How to Configure Your FeedBurner Settings

Have you heard of blog or website feeds? Mmmm... I hope most of you know and using FeedBurner to manage your raw site feed. It's the reason you wanna know more about FeedBurner settings and stop by here, right? However every website doesn't publish a site feed, but mostly blogs do publish feed automatically.

Feed is a great way to distribute your content over the web. Feed is like a lightweight version of your content where most devices and readers are compatible with. Once your readers subscribed to your feed, they don't need to visit your site to read your content.

You may have already redirected your site feed to FeedBurner service to enhance your site feed for readers as it enhance your feed capabilities and offers you range of features. Eventhough you use FeedBurner to manage your site feed and make use of its features, you may have no idea about all of its features. If so, now it's time to get to know it all.

Here I just explain most of FeedBurner settings which matters and how they can be configured as your preferences. I hope this post will act as a reference for you. There is no best way when it comes to managing your feeds. However someone can claim, for this type of sites you need to enable or disable these settings. But it depends on your personal preferences and how you wanna handle your site feed. Some settings are must have and some others are optional.

I had no idea about FeedBurner and its settings at first place. So I was confused and kept default settings. But as I research and familiar with settings, I've learnt how to change FeedBurner settings as I need. So in case if you couldn't help out with a setting on FeedBurner, I hope this post will help you to get a clear idea about it.

Before You Go:

Hopefully, you may have already redirected your site feed to FeedBurner and interested in customizing preferences. In case, if you didn't redirect your feed to FeedBurner yet, you may find following links helpful.

● If you are a Blogger user, read How to Create a Blogger Feed using Google FeedBurner.

● Non-Blogger users, read How to Redirect Your Feed to Google FeedBurner.

Steps:

1. Log in to FeedBurner service.

2. Now click on your Feed Title.

3. From here you can access your FeedBurner settings related to your feed. Mostly I will go through all settings on tabwise so you won't get confused about settings.

Analyze

Here you will find your feed statistics and you can view statistics for specific date, week or month. Stats include about subscribers and usage of your feeds. Except for viewing your stats, FeedBurner let you export your stats too.

Configure Stats

This option let you manage your stats on your feed. Basically FeedBurner tracks subscribers, feed reader applications used to access your feed and unique number of people viewed or clicked your feed content. Here you can customize tracking of feed views, podcast downloads and feed link clicks. However it will change your post links on your feed to trackable links. As feed links bring your visitors to your site, you can track those incoming traffic through Google Analytics by enabling Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics option.

Optimize

Here you can find featured services of FeedBurner to optimize your feeds for your audience.

Your Feed

This section let you see how your site feed configured with FeedBurner.


XML Source

This section reflects actual raw XML view of your feed being published on your site. This is how your site viewers see your feed if you haven't redirected it to FeedBurner.

BrowserFriendly

This service offer your feeds to render as a webpage on major web browsers and let visitors to subscribe your feed using a preferable subscription option. Here you can set a theme for your landing page, customize how your feed content should be displayed, let you include a personal message to display on top of your redirected feed and you can add more subscription options for your visitors. This is a very helpful and recommended service for you to maximize your feed readability. So if you wanna improve readability of your feed in web browsers, make sure to activate this service.

SmartFeed

This is another definite service you should activate. It has the capability of translating your feed into another feed format on-the-fly. Format by means it could be RSS or Atom format. For example, if your site feed is being published in Atom format, then some readers or services may only compatible with reading RSS feeds. SmartFeed service is capable of converting one feed format to another, so your feed in Atom format will be converted into RSS format whenever it needs to. Then your feed won't be restricted to a single format and any type of feed reader or service can read your feed. I hope you don't wanna keep this service deactivated.

FeedFlare

FeedFlare is an interesting service which let your subscribers act on your feed while on it. You can add links or text which called FeedFlare units at the bottom of each feed item for specific purposes such as to show off comments, display copyright, share your content or so. FeedFlares are custom developed units and in addition to checking out your content on feed readers or such devices, subscribers can share and view relevant details you wanna show them. So subscribers can do more with your feed rather than reading it. You can select which FeedFlares need to be displayed on this page and if you wanna add more, you can explore FeedFlare lists and add them. You can provide many number of units or links at the end of your content. But generally your visitors may not like to see bunch of links or options underneath your feed content, cause it may seems like messed up. So make sure to have most relevant FeedFlares on your feed.

Link Splicer

This service will let you add your links on the feed. However it supports few popular link collection services. For example, if you're a Digg user and activate this service providing your Digg username, it will append your submitted links on Digg at the end of your feed. Absolutely if your submitted links on Digg not relevant to the feed content, you don't wanna activate this service. Also this service make your feed bit complex and may affect to the user experience. So activate if your links matters.


Photo Splicer

Photo Splicer service let you show off external images hosted on your image hosting service. You can show off images from few available services and they will append to the end of your feed. If you have images that matters to your feed, you can make use of this service to show them off. Else user reading experience may get hurt.


Geotag

This services will add state location of your publication. You can show off from where your feed originated, a physical location. If you are live in United States, you can just enter your Zip code, else you have to know the latitude and longitude. However this service is optional and activate if it matters.

Feed Image Burner

This is an interesting personalization option for your feed. You can add an image for your page header which will be positioned on top right corner. You can either show default Powered by FeedBurner image provide by FeedBurner or else use a custom image such as your logo or feed count there. If you gonna use a custom image, make sure its height is not more than 144 pixels. Further you can link your image to your source blog or website too.

Title/Description Burner

This is a basic option where you can alter the default feed title and the description of your feed. If your feed title isn't informative enough, you can make use of this service to specify new one replacing current title displayed on page header. However you won't see any sign of description on the page, but it matters to feed readers and services willing to show off your feed description.

Convert Format

You can use this option to convert your source feed format into another specific format you need - RSS or Atom. But this option will interfere with SmartFeed option as it translates whatever feed format you have to be compatible with any feed reader application. If you have no special reason to convert your feed to another specific format, then it's highly recommend to leave this option deactivated while keeping SmartFeed option activated..

Summary Burner

What's your choice? You wanna display full content on your feed so subscribers can enjoy your content without visiting your site or do you wanna get them to your site? It depends. It's your choice. Summary burner is a helpful service if you wanna get subscribers to your blog or website to read full content. It shows a summary of your content on the feed and you can include a teaser message with each feed item too. In this case, to view full content, they have to visit your site.

However you have to be careful with this option. May be people subscribe to your feed to read your content via feed reader application. If so they would get disappointed for being subscribed as they wanna read full content via reader. Also if you have activated Email Subscription service on FeedBurner, your email sent out to your subscribers would see exact summary content and they have to reach back to your site to read your full content. Another dissapointing scenario if they wanted to read full content on email.

Downside of this service is enabling this option may decrease number of subscribers, but may increase number of visits. Your feed subscribers or email subscribers may find it not useful to being subscribed to your feed because each time to view full content they have to visit your site. However make sure to select best option for you - whether it should be activated or not. If you are not sure what to follow with this option as I did, experiment for a period of time with this service deactivated and activated. Then you can analyze improvement and go for best option you prefer. Here you have to select either number of subscribers or pageviews. Yeah, you can ask your readers which matters most for them too.

Publicize

Here you can promote your feed and statistics, enable email subscription for readers and configure some critical options related to your FeedBurner feed.

Headline Animator

Headline animator is an animated banner which pull off 5 most recent content and let you promote them them anywhere where you can view HTML. You can customize the appearance of your dynamic headline  and select how it should be displayed. Once you done with customization you can place its HTML snippet on your blog or somewhere else compatible with HTML. It's a great way to promote your content as it's eye catching due to animation but personally I think its design should be improved.

BuzzBoost

BuzzBoost is a simple customizable script which republish your feed content as HTML. This has huge advantage if you wanna promote your recent content and it can be used as a widget on your site or on another site you manage or have access. Yeah... it's really cool and recent content update automatically. If you wish to use this service and implement this widget on a blog or website, read Show Off Recent Content on a Website with Google FeedBurner.

Email Subscription

I don't think you wanna ignore this option if you care about email subscribers. This is really cool option for you to set up emails or newsletters for your readers to subscribe and enjoy your posts via email. It's easy to setup and implement. You can change its options such as delivery, email format under subcategories. Actually it provides you an option to get notify whenever an user unsubscribe from your emails too. So you can even contact them and ask reasons for unsubscribing to know is there something wrong with your email service. I personally recommend you to subscribe for your own email subscription to find out if there is something wrong with the delivery. Below you can refer to subcategories you find after activating this service.

Subscription Management - Here you can find code snippet for email subscription form and link to add on your blog or website to enable subscription of your content via email for people who would love to get your latest updates right into their inbox.

Communication Preferences - This section enables you to design your confirmation email being delivered to first time email subscribers. Once users enter their email and subscribe to your email updates, they will get this confirmation email before they opt in to receive email updates. You can customize email header and body as you need here.

Email Branding - This is an important section you should concern more. Here you will be able to customize format of your subscription email and the way it appears to your subscribers. So make sure to spend some time with it and make necessary changes to 

Delivery Options - This is another vital aspect of email subscriptions. Here you will be able to set up delivery time for your email subscribers. You should think about your readers and timezone including best time to send out your email newsletter where they hopefully able to catch it without being ignored or buried by other emails they receive. So analyze your blog or website visitors and change time zone to best matching region where most readers come from. Personally I've set email delivery time to the morning 7 AM to 9 AM where mostly people read emails. Else they may not find my email newsletters when they read emails.

PingShot

This is a must have service, which notify feed services whenever your feed changes or get updated. Usually when a blog or website update their feed, it will automatically update feed services interested in your feed. But here FeedBurner has access to more services and it will notify all of them immediately whenever something happen to change on your feed. So I recommend to keep it active.

FeedCount

This is another promotional and eye catching feature provided by FeedBurner to promote your feed circulation. You can show off your subscriber count on your site or elsewhere HTML possible using this chicklet and here it let you customize your chicklet.

Socialize

FeedBurner let you distribute your content to social media using this feature. However still it supports Twitter only. You can link your Twitter profile with FeedBurner to post your feed updates on your Twitter profile in real-time. Just add your Twitter account and customize settings as you prefer in respect to Sample Item Preview. If you are not using another service to feed your content to Twitter, this would be helpful.

Chicklet Chooser

Chicklets can help you in promoting your feed on your site to find view site feed and let readers subscribe to your feed instantly via preferred feed reader service. Your readers who wanna subscribe to your feed will find this helpful but however they can find all subscription options at your redirected FeedBurner feed too. If you think this chicklets are handy and useful, just select preferred chicklet and grab HTML code for it.

Awareness API

Awareness API let explicit developers to make use of your feed and related traffic information. It can be useful if you wanna build applications based on your feed to promote your content. But you need to make sure your feed is on good hands. Yahoo Pipes is a place where most sploggers live. Splogger means the content thieves. As Awareness API enables access to your feed data by other users, FeedBurner itself provide you another option to secure your feed from Yahoo Pipes usage. Refer NoIndex option if you gonna use Awareness API.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is an alternative non-profit license which allows you to hold copyright of your content while letting visitors to share your content with attribution. Also you can allow more right to other users too. This service will attach the license in your feed according to your specified conditions. But after enabling this option, some feed readers may unable to read your content or mess with your content and its formatting. But popular feed readers are compatible with it and you won't find any problems with the feed. So if you wish to allow some more rights to other and let them use your feed, make use of this service.

Password Protector

You can keep your feed password protected if you wanna get rid of other users accessing your feed. So users may require to enter username and password to read your feed, prevent email subscriptions and also Headline Animator will be password protected. I hope mostly you won't need this as you wanna go pulic with your feed, but this would be really helpful in some scenarios where your site is accessible by few users and so your feed. If you wanna go public with your feed, keep it deactivated.

NoIndex

Earlier most major search engines used to crawl your feed and index them. So there were possibility of duplicating your content because of search engines indexing your original post on your site and also indexing your feed. However now major search engines do not index your feed. So you will find no advantage of using NoIndex feature for search engines.

Yet, enabling this feature doesn't pose a threat to your feed. But as we discussed on Awareness API, Yahoo Pipes sploggers can grab your feed content and republish same content on elsewhere without your permission. So you can make use of option Indicate that your feed should not be used by Yahoo! Pipes to prevent your content being used by Yahoo Pipes. If you wanna secure your feed content, you can enable that option in NoIndex feature and secure your feed.

Monetize

If you are a Google AdSense user, you can use Configure Ads option to show ads along with your feeds and to earn extra income while distributing your feeds on the web.

Troubleshootize

Here you can find general help and tips regarding to your feed and generated reports to find out if there is a problem with your feed.

Tips and Tools

Here you can figure out common problems you may find related to your FeedBurner feed. It list out common problems along with quick fixes for you. It also let you resync your feed in case if your feed doesn't update it was used to be or if you find your feed is being malfunctioned. If you face problems with FeedBurner, this section may help you to solve them.

FeedMedic

This is an useful service and you should stop by periodically to check general problems of your feed. It automatically check and report problems regarding to your feed. Here you can find list of recent problems  occurred on your feed along with repair confirmations to fix them out.

I hope now you are much comfortable with FeedBurner and its settings especially which was unknown or confusing to you. You can configure them as you need to optimize your feed for your subscribers and get more out of it. Yeah, don't stop and research more about them so you can grab even more out of it.

Enjoy :-)