Is Feedburner Worth it?

I have a relatively new Wordpress blog and I was wondering if you all thought Feedburner was worth using. Is it that much better than just having a subscribe page on your site with all of the "Add to Google, MyYahoo..." buttons?

Thanks

 

it's free, I would say any free marketing is worth it.

 

I know it is free, but is it worth using? Will it take any visitors away?

 

You are not required to link to them. If you get the feeburner page indexed, it's just a free backlink to you.

 

Good point, thanks for your help

 

Feedburner is great, I've been using it for several months. The "Feed Flares" you can add to both your posts on a blog and your feed alone make it worthwhile. The Feedburner Ad Network has blown away Google's Adsense for Feeds in my experience, too.

 

The features I've seen on Feedburner seem very valuable, expecially stats and the Feed Flare service. That, as well as the fact that the service is free makes this service a good choice. Personally, I do have one small problem with using Feedburner... Having a feedburner feed url limits my control over it, in the sense that if the service ever goes down, the feed subscribers will either presume the feed dead or something and that gives a chance for potential loss of readership. I would use Feedburner, but would also use their MyBrand service to customize it to my own domain, so if Feedburner ever goes down, I can still get a normal feed working from the same url. It's a "just in case" option IMHO...

 

Definitely worth it, but don't expect miracles

 

I do both things, actually. I run my feeds thru FeedBurner AND have buttons to add the feed to various RSS sites (Yahoo, Google, etc.). I like using Feedburner because it shows you how many people use it and with what RSS readers. There's many other features which might be useful to some.

 

^^ I do the same as above, you can see the footer of my blog
The only problem I have is when the service goes down, not that it is down freuquently, but I have noticed it being down a few times!
Abhishek

 

I love the button Feedburner generates. I have linked it in my main site and I get a lot of traffic to my blog.

 

I have the same problem with feedburner. I want to retain control of my own feeds, just as I want to control my own domain. Subscribers and inbound links are the compound interest of the internet.

 

That's what I do too. There's no law that says if you use Feedburner you can't use other options.

 

This is what I had in mind. Is there some plugin for wordpress which makes it easy to add all these buttons to your blog?

 

I see you are using just the normal wordpress feed on your psych blog. Didn't feedburner work out?

 

Hi,
I too am using both feedburner and links to my own rss feed url to subscribe. It's probably getting a good of both worlds. Also if your website is adequately indexed you get a lot of rss sites spiders who make it available to their subscribers. The stats on the feedburner are good.
R.Anand

 

I am particularly happy about the "email subscription" available there. It has been amazing.

 

Looking into feedburner a bit further, using the plugin to forward the normal rss feed urls to feedburner is probably the best option, as you can consolidate all your subscriber stats.

 

I use Semiologic's Subscribe Me.

I deleted feedburner for two reasons:

1. I felt it was like giving Feedburner my backlinks instead of my blog.

2. I started to get a bit concerned about duplicate content issues in Google after Big Daddy.

 

Syndication is what the internet is all about. Why not just show a summary of each blog post to get around this?