You have a show that's been in operation using Feedburner, but now you have employed Libsyn. Should you stop Feedburner and instead use Libsyn? If so, how do you make such a change without breaking your Apple Podcasts submission, or losing any subscribers? This article will answer each of those questions.
Should I Use Feedburner?
Many producers choose to use Feedburner. The number one reason Feedburner is used by producers to generate their feed is because they do not otherwise have a way to generate a valid, Apple Podcasts compliant, RSS feed. The other major reason Feedburner is used is to make sure you, as the producer, maintain full control over your RSS feed, over your show. Not all hosts provide the ability to change your host by redirecting your feed to another. By using Feedburner, a producer can work around this limitation.
Libsyn always allows a producer full, 100% control, over their RSS feed. This has always been true, and it will always remain be true. We provide a fully valid RSS feed which can be customized, even redirected, as you see fit. When using Libsyn, there is no good reason to use a third party feed generator.
The downside to using Feedburner (or any other third party feed generator while using Libsyn) is that if your outside feed breaks, we have very limited ability to support you, to help you fix the feed. The other issue we have seen through our support team is that many settings inside Feedburner do not play nicely with the iOS Podcast App, causing shows to appear incorrectly or stop updating entirely.
So Libsyn Recommends Switching. How do I do that?
Start by logging into your Feedburner account.
Click on your feed to open the feed configuration. This will seem strange, but you first need to get Feedburner to pull from Libsyn instead of from wherever it is pulling from. To do so, click to edit the feed.
Hit the edit feed link in order to edit the location Feedburner pulls from.
Change the Original Feed field to your Libsyn RSS feed URL.
Hit the Save Feed Details button.
Important Note: Feedburner does have a way to cancel the Feedburner feed and redirect the feed when you do. However, Feedburner does not let you pick where to redirect your feed. It automatically redirects your feed to the feed URL it is pulling from. This is why we have to change Feedburner to pulling from Libsyn first.
Next, we will setup a redirect. Log into your Libsyn dashboard and click on Destinations, then hit edit to edit your RSS feed:
Scroll all the way down the page to advanced options. Clicking on the advanced options bar will open them up for you.
Enter a tag into the extra RSS tags field. Note: Do not use the redirect field here, use the extra rss tags field.
The tag to enter is:
https://.libsyn.com/rss
Important Note: Replace the example URL above with your Libsyn feed URL.
Hit the Save button.
Finally, log back into Feedburner and select your feed. Hit Delete Feed (under your feed title):
Make ABSOLUTELY SURE to check the box that reads With permanent redirection:
Feedburner will then confirm that your feed has been deleted, but they place a 301 redirect that will redirect your old Feedburner feed back to your source feed. Following the steps above, your source feed is your Libsyn feed.
This process will update Apple Podcasts, your subscribers, most podcast directories, all automatically.
A More Detailed Explanation: Feedburner works by taking an already generated feed and burning it into something valid for a specific purpose. If you are using Feedburner, you already have a feed elsewhere, which Feedburner is pulling from. So what we just did in the above above is set Feedburner to pull from Libsyn instead of it's prior feed. The redirect we entered into the Libsyn feed gets pulled in by Feedburner, redirecting the Feedburner back to the Libsyn feed. While it sounds strange, we promise, it will do the job! Apple Podcasts will see this redirect and update to pulling from Libsyn, and subscribers will automatically be updated. This arrangement should be left in place for at least 4 weeks.
Getting Additional Help
Have questions? Contact our support staff at support@libsynsupport.com.