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The (not-so) secret Google tool you should use

Of course there are no real secret Google tools. And if there are, I’m not running with the crowd who knows about them.

But over the last few weeks I’ve talked to  a number of site owners – speakers, recruiters, SEO folks – and I’ve been really surprised by how few of them know anything about Feedburner.

Now Google’s wall-splattered with spaghetti approach to product launches makes it too easy for some of the great tools they have to fly under the radar.

Feedburner is one of them. If you are a site owner with a blog or podcast, stop reading this post right now and sign up for Feedburner.

What it does is take your raw feed – generally looking like this – and turn it into this.

Pretty slick.

But it does more than this. It will also create forms so folks can subscribe to receive your new blog posts via email, provide a metric showing how many folks are subscribed – along with their emails. Go ahead and subscribe to my feed using the form on this page.

It will also generate simple code for you to display your blog posts on virtually any page on any site you run.

It will also notify different services when your blog is updated – helping your SEO. And of course it will also automatically update your Twitter account.

With a couple of Facebook tweaks you can even connect your Feedburner feed to automatically send your new posts to your Facebook Fan Page.

So what are you waiting for. It’s a free service.