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Blogging Tools Week: Feedburner

Following on from my previous post on Technorati, I now want to cover the importance of using Feedburner for your blogging, and I feel the tools that this site offers are the most important in terms of bringing returning readers to your site.
Now, I will define the most important term first, as it can be quite tricky to understand:

RSS or Really Simple Syndication allows you to subscribe to the feed of a website, blog, or most media content sites. This means that when the website is updated, you are automatically sent the new content via email, without having to visit the site to check. What is more useful about RSS, is that you can subscribe to all the feeds you want, and then you can use a feedreading software like Bloglines to view all your feeds in one place, saving you time and increasing efficiency.

Where Feedburner comes in is quite simple. As a publisher of information, all I had to do was sign up, and then create my feed by typing in the name of my blog and its address, and by finally naming my feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogtrepreneur.
I was then able to publicize my new feed by adding a chicklet or button which you can see in my sidebar. To make things really easy for my readers, I put a completely free email subscription box at the top of my sidebar, so that readers can quickly subscribe to my content if they like what they see.

Now, every time I write a new post or article, Feedburner automatically detects the new post on my site, and emails it to my subscribers. I didn’t even have to pay for the service.

In a nutshell, Feedburner’s services have greatly improved my blog’s readership, and it is readership that helps to build a fantastic blogging community which will hopefully spread the Blogtrepreneur name.

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