Feedburner

Do you ever wonder where bloggers get all those little buttons that say xml or My Yahoo and do you wonder what they are for?  Well, these little buttons (called chiklets -- who comes up with these labels?) enable your readers to subscribe to your blog using an RSS Reader.  When a person subscribes to your blog via RSS, they can read your posts via a newsreader or news aggregator rather than getting an email alerting them to new posts or surfing to your blog.

One way you can get buttons for these various subscribtion methods is through Feedburner.

FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, "shockproofing" to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more.

When you submit your blog RSS URL, (example RSS URL: http://nextlevelpartner.typepad.com/bbab/index.rdf ) you are then offered the opportunity (publicize) to create buttons for the various feed services you want to offer your readers.  You can create a button for My Yahoo, My MSN, Newsgator, Feedburner, as well as create various xml buttons.  This tells readers they can subscribe to your RSS feeds and enables you to reach more readers.

When you combine RSS feeds with an email subscrption service like Bloglet, you are making it easy and convenient for your readers to keep coming back to read your blog in whatever format works best for them.

Comments

[Sandra]

Yes, feedburner is indeed good if you want to enhance an existing RSS feed... You can also try http://www.rapidfeeds.com for publishing an RSS feed if you already dont have one and also keep a track of it... its a good free service for RSS beginners, very easy and user friendly.

[Denise]

Sandra, thanks for the resource info!.
Denise