If you're reading this post, chances are you know what a feed is.  It's likely that you're reading this as a feed right now, rather than actually visiting the site.

But as important as feeds are to blogs, most bloggers know almost nothing about how many subscribers they have or how to control what their feed looks like.

For the newbies out there, a feed is essentially a portable electronic copy of your blog posts.  People like feeds because they can subscribe to a bunch of feeds and read them all from one place, like Google Reader, without having to take the time to go from one blog to another.

If you use Wordpress or Blogger, then your feed is automatically created for you.  But by burning your feed with Feedburner, you can do all sorts of things with it that you can't do otherwise, like change the way it looks, run ads in it, and my favorite, see subscriber counts and stats.  Here are three steps to setting up your feed with Feedburner.

1. Go to Feedburner.com and sign in with your Google account or create one.  Enter your feed address. (If you don't know it, try appending "/feed" to your Wordpress url or "/feeds/posts/default" to your Blogger url.  Contact us for help if you can't find it!)  Click "Next," and if everything works, you'll be asked to give your feed a name and address.  Done!
2. Download the FD Feedburner plugin if you use self-hosted Wordpress, and use it to redirect your old feed to your new one by entering your new Feedburner feed address.  When you redirect the old feed to Feedburner, you should notice you have more subscribers than your previous Google Reader count showed, since now it will be counting subscribers in other readers as well.  Yay!  If you're not self-hosted, it's not as easy to redirect your feed.  But you can manually update your "Subscribe" links so that all new subscribers will get your new, managed feed.
3. Enjoy your new feed!  Give Feedburner a day or so to start tracking your subscribers, then start using it to customize your feed.  Feedburner's default settings are pretty good for most purposes.  You can get chicklets (graphical "Subscribe" links) for your blog, notify services when you post, put ads in your feed, and a ton of other things I haven't begun to explore.

Once you know your subscriber count, you might consider displaying it on your site.  A decent-sized number shows new readers that your blog has been around for a little while and built a following, and may give them confidence in commenting and clicking your links.  I think a good time to do this is when you've reached 250 or 300 subscribers, but it's up to you. Use Feedburner's "Publicize" tab to choose how to display your count.  You can see how I did this in the sidebar of No Meat Athlete.

That's all for now, Health Blog Helper readers.  Get burning!