FeedBurner is a free service that allows you to track your feed traffic and all kinds of other fun stuff. It won't create a feed for you from scratch as often believed - rather it wraps itself snugly around a feed you bring in and adds its services therein. It has a few premium options for the serious feed publisher, too.

People ask me all the time if I suggest that they use FeedBurner’s plethora of free feed enhancement tools. I have always answered a resounding “Yes!” – But lately FeedBurner has moved itself to a whole new level.

Did I mention most of these tools are free, and can help increase the traffic you get to your blog, by using your feed? Don’t believe me – go to http://www.feedburner.com and see for yourself. Tell ‘em Tinu sent you.

They have no idea who I am but it’ll be fun, I promise.

So enough with the warm-up already, and let’s start talking about some of these incredible features.

Increasing Your Blog Traffic with FeedBurner

Blog Traffic Increaser # 1- Give others permission - or shake the no-no finger with the Creative Commons option, found under the Publicize tab in your FeedBurner dashboard.

It will pop in the logo if you like, and explain what permissions others have to use your feed. Being clear about what permissions others have to use your feed with encourage them to display your headlines on their site – or let them know that they must link to you to cite your views.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 2- Turn your feed into a newsletter with Feedblitz or Squeet under Publicize/Email Subscriptions.

This turns your feed into a newsletter. It even gives you a subscribe form for your site. Now you now have a(nother) ezine option to go with your blog without any extra work.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 3- Use the Browser-Friendly version, combined with FeedFlare to explain what an RSS Feed is.

Four on the Optimize tab, the Browser-Friendly version turns your RSS feed into a web page, so that when new people click on your feed, without knowing what it is, they’ll know how to use it. All you do is link to the FeedBurner version of your feed, instead of your default feed address. FeedBurner will even help you with this, as we’ll see in Tip #12.

But before we talk about that, here’s an extra tip: under the FeedFlare option on the Optimize tab, you’ll find the Personal Flare section. If you click one of the links given, you will see one called “Get Email Updates”. Once you have the Email Subscription option enabled, you can enable that link in your feed to provide the option to subscribe to your updates via email.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 4- Make your feed compatible with all feed subscription services with SmartFeed.

Maybe you have an Atom feed in a world that uses RSS more often. Perhaps the tool you’re using utilizes an older version of RSS, and you’re just getting around to turning on your feed, but don’t want to switch. If you look on the Optimize tab in FeedBurner, you’ll find a tool that will convert your feed on the fly to any version the end user’s tool is asking for.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 5- Import pictures and links with Photo Splicer and Link Splicer

Under Optimize, look for these two options to help you jazz up your feed with your suggestions from Furl, del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 or Bloglines. The Photosplicer will also let you drop images into your feed using Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots.

The more of a resource your feed is, the more your subscribers will want to use it. I find that reminding my feed users that they’ll get even more treats than when they visit the blog gets more of them to subscribe – which also brings them back to my blog more often.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 6 - Get your audience to help send you even more traffic with FeedFlare.

Within the Optimize section, you’ll find one of the top three innovations from FeedBurner, as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve ever been to a blog that has options that make it easy to add a post to your del.icio.us, Digg or Technorati page, then you were probably green with envy, as I was, if you didn’t have the time or the technical expertise to add those fabulous hacks to your site.

Well I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to be find the days in your schedule to reverse engineer all those little tweaks, nor do you need to become a techie if you have no idea what all that HTML code does in your blog’s template.

Using FeedFlare, you can now do all of these things yourself for your feed without touching a line of code.

The exciting thing about this is that you can get your visitors to help you spread the word about your blog.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 7 - Notify all RSS and Blog tracking services automatically with PingShot.

Another one of the Optimize tools will free up your time by pinging all the top blog notification sites when you update, by following your feed. If you feel that all the pings slow your blog posting time down, or your blog won’t allow you to customize what services get pinged, this is a lifesaver.

There are several dozen more ways to increase your traffic with FeedBurner, not to mention all the little tricks you can use to maximize the traffic FeedBurner can generate, analyze or optimize for you. You’ve got to hustle on over to FeedBurner to use these (mostly) free feed tools before you can enjoy their benefits, and there’s no time like the present.