you’ve subscribed to. Most people (including me) use Google Reader. When I subscribe to a website’s RSS feed, every new post is sent to Google Reader so I can read it when I want. I have folders for the various types of websites I read, making it easy to go to that folder and see only certain types of information.
Feedburner
Feedburner is a Google service that pulls your blog’s original feed and allows you more control over how it looks and how people subscribe to it. If you have a WordPress or Blogger blog, your RSS feed is created automatically without any action on your part. However, if you want to keep track of your subscriber numbers, customize the look of your feed, or make other changes, Feedburner provides a way to do that.
For example, my personal finance blog offers RSS subscriptions in both a reader and through email. With Feedburner, I can change everything from the subject of the email to what email address it comes from. I also added my logo to the top of each email. My regular RSS feed doesn’t provide a place to login and make those kinds of changes.
Using a service like Feedburner can offer a lot of advantages and customizations, and as an added bonus, you can add Google Analytics code to your feed so your subscribers’ views still count toward your total traffic numbers.
The number one advantage of Feedburner is this: If you ever move your blog to self-hosted WordPress or to its own domain, instead of making everyone subscribe again, you can just edit the source of your original feed on Feedburner (like from mydomain.blogspot.com/feed to mydomain.com/feed). That way Feedburner will know where to access your new posts, and your subscribers will still get their updates like nothing ever happened.
The Bottom Line
It’s important to offer RSS subscriptions to your readers to keep them reading. If they have to go to your website every day, they may not remember (especially if they’re like me and they read tons of blogs). By making it easy for them to subscribe, you’re ensuring that your content will be seen and your audience will continue to grow.
