One of our earliest tips – waaaay back in 2005 – was to make sure you have a functioning, visible, accessible, news feed. Though the vast majority of missionary bloggers now have functioning feeds, it’s amazing how many still don’t have a visible, easy to find, working link or button to their feed.
One of the best tools that people use to manage their feed is Google Feedburner. Though far from perfect, it gives you a lot of tools to make your feed much more powerful.
In a nutshell, Feedburner takes your feed URL and runs it through their service, giving you a brand new URL that you choose,like feeds.feedburner.com/(yourblogtitle). So what are the advantages of this?
- It gives you what can be a permanent feed. Many people change blogs addresses or blog software over time. You can have your new blog point to the same Feedburner feed, so your feed readers will still know where you are.
- Feedburner gives you great tools for promoting your blog and feed. For example, email signatures, animated headlines for other sites, and buttons for your blog itself. As I wrote in my original post on feeds, there’s incredible value to having people subscribe to your feed and have instant access to your prayer requests, etc.
- Feedburner gives you easy to read statistics for your feed. Admittedly, many of us don’t have that many readers, so statistics may not be that interesting. However, it still gives you an idea who’s interested in your feed and how they read it and what countries they come from.
- It gives you an easy to remember feed URL, one that you choose. In fact, in some cases you can even create a URL on your own domain (not feeds.feedburner.com) that still runs through the Feedburner service.
- You can do various things to customize your feed. For example, you can make it more accessible to a wide variety of feed readers.
There’s a reason why so many bloggers continue to use Feedburner. Give it a try, and I think you’ll find it’s worth it!
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