FeedBurner is a free service that allows you to keep track of your feed traffic and all kinds of other fun things. It will not create a feed for you from scratch as is often created, but it fits perfectly into the feed you bring in and adds its services to it. It also has some premium options for the serious feed editor.

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

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

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

Enough with the warm-up, and let’s start talking about some of these amazing features.

Increase your blog traffic with FeedBurner

Blog Traffic Increaser # 1- Give permission to others, or wave your finger no-no with the Creative Commons option, found in the Publish tab in your FeedBurner panel.

The logo will appear if you wish and explain what permissions others have to use your feed. Be clear about what permissions others have to use your feed, encourage them to display their headlines on your 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 at Publicize / Email Subscriptions.

This turns your feed into a newsletter. It even gives you a subscription form for your site. You now have an (other) ezine option to go along with your blog without any additional work.

Blog Traffic Increaser # 3- Use the browser 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, not knowing what it is, they will know how to use it. All it does is link to the FeedBurner version of your feed, rather than your default feed address. FeedBurner will even help you with this, as we’ll see in Tip No. 12.

But before we talk about it, here is an additional tip: under the FeedFlare option in the Optimize tab, you will find the Personal Flare section. If you click on one of the links provided, 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 email updates.

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 are using is an older version of RSS, and you are just starting to activate your feed, but you don’t want to change. If you look under the Optimize tab in FeedBurner, you will find a tool that will convert your feed on the fly to whatever version the end-user tool requests.

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

Under Optimize, look for these two options to help you improve your feed with your suggestions from Furl, del.icio.us, Digg, MyWeb 2.0 from Yahoo, or Bloglines. The Photosplicer will also allow you to post images to your feed using Flickr, BuzzNet, or Webshots.

The more resource your feed is, the more subscribers will want to use it. I find that reminding my feed users that they will get even more rewards than when they visit the blog causes them to subscribe more, which also leads them to my blog more often.

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

Inside the Optimize section, you’ll find one of the top three FeedBurner innovations, 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, like me, if you weren’t. have the time or technical expertise to add those cool hacks to your site.

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

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

What’s exciting 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 of Optimize’s tools will free up your time by pinging all the major blog notification sites when you update, following your feed. If you feel like all the pings slow down your blog post time, or if your blog doesn’t allow you to customize the services that are pinged, this is a lifesaver.

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