I wanted to understand more about the relationship between feedburner and wordpress so I did some research and here’s the answer to the above question.
First let’s recall that in the default installation of WordPress, the software automatically sets up RSS, RSS2, Atom, etc. feeds for you. These are the RSS feeds from your site, and anyone can use the URL of one of the your RSS feeds above to follow your blog or website via RSS.
The feeds look like this:
https://www.helpspa.com/wp-rss.php https://www.helpspa.com/wp-rss2.php https://www.helpspa.com/wp-rdf.php https://www.helpspa.com/wp-atom.php
Easy.
Now let’s talk about the role of FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a company that’s now owned by Google, and the FeedBurner web-based software creates a customized feedburner-feed from your RSS feed (you tell Feedburner what RSS feed to use so Feedburner can “burn” your feed.).
The FeedBurner feed will look something like this:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Helpspa
What makes the FeedBurner feed different from any of the standard WordPress feeds is that the Feedburner will use the Feedburner feed to give you analytics, statistics, subscription information and many other bells and whistles about your subscribers and your RSS feed that wouldn’t normally be available. You can think of your FeedBurner feed as your normal RSS feed on steroids.
For example, Feedbuner will let you track how many people are subscribing to your feed – something that’s not normally done with your standard rss feed. With the Feedburner feed, it’s partly like having a mini-Google Analytics for your RSS feed.
As for the Feedburner Plugin for Wordpress, (on this page you will need to scroll down to where it says “Installation” and “Download the Plugin”) the plugin takes all of the standard Wordpress feeds above, and re-directs them all to the feedburner feed for your site.
This way, people who signup for any of your Wordpress RSS feeds – whether the RSS, RSS2, Atom, etc, will all be subscribing to the Feedburner feed. This way, you will be able you use all of FeedBurner’s features (e.g. number of subscribers) for ALL of your WordPress feeds.