Headline Animator Overhaul, Part 4

The newest installment of the heroic Headline Animator overhaul series highlights three new additions designed to help you build your online audience by increasing exposure of your content, making that content easily "shareable," and tracking how people are engaging with it. In a nutshell, Mr. Powers, it's really what we do around here.

1. Create and Store Multiple Headline Animators An easy way to increase the exposure of your content is to place it in more places, and nothing says "I have so much more to give" like Headline Animator at the bottom of your emails, on your MySpace page, on forum posts, or on your friend Hendrick's blog. Heck, you can even create an IAB-standard ad unit powered by the content in your feed and place it in an ad network for blogs and feeds.

   Before today, only one Headline Animator format per feed was allowed. Now? A world without limits! Style up your content to fit its intended destination and store multiple versions with each feed in your FeedBurner account. Note the streamlined interface, displaying an organized list of your multiple Headline Animators:

   

2. "Grab This" and Share
   You've been busy churning out content, and now it's time put the viral distribution power of the Inter-tubes to work for you. Newly created Headline Animators feature a "Grab this" link, so the people viewing your content can help push that content further (or farther, depending on how concrete your viewpoint is — we don't judge). Sharing = good. Also, step-by-step instructions are available for grabbing the badge and placing it just about anywhere (e.g. MySpace, TypePad, Blogger, etc.).

   Now, you can also choose not to share by unchecking a box. Is it really a box that you uncheck? No, it is not a box, it is more like a square that you uncheck, and yet, people have always called these "checkboxes". Why? We don't know the answer to that. We are not experts in everything like those shmarties over at the wikipedia. Perhaps the inventor of the checkbox thought that one day the checksquare would be able to be manipulated in a 3-D environment and was merely thinking ahead. In any case, it is not our place to argue with tradition. Uncheck the box that looks like a square and you don't have to make your Headline Animator shareable. Nor do you have to tell anyone you grappled with the decision for this long.

   Click the "Grab this Headline Animator" link to see how easy it is to share Urban Dictionary's cool word-of-the-day badge:

   

   ↑ Grab this Headline Animator

3. Track Clickthroughs
   As you may recall, FeedBurner unveiled engagement metrics back in Update 3 of this series when we introduced Headline Animator "Views." Today, we add "Clicks" to the mix, another way to measure the impact your content is having once it's "out there" in the "world". (Note: To activate clickthrough tracking on existing Headline Animators, you need to grab the new HTML code or re-add your Animator to your blog if you use a service that supports blog "widgets", like Blogger or TypePad. Return to your feed's Publicize tab and repeat the "Add to" process for your publishing platform.)

It should be plain by now that we can't contain ourselves where messing with this service is concerned. Even as we write this, an engineer inquires, "May I toil here a bit more, perchance to enrich this service ever so slightly?" "No!", we bellow, "Forsooth, it has become tiresome, darkness falls, and other fallow tasks beckon." Speaking of which, more new services for our industrial strength FeedFoundry customers are coming very soon.