Feedburner (http://feedburner.com) is a free and useful service for RSS feed owners. Feedburner automatically adds features to the feeds your software already produces, with very little work on your part. The most useful feature is collection and presentation of readership statistics. Wondering how many people read your feed on a regular basis? You may have many readers who seldom visit your web site. Feedburner provides unique subscriber counts as well as breakdowns by attributes such as client or host site.

Another useful feature for promotions is the ability to embed your latest posts — dynamically — in your email signature or other location. Feedburner provides a simple snippet of HTML that you can add to your outgoing email signature; this dynamically pulls the content from your feed whenever someone views the email — a great stealth marketing tool Finally, Feedburner has recently added the ability to embed ads within your feeds. If you are looking to monetize your work directly, this is a great option to experiment with. Getting started with Feedburner is easy and the web site guides you through the process with plenty of examples. You can see your feed in Feedburner before switching it on for your subscribers, so you can ensure that things look the way you want to before making the switch to your site’s subscribe link.