Online Marketing Blog

The FeedBurner plugin has got a new name and a new owner. Steve Smith from OrderedList.com handed off the plugin to the FeedBuner crew. It wasn’t a multi-million dollar deal like you hear with internet companies these days, but FeedBurner did rename the plugin in Steve’s honor. It’s now the FeedSmith plugin.

If you’re not familular with the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, what it does is automatically reidrects your WordPress’ feeds to the FeedBurner version. You don’t need to update your template or give out your FeedBurner URL, just update the setting via your WordPress admin and it’ll do the rest. Quite handy and works well.  It’s a must install on my list.

Congrats to Steve!

[tags]FeedBurner,FeedSmith[/tags]

I noticed today that Self Made Minds is working on a list of the top 100 blogs that use Feedburner to host their RSS feeds. I noticed quite a few search marketing related blogs in there and found it pretty interesting. John Battelle is kicking search engine ass with nearly 68,000 RSS subscribers. Here are a few that I was able to pull out from the original list and a few others I looked up.

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Matt Cutts

Search Engine Watch

SEOmoz

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Roundtable

ShoeMoney

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Guide

Online Marketing Blog

Pronet Advertising

Marketing Pilgrim

FeedBurner has an easy way of promoting a blog post though FeedFlare. FeedFlare simply adds a few social options to each post. You can choose to add a Digg link, del.icio.us link, ‘email this post’ option, share on Facebook and a few other handy choices. However, there are many more possibilities as you can create custom FeedFlares.

The other day Danny Sullivan put together one for StumbleUpon. He said it was quite easy as even a non-techie like himself can do it.

Here is how you’d get the StumbleUpon FeedFlare working for your site:

1. Log into your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on your feed.
3. Click on the Optimize tab.
4. Click on FeedFlare
5. Copy this URL http://searchengineland.com/stumble.xml and past it into the ‘Add new Flare’ box.

I’ve been testing out FeedBurners StandardStats package and it’s a great start for a free stats program. The data seem to be online with Google Analytics and the look and feel is great for the non-techie person.

Starting off, the setup is easy. Just log into your FeedBurner account and activate StandardStats. One click of the button and your done with step one. The next step is to implement the code on your site and I think it could be easier.

Currently, you choose your blogging platform from the dropdown and it gives you the code to add to your template. It tells you where to put it but I think it’s a bit much for average users. For example, you have to put the code in the post-meta loop. Everyone knows where that is right?

When I built the FB StandardStats plugin I built it to make it easy to add in the necessary code to get the new StandardStats up and running. People mentioned that it worked with FeedFlare but it didn’t hit me until today how cool this plugin really was!

“FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build ‘interactivity’ into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item. Publishers can choose to include FeedFlare within the feed itself as well as on their blog or site.”

The past few days have been great for the FB StandardsStats plugin. Not only have I been in communication with the FeedBurner folks, it also got mentioned on the FeedBurner buzz blog. That gave the plugin some great exposure and uncovered a few bugs. It’s since been updated and re-packaged and FB StandardStats 1.0b is now available.

The biggest update is how the plugin displays the FeedBurner code. It seems that I was showing it not only on blog posts, but also in the feed. This could cause issues and confusion with feeds burned at FeedBurner. So I added a few lines of extra code to ensure that it only adds the StandardStats code in the browser version of posts and not in the feeds.

While working on a review of StandardStats from FeedBurner, the only real negative thing I could come up with was the fact that the install wasn’t simple for non-techies. Sure it’s easy for some, but I thought it could be easier. So I created the FeedBurner StandardStats WordPress plugin.

FB StandardStats makes installing FeedBurner’s stats code simple. No files to edit and no wondering if you got the code in the right place. Simply put in your user ID and the plugin will do the rest.

As a bonus, the plugin can also be used to show FeedFlare links on each blog post.

To Install:

1. Download FB StandardStats 1.0b
2. Upload fb_standardstats.php to the /plugins/ directory of your blog.
3. Activate via the Plugins area in WordPress’ admin.

If you didn’t hear, Performancing’s blog stats are no longer. They sold that part of the company to PayPerPost and PayPerPost returned it. Now no one is taking care of the stats and it’s been closed.

So my first thought was, what do I replace it with? Google Analytics is great, but a bit overwhelming for most people. Mint is one of my favorite stats packages, but costs $30 and I wanted something free for now. Who doesn’t? That’s when I saw Feedburner’s StandardStats.

StandardStats will track and report on blog visitors, inbound traffic, browser usage, OS usage, outbound clicks and much more. I just installed it and I’m waiting for my stats to come poring in.

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

The podcast and audio search session was very good. It started with Amanda Watlington giving an overview of of podcasting. Other speakers included Darion Babin of Webmaster Radio and Rick Klau of Feedburner. They all made excellent points on podcasting. Takeaway points included:

• Bandwidth can be costly, but it’s worth it.
• Don’t just get into iTunes, submit podcasts everywhere.
• Make it as easy as possible for users to subscribe.
• Quality does matter so get good software, a good microphone and a pop screen.
• Prepare for growth.
• Always transcribe your shows and make that accessible to search engines.
• Use Feedburner to distribute feeds. 302 redirect existing feeds.
• Optimize show landing pages and show episode pages.
• Validate feeds.
• Educate and/or entertain in your podcast for success.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.

The news is out on the Blogbeat.net site and the FeedBurner blog of the blogbeat acquisition by FeedBurner. On the blogbeat site a comic newspaper “They Daily Analytic” headline reads, “FeedBurner Invasion! Planet blogbeat acquired by FeedBurner Overlords”.

Blogbeat functionality will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service and integration will be complete during fourth quarter 2006. Current blogbeat customers will get a refund as the new service is free. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The addition of blogbeat technology should further enhance FeedBurner’s lead as a RSS resource for bloggers or will it? The reviews I’ve read about blogbeat haven’t been that great. I did a trial a while back and went back to the trusty analytics package I’ve been using for years. Integration into the FeedBurner control panel would be convenient though.