Feedburner—owned by Google and part of its suite of services—is the premier RSS feed tracking service.   If you’re not using Feedburner, here’s five reasons why you should be:

1. Future-Proof Your Feed – Unfortunately, there is now standard for how Content Management Systems format the location of feeds.  This means that if you change your CMS solution to from WordPress to Drupal, for example, your feed will be at a new address, leaving your former subscribers adrift, no longer receiving your site’s content.  Feedburner solves this problem by creating a new feed, with a permanent address, into which you can plug any existing feed.  This way if your site’s structure changes, you just plug the new feed into feedburner and your subscribers keep receiving updates.  It might be helpful to think of Feedburner as a newsstand and your website as a newspaper’s offices.  If the Washington Post moved its offices, no one would need to track down their new address to get their daily paper because papers would still flow from their new address to same old newsstands.
2. Increase Your Feed’s Compatibility – Feedburner will convert your feed into a many different formats, making it compatible with dozens of readers and social bookmarking platforms.  You can even opt to have your feed sent out to subscribers via email, which is a very handy service for those not familiar with RSS readers.
3. Track Your Subscriber Rate – Feedburner tracks how many subscribers you have by tracking the number of times your feed is access in a day while taking into account repeat visits and other factors in order to produce a fairly accurate accounting.  Many Feedburner users will find that this number varies from day to day, but this isn’t because your actually subscriber base is waxing and waning.  Instead, this fluctuation is caused by the fact that many RSS readers won’t be checking for updates to your site on a daily basis.  So, on days when most of your subscribers are reading, you’ll see feed numbers spike and vice versa with low-readership days.
4. Money – Feedburner allows you to add Google AdSense ads to your feed, giving you another source of income from advertising.
5. Promotion – Feedburner’s PingShot feature is very useful, especially for those working on CMS systems that don’t have a built-in update services or “pinging” solution like WordPress does.

So, login to your Google account, visit Feedburner and get started!

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