A Blog feed allows "Feed readers" to access a site automatically looking for new content. Syndicating your blog via an RSS feed is a great way of allowing your readership access to all new posts from your blog without them having to keep visiting your blog.
Most people today use RSS feed readers to keep up with syndicated content from their favourite blogs, so if you don't syndicate your blog via an RSS feed, you are depriving yourself of a huge proportion of readers.
What Is An RSS Feed?
An RSS feed allows easy online content distribution. RSS feeds can be read as plain text files, but they're designed to be read via an RSS Feed Reader. Numerous RSS feed readers exist. Readers vary from being standalone applications to being online based.
How To Publish Your Blog Feed?
If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform then you are in luck. WordPress has inbuilt RSS feed functionality so you are most likely already syndicating your posts via RSS without even
knowing it. If you are using some other platform which does not automatically publish an RSS feed, you will have to look for an appropriate plugin to use for this purpose.
You can view your WordPress RSS feed by navigating to yourdomainname/blog/feed or yourdomainname/feed (depending on the exact location of your blog).
What is a Feed Burner?
A Feed burner provides services that allow RSS publishers who already have an RSS feed to expand on the features provided by their basic feed by "Burning" their feed. "Burning" your feed with a Feed Burner provides the following benefits:
* Allows you to view detailed stats as your blog feed is read.
* Allows your readers to easily subscribe to your feed no matter what feed reader they are using.
* Allows you to format your RSS feed for all directories and readers and gives you options of further customizing your feed by for example adding ads to your feed.
* Allows you to easily display your Feedburner stats including your subscription count via a simple widget.
There are numerous feed burners that you can find by doing a simple search for "feed burners".
Why Burn A Feed?
That is a very logical question that you might be asking yourself right now. What's the point of burning your feed? Why not just leave it as yourdomainname/feed?
There is a very simple yet important answer to this question. When you publish a new post to your blog, it gets published to your feed. If you have many readers subscribed to your RSS feed and you have not burned your feed, your readers will be reading your feed directly from your webhost. You run a big risk of slowing your server down if a lot of readers access your feed at the same time. A feed burner takes on its shoulders the task of taking your RSS feed and serving it to the tens of thousands of people and applications that subscribe to it so that your server performance does not suffer.
John Motson runs a domain name forum, domain name blog and has authored the popular domain name book Domaining Manifesto.
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