This is part 2 in our series about FeedBurner.
See part 1 here.

FeedBurner – Point your feed here. We’ll do the rest.

As promised, we’re now going to explore the world of FeedBurner.

Blogger gives me the tools to create my Atom feed. Atom, like RSS, is a dialect, a contract that defines the structure of my xml’ized blog. Blogger does Atom, some blogging tools do RSS .9, 1.0 or 2.0. FeedBurner promises to make my Atom file understandable to syndicators that rely on RSS, so I’m all set as far as standards are concerned:

• Use Blogger
• Create an atom file,
• Give the atom file to FeedBurner

If you need help creating your Blogger atom file, click here.

Remember, xml is not meant for human consumption. Atom is much friendlier on the eyes than RSS-type xml (your browser thinks it’s HTML), but it’s role in life is to be a feed. The “eProgramming: Software for Web Marketing feed is:

http://www.sitexl.net/eprogramming/atom.xml

This is what we’ll hand to FeedBurner’s URL entry box on the home page.

FeedBurner now presents me with a world of services. I can:

• detail traffic stats about individual feed content items
• make my feed work with any reader
• enable my feed for Podcasting
• make my feed human-readable (what was I just saying about xml not being meant for human consumption?)
• add Amazon.com links to my feed (for which I’ll get a referral fee if clicked)
• and really a whole a lot more….

Let’s start with item stats.

• check the Item Status box
• name my feed “eProgramming for SEO and SEM”
• name my URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/eProgramming-for-seo-sem

Note that I did not take the default URL name: EprogrammingForSeoSem. Search engines want human-readable words, and eprogrammingforseosem is not a word.

After easily creating an account I am asked to verify my only service choice, to gather item-level statistics for this feed.

I admit I am pretty pleased when I see:

You have successfully activated the feed “eProgramming for SEO and SEM”

I have reason to feel pleased, as FeedBurner politely compliments me:

Well Done. What Next?

My choice is to launch my publicity tools. Publicity Tools. Let us ponder this… publicity… tools. eCommerce Blogging is about writing targeted content to attract a targeted market, and FeedBurner is offering me free publicity tools.

We will explore these tools in detail in the next post.

This is part 1 in our series about Feedburner.
See part 2 here.

FeedBurner does a great job of summing up the Blog/Feed/Rss/Atom world here.

 

Consumer Bottom Line: RSS makes reviewing a large number of
sites in a very short time possible.

Publisher Bottom Line: RSS permits instant distribution
of content updates to consumers.

As a website owner running a blog for SEO as well as the greater good, your role is to publish highly-relevant RSS content. Your write the content, the blogging tool takes care of the RSS. 

Some consumers use an online server and others use desktop applications to read your content. From the consumer’s perspective, your blog content is one of many feeds streaming into their tool for consumption. Because these consumers subscribe to these feeds, they are, by definition, targeted consumers.

For publishing, FeedBurner suggests TypePad or Blogger (I used Blogger to compose this entry).

For consuming on the desktop, FeedBurner suggests FeedDemon, NetNewsWire.

For consuming online, FeedBurner suggests NewsGator, Bloglines and My Yahoo!

FeedDemon
FeedDemon’s role is as feed analyst. Just like we use web analysis to track web site hits and click-throughs, we use FeedDemon to track blog hits and click-throughs.

In our next post, we’re going to step through applying FeedDemon’s tools to this blog.

AdsWizard.com
Buying flat rate ads on the internet is like moving from powerful PC’s to thin clients. It’s the wave of the past, and that is a good thing.

When desktop PC’s arrived they wrestled power away from the mainframe, the sysadmin-controlled centralized box kept in a locked, air conditioned room. Each individual got power, including the power to totally screw up. The karmic result? Citrix, a thin client that depends on — wait for it — a sysadmin-controlled centralized box kept in a locked, air conditioned room.

Internet pay-per-click continues to bring a lot of advertisers a lot of money. But because of its distributed nature, the PPC is open to the least common denominator competitor who clicks links to play dirty.

Flat rate advertising worked in all media before the internet existed. Going back to flat rate might be the wave of the future.