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.

Feedburner has a relatively new feature called "FeedFlare", which I absolutely hate to talk about.

Why don't I like to talk about my flare? Because when I do, I know other people will use it. And that seems almost wrong in some way. ;-)

Maybe you heard it was updated about this time last month and an API was released, and you said, "So what?"

Here's so what: FeedBurner allows you do to things that either time or knowledge may have prohibited you from earlier, which is to help your visitors get hooked on your blog faster, or to get your audience's help in getting more traffic to your blog. These FeedFlare options are based on tools people actually use, like Technorati, del.icio.us, and Digg, to name a few.

If you knew how to hack into your Wordpress/Blogger/Movable Type installation and add these little tweaks to your posts, then it was no biggie - you've probably done this ages ago.

But if you haven't, or like me, haven't had time to look under the hood lately, FeedFlare is for you.

When FeedFlare first came out, it only had a few options, and they were just for your feed. Things like "Email this" and "Add to del.icio.us", which were a great start. What they added over time was something to sing about - now you can add these options to your weblog. If you get more traffic to your pages than you do to your feed, this is a bit of joy.

With the addition of the Open API, developers outside of FeedBurner could add their ideas. Now you have options such as "Digg This", and "Add to Technorati Favorites", with your choice of adding the flare to your site, your feed, or both.

The Options the developers have come up with appear in the Flare Catalog, as well as in the API section. Cutting and pasting the appropriate link from there into the "Add New Flare" box in the FeedFlare section is required to operate the special pieces of flare.

Now you know my deep dark secret, one that shot my traffic further up than even I thought it could go, shortly after implementation. *insert dramatic sigh* I hope you're happy now.

Go to http://www.freetraffictip.com to learn more about all aspects of traffic generation, including blogging, article marketing and search engine optimization.