One of the problems always arising after blog sales is the control over the FeedBurner feed and access to the Feedburner statistics panel.
FeedBurner doesn't offer an easy option to push a feed to another author and most blog owners are afraid to lose subscribers.
But there is a way to redirect the feed from the former to the new blog owner without losing any subscribers.
This how to is aimed at WordPress users and requires the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin for WP (or the original Orderlist FeedBurner Redirect plugin for those who haven't upgraded yet)
Important Note!
I have only tried this on blogs using the original blog feed URL, together with the redirect plugin, and on blogs using the FeedBurner feed URL for subscription. Theoretically this should also work for feeds only using the FeedBurner subscription URL.[1]
The difference: when you use the FeedBurner link your readers subscribe to FeedBurner otherwise they subscribe to your blog and some PHP or .htaccess (I've heard there still are .htaccess ninjas out there) foo redirects your feed to FeedBurner.
1. Cancel the old feed
Ask the former owner of the blog to delete the feed. It is important that the 30 day redirection option is checked before deleting the feed!
Deleting a feed can easily be done from the FeedBurner Feed admin panel.
From now on, your feed will for the next 30 days be redirected to the original feed URL of your blog.
2. Burn a new FeedBurner feed for your blog.
As soon as the old feed is deleted (with redirection) you can burn a new feed for your blog, using your blog (feed) url. AFAIK this can't be done before the old feed has been deleted.
Go in to your FeedBurner control panel and navigate to Optimize. Select here BrowserFriendly. Under Content Options ---> Personal Message you'll see Are you redirecting your feed traffic?.
Click that link and enter your blog feed URL here. You wouldn't want the future owner to go through the same trouble if one day you'd sell the blog again, would you?
3. Redirect to your new FeedBurner feed URL.
Once you've burned a new feed, you can now redirect the original blog feed to your new FeedBurner feed, which you control.
Using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin in WordPress (Options ---> FeedBurner) every feed aggregator will now automatically be redirected to the new FeedBurner feed and your feed readers will automatically move to the new feed as well.
In worst case they might be spammed once with the latest entries (post an entry warning your readers).
How come aggregators automatically pick up the new feed?
Remember the 30 day redirection option? During those 30 days, FeedBurner redirects all the traffic to your original blog feed URL, which gets automatically redirect to your new FeedBurner feed via the FeedSmith plugin.
If you coordinate this with the former blog owner, this can easily be done within minutes and no one should notice anything (remember the old-fashioned way of communicating, AKA IM?).
And just as a reminder: from now on don't use the FeedBurner URL anymore for subscription. Use the FeedSmith plugin and make the readers subscribe to YOUR FEED URL and not to a FeedBurner URL. ;-)
[1] If someone would try/has tried this, let me know and I'll update the entry accordingly.
