Permagnus.com

I believe that most of the sites (especially frequently updated one) on the net has RSS (or other types of feed) capability on it but few of them (I think…) realize how important it is to optimize your feed and tracks how your feed is performing. This is important to enrich your site statistic and also to track your feed’s performance.

In this entry, I will show you how to optimize your site’s feed using the free service of Feedburner, one of the best “feed burner” out there (and the biggest probably?).

First, you have to have a Feedburner account which you can register for free. Here’s a direct link to the sign-up page. Fill in the yaddi - yadda form (not much difference than any online form I’d say). After signing up, you’ll be prompted to enter your site address and the system will detect which feed format is supported (usually RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92, and Atom) and you’ll get to choose the address of your site feeds. When you are prompted to “to dress it up a little”, simply click “skip directly to feed management”.

And here goes the interesting part. I’ll guide you part by part on how to fully maximize the use of your feed (and feedburner) for your site.

Don’t bother to click the Analyze tab just now because most likely you don’t have any readership on your feed via feedburner just yet. Instead, click on the Optimize tab. Under that tab, ensure that you activate the following services (don’t worry, it’s no hassle, we are not there yet):

• Smart-Feed, to ensure the readability of your feed by any feed reader
• Title/Description Burner, one of my favorite that can add a custom title (and custom description) to your site feed
• Tickerize, if your site covers financial content, you can add this feature so that specific financial feed agregator can index your feed in such a way

I personally don’t like using Link Splicer or Photo Splicer because they tend to iritate your reader with clogged non-content-based feed which in the short run may turn your feed reader away.

After pimping your feed display, what you have to do next is to Publicize your feed:

• BuzzBoost, it’s a must-activate if you have a site network since this feature will give you a javascript code to put to any website to automatically display your content.
• Headline Animator, pretty much the same as BuzzBoost but without the full content being displayed. Furthermore, it enables you to display a cool rotating headlines from your site that can be put just about anywhere
• Pingshot, automatically “tells” services that your site has just been published
• Email Subscription, if your visitors are not a l33t and don’t know what the heck a feed (and a feed reader) is, you can use this feature so that your reader can subscribe to your feed via email
• FeedCount, it’s a bit narcissist but it’s worth to show off how many readers you have. Like this site, averagely has 40-something feed reader at the moment. Not bad for a new site :)

And the last step to go on preping your feed will be monetizing it. I don’t like the idea too much. The reason why I read stuffs via feed reader is because I wanted to save time and I don’t want to see ads that will clog my reader. Infact, I’m an ad-blind. Use this feature at your own discretion.

That’s all about prep-ing your site feed. Now let’s try to implement it on your site (which is a bit tricky and not as simple as preparing the feed at the first place). But then again, maybe that’s a time for the next entry :)