FeedBurner has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years. So much so that I am seeing Chicklets and Headline Animators almost everywhere I go. Not sure what a Chicklet is? It’s the cute little buttons that give you the option to subscribe to feeds through various aggregators. Here are some examples:

You can see more in the footer of this page. The Headline Animator is more popular in forum signatures and on static web pages. It is an animated GIF that rotates your five most recent headlines, or blog posts. You’ve probably seen these all over the place, too:

Using that Headline Animator in my own forum signatures has brought A LOT of traffic to this blog. If people like what you have to say, they generally like to hear more - so why not give them your latest? With this animated self-updating graphic in place, even forum posts you wrote two years ago will show people what you’re writing about now.
Likewise, I’ve clicked through A LOT of these in other people’s signatures - for the same reasons. It’s a terrific little marketing tool!

FeedBurner offers a lot more, too - such as stats for your feed. These are particularly interesting as they show you how many subscribers you have, how those people are subscribed, and more. And a handy little tool they offer: a list of Uncommon Uses, which they describe on their site like this:

FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the Web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.

Beyond these known places, FeedBurner can also help identify “Uncommon Uses” of your feed content. These references could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers want to see where their content is republished and it’s very helpful to have something like FeedBurner to provide visibility into usage. When FeedBurner identifies an “uncommon” use, we highlight it in your main Dashboard and on the detailed Uncommon Uses page.

Like most people, I take advantage of some of the easy-to-use tools that FeedBurner offers, but haven’t dug into their site much beyond that. But when Rae Hoffman posted an interview with FeedBurner’s CEO on her blog this morning… I realized just how much I was missing out on.

After reading through the interview, I surfed on over to log into my FeedBurner account and check my own stats. Guess how many subscribers I have to my feed?

11

LOL - Eleven? Geez, that can’t be right! Obviously it’s not, but I figured out what I need to do in order to better track my subscribers and get more accurate stats. The first step is to redirect subscribers of my old feed (at blogger *blush*). Next, I need to change the “auto-discovery” option to point to my FeedBurner feed. And a few other minor details. Fortunately FeedBurner offers all of those details and instructions in bite-size chunks!

Here’s the link –> FeedBurner Log in or Sign Up FeedBurner is one of the greatest tools out there for bloggers! And all of the services I mentioned above… are free!

Tags: feedburner, Dick Costolo, blog promotion, chicklets, blog stats