Once you're up and rolling with a few blog posts, you may wonder if anyone's reading your. For page views and visitors, there are plenty of stats programs to choose from from those provided by your web host to 3rd party stats programs. However, one area where there really is only one choice is for web feed management. If you're interested in tracking how many people have subscribe to your site's RSS feed you'll need to burn it through FeedBurner.

What the does that mean? It basically means you tell FeedBurner the location (URL) of your blog's RSS feed so FeedBurner can subscribe to it. FeedBurner then provides you with a new URL for your feed and you point your visitors to the FeedBurner version of your feed for subscriptions.

Example: www.yourdomain.com/feed becomes feeds.feedburner.com/yourdomain

FeedBurner will provide reporting to you beyond what you'll likely be able to track by yourself. This includes subscription levels, click throughs from RSS readers to your site, errors your feed may have, and other fun stuff.

One of the nice things about this is you end up with only one subscriber, FeedBurner, hitting your site directly to check for new posts. Everyone else is hitting FeedBurner. This makes a difference if your feed becomes popular. For example, imagine having hundreds of thousands of subscribers hitting your site every 30 minutes to check for new posts. That kind of traffic can be a pain to deal with. To put this in perspective, the feed for Technology Evangelist gets hit around 4 times a minute.

Another nice thing about FeedBurner is their ad network. Once your feed reaches an undisclosed number of subscribers (cough - 500ish - cough), your site may be accepted into the FeedBurner ad network. FeedBurner will give you the option of selling ads on your behalf, thus putting money in your pocket with no work on your part.

It's worth noting that some people have had reservations about pointing their subscribers to an external URL for RSS subscriptions. If this is something that bothers you, set up a CNAME entry in your DNS records pointing the URL of your choice from your domain to your FeedBurner URL. For example, you could turn feeds.yourdomain.com into your site's feed URL, assuming you have control over your domain's DNS records (this isn't the case for blogs hosted with Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com and other hosted solutions unless you've mapped a domain to their servers).