The fine folks over at theNEXTweb has published a video showcasing just how easy it is to manipulate your subscriber numbers in FeedBurner.

Apparently, it's as easy as creating an OPML file, placing your FeedBurner URL into the file about 1,000 times or however many new subscribers you want, then importing this OPML file into Netvibes. Each module in NetVibes which loads your RSS feed will count as an RSS Subscriber to FeedBurner.

This is definitely not the way to go about increasing your RSS numbers. However, I'm willing to bet that there are a few bloggers out their who will take advantage of this opportunity. I'm pretty sure, thanks to this video highlighting the hack that Google/FeedBurner will do something about this in the not to distant future. Once that happens, keep an eye out on your favorite blogs and see if their RSS subscriber count goes downhill.

I strongly recommend staying away from this hack. Instead, organically grow your subscriber count. If you need a jump start on how to do that, check out these great articles on Performancing.com which provide you the information and tactics you need to juice your RSS.

What Makes You Want To Subscribe
Feed Placement and Design Tips
How NOT to Sell RSS
RSS & CB Radio
If RSS Subscriptions Are Gold, Why Treat Them Like Dirt?

Do you have a tip or suggestion on how to organically increase RSS subscribers? If so, let us know in the comments. Lets talk about it and share some tactics.

I've spent the past few hours playing around with trying to export Drupal posts through XML or RSS into WordPress. However, I've run into a problem where I can only import posts from Performancing through the Feedburner XML file. This results in posts successfully being imported into WordPress with all of the FeedFlare options. Not only that, the links within the posts (when linked to older posts on the same blog) show up as FeedBurner URLs. So, I've spent some time trying my best to figure out of you can disable the FeedBurner redirect so that I can get access to the raw XML file being produced by Performancing but for the life of me, I can't find one.

You simply can't turn FeedBurner off. Sure, we could delete the feed from FB but then we risk losing all of the RSS stats and if we create a new feed, we would have to redirect readers to the new Feed address. What an unnecessary pain in the rear.

Knowing that many readers of Performancing use FeedBurner on a daily basis, have you noticed anyway to temporarily disable the redirection service? If not, does this mean that those who have used FeedBurner for an extended amount of time are locked into the service when a need for access to the raw XML file is needed?

FeedBurner, who was purchased by Google back on May 23rd, 2007 for a whopping $100 million dollars announced on May 30th that starting this week, they will be rolling out AdSense feeds for a small group of publishers. This small publishing group will act as beta testers as FeedBurner plans a full launch of the service.
According to FeedBurner,

publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you'll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google's AdWords program.

For those of you who are not yet placing ads in your feeds but would like to do so, be sure to read the requirements to join the AdSense program.

If you would like to use AdSense for your feeds, you'll first need to sign up for AdSense if you haven't already. Then, set up your AdSense channels for placement targeting. This will allow advertisers to target your syndicated content specifically. According to FeedBurner, you will be able to remain in control of the campaigns that are targeted at your feed by using the Ad Review Center.

Considering there are over 934,797 publishers who have created 1,657,885 feeds with 229,542 of those being podcast and videocast feeds, there are quite a few people in the mix who are in line to make money through AdSense within their Feed.

I'm thanking my lucky stars right now that this is a feature they have provided to their end users which is a much better solution than to slap ads on every single Feed that has been created through their service. If you are looking to monetize your RSS feed, definitely keep an eye out on FeedBurner.

BlogPerfume has created a very nice feed analytics tool called Feed Analysis. This tool allows you to view statistics at various timeframes from your FeedBurner feeds. Unfortunately, there are not many solutions for feed analysis available from some recent searching which I have done. However, I recently found this tool, and it is a definite bookmark for anyone that has a FeedBurner account. I have been using it for the past few weeks, and I think you might enjoy it as well.

Interface

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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.

The FB StandardStats Wordpress plugin makes installing FeedBurner's stats code simple. Just upload the plugin, active and add your user ID in the options page. That's it. The idea was to make it easy to use and help the user avoid editing any code.

Not only does it work with FeedBurner's StandardStats, it also installs FeedFlare from FeedBurner. A nice side effect that I didn't anticipate, but the same code works with both FeedBurner features.

If you'd like to install the plugin, you can get it at the FB StandardStats page. It has been around for a few weeks and even the folks at FeedBurner have been nice enough to test it and promote it. :)