4 Important Reasons to Redirect your Blogger Feeds through FeedburnerA

Feedburner is the most popular and fully featured free service for syndication of your blog feeds. Once you have set up your free Feedburner account, you can choose to redirect your blog feeds through Feedburner, instead of simply offering the default Atom feeds which are automatically generated for your blog.

There are many reasons why redirecting your Blogger feeds through Feedburner will be beneficial for both you and your readers, but while researching for a forthcoming post, I've come to realize how few Blogger users actually do this.

So in this post, I'll offer four important reasons why you should redirect your feeds through your Feedburner account, and also explain how easy it is to do.

Five Great Reasons to Redirect your Feeds

1. All of your subscribers will receive the same feed
   
   Your Blogger blog is capable of publishing up to three different feed URLs for your blog:
   
   • yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default (atom feed)
   
   
   • yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml (another atom feed)
   
   
   • yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml (an RSS feed)
   
   However, if you choose to redirect your feed to your Feedburner syndicated feed, all of these feeds will lead to the same single online location:
   

   feeds.feeedburner.com/YOUR-FEED-NAME

   
   This also means that all of your subscribers will receive a feed with the same (possibly improved) formatting.
   
   To seer this in action for yourself, try visiting any one of the three locations for the Blogger Buster posts feed below (all of these will redirect to my Feedburner feed URL):
   
   • http://www.bloggerbuster.com/feeds/posts/default
   
   
   • http://www.bloggerbuster.com/atom.xml
   
   
   • http://www.bloggerbuster.com/rss.xml


2. You will have a true indication of your subscriber base
   
   While many bloggers choose to add a Feedburner account and offer this syndication to subscribers, those who don't redirect their feeds through Feedburner will seem to have fewer subscribers!
   
   It is virtually impossible to know how many subscribers retrieve your default blog feeds unless you redirect them through Feedburner (or another service which is able to catalog feed retrievals).
   
   Most Bloggers who choose to redirect their feeds through Feedburner notice a sharp increase in their subscriber count. Also, you will be able to monitor your subscriber count, since you will have access to daily, weekly and monthly feed analysis.


3. Monitor the growth of your blog using the subscriber count
   
   As your blog matures and your posts reach a wider audience, you will undoubtedly notice an increase in your subscriber count.
   
   
   
   Using your blog's subscriber count is one method of analyzing your blog's growth, and can also offer statistics of page views and popular posts.


4. Using Feedburner offers readers more incentive to subscribe
   
   This may not seem so obvious until you make a comparison between these two pages:
   
   
   
   
   The page on the left is an unformatted, default feed page which is accessed when feeds are not redirected through Feedburner. The page on the right is a feed page generated by Feedburner. As you can see, this is much more visually enticing, and includes easy subscription options for your readers to use their favorite feed readers to subscribe.

You may be surprised how easy it is to redirect your Blogger feeds through Feedburner. Assuming you have already created your free Feedburner account, here's how to redirect your Blogger feeds:

1. Go to Settings>Site Feed in your Blogger dashboard.


2. In the box which says: "Post Feed Redirect URL", type the URL of your Feedburner feed (eg: http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED-NAME)
   
   


3. Save this setting!

I hope this post has helped you realize the benefits of redirecting your Blogger feeds through Feedburner. Please feel free to leave your comments (or indeed, your own incentives!) below.