Internet Tools

Feedburner - Analyze, Optimize, and Publicize your Blog

This is the #1 tool to partner with your blog, podcast, or other feed.  It is a free service, owned by Google, that adds some great functionality to your blog.

Provides one permanent feed address no matter where your blog may ever move to.  

This is my biggest reason for advocating Feedburner.  It’s a great safety net.  Most people will get the idea to start a blog, and even jump in, before they know what they want completely.  That is good but usually will lead to limitations in the future by being locked to the platform you started with.  If you decide to move, every single user is unsubscribed and must subscribe again.  This usually loses 30%-50% of the readers immediately just for upgrading.  

Feedburner solves this problem.  It allows you to have a public address that will never change, while giving the flexibility behind the scenes to change the location, host, or platform to anything you want, anytime you want.  When you use it, just make sure users subscribe to the feedburner address. (i.e. feeds.feedburner.com/MinistryTools)

Gives ability for your content to be delivered by email.  

Feed readers like Google Reader are great, but the majority of normal people still don’t use them.  But everyone knows and understands email great.  Feedburner converts a complicated updating blog to email and emails everyone with the new content.  Notice the entry form on the side of this blog.

Gives statistics about your readers.  

Ever wonder who is reading what you write?  Feedburner gives those detailed statistics as well.

Builds interaction into posts.  

Notice at the bottom of this post.  It places these links into the content whether it be on the site, in a feed reader, or in email.