When it comes to blogging the most important people are the ones who take the time to read your RSS feed. They’re your long term readers who are in it for the long haul, much more so than the people who stop by your blog because they found it through a search engine or a social bookmarking site. They’re the ones who promote your articles, and the ones who’ll let you know when you’re falling off your blog game.

It’s important to build a rapport with them, and one of the ways to do that is by giving them special offers that aren’t available to regular readers of the website. This could be an electronic book, information on how to submit reader links, or beta invitations to other websites like Pownce and Joost.

But how do you send these links to your RSS readers without displaying them on your blog?

FeedBurner to the rescue

If you aren’t using Google’s FeedBurner service for your blog then you should be. (It has built-in integration with Blogger, and the rumour mill says that it will be added to WordPress.com at some point.) FeedBurner has these things called FeedFlares that show up at the end of your RSS feed. They can do things like dynamically list the number of comments on that post, or how many times it has been dugg or saved to del.icio.us.

It’s really simple to build your own FeedFlare that links to anything you want. Dosh Dosh has a detailed guide explaining how to do it. I wrote a list a while back explaining why I think FeedBurner is so great.

How to create a Custom FeedBurner FeedFlare

1. Login to FeedBurner
2. Click on My Feeds
3. Click on the feed you want to edit
4. Click on the Optimize tab
5. Click on FeedFlare from the sidebar
6. Under “Personal FeedFlare” cut-and-paste your generic feedflare link and click add to FeedFlare

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?

text=Some+text&link=http://www.somelink.com

I’ve created a Password-Protected Post on my blog for my RSS readers at http://internetducttape.com/easter-eggs/reader-appreciation/

So I would use the following custom FeedFlare:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?

text=Thank+you+for+reading+IDT+(click+and+enter+password+-----)

&link=http://internetducttape.com/easter-eggs/reader-appreciation/

That will give you something like this:

Thanks to Dosh Dosh for showing me how to do this. I had a previous hack in place where I had a del.icio.us account and I would use the FeedBurner splice with del.icio.us to share things with my RSS readers only. Using a FeedFlare is much more elegant.

Maki tagged me with his Feed Count meme exploring the reasons why bloggers display their FeedBurner feed count statistics (this is my last post in a row talking about RSS, I promise).

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Why FeedBurner?

Maki left out this question, but I think it’s a valid one. I choose to use FeedBurner for my RSS feeds because of the following things it gives me (for free):

• Recognized metric that is sometimes used to evaluate “blog worth” (like Technorati).
• Browser friendly page when someone clicks on the RSS link (instead of an XML file).
• In depth stats package that tells me who is reading my feed, where they are from and which RSS application and web browser they are using.
• Click tracking to know which links people click on in my feed.
• FeedFlares that let me put a footer on each RSS post with the number of commenters, Technorati links, and Digg/del.icio.us/Stumbles.
• Ability to change the title and description of my feed.
• Ability to offer email subscriptions.
• Subscriber count chicklet.
• Animated image of recent posts.
• Switching to FeedBurner can reduce your server load by as much as 50% (not an issue for me).
• I can change the source FeedBurner is using — this let me do hacks like display asides only on my blog and not in my feed (that I’ve since stopped doing).

All the options that could ever appeal to a geek like me.

Why Display FeedBurner Subscriber Count?

The short answer is because I don’t have a choice if I want people to subscribe to it. I’m a special case because I choose to be hosted on the WordPress.com multi-user platform. Unlike regular WordPress this means I don’t have the ability to add/modify themes or plug-ins — that includes changing my default feed to my FeedBurner feed [1]. Clicking on that chicklet is the only way people subscribe to my FeedBurner feed, everyone who uses auto-discover gets the WordPress.com feed instead.

I’d love to have the ability to switch to my FeedBurner feed as a wp.com feature.

The FeedBurner subscriber count is also a badge of reliability. I agree with Andy Beard that displaying is a form of social proof — it shows that you have an audience and that may increase your credibility the same way as displaying your Technorati rank.

For some people blogging can be a numbers game [2] (*whistles innocently*), and the number of readers is the only metric that makes any sense. The FeedBurner subscriber count is one of the few trustworthy metrics bloggers have available. Other ones like Technorati rank, Alexa traffic and MyBlogLog community members are all either hopelessly flawed or continually gamed [3].

FeedBurner is one of the few modern web companies that has a truly great product for content producers, and I’m proud to use them.

Footnotes

[1] And yes, I know I can switch hosting providers if it is that much of an issue for me. :)

[2] I am a number junkie and I spend a ridiculous amount of time tracking stats.

[3] Yes, FeedBurner has been gamed before but that has been quickly resolved.

Colour my face red. I’d been wondering about how to subscribe to Feedburner feeds using Sage, the Firefox RSS Reader extension. With the plethora of subscription options I was wondering “How do I get an XML feed I can bookmark!?”.

It turns this Feedburner page is formatted XML that you can bookmark for Sage. Just ignore the “Subscribe Now!” options and add a live bookmark for the page directly.