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How do I use Feedburner for my Blog RSS?

Dave, I've been blogging for a while now - partially thanks to your inspiration with this great site of yours! - and would like to include one of those neat FeedBurner graphics on my site so I can track RSS subscriptions. How do I do it?


Dave's Answer:

Great question! FeedBurner is a very cool service that does exactly what you state, it lets you offer a wide variety of different RSS feeds from your weblog (or podcast site) with minimal fuss and it also lets you keep track of RSS subscriptions.

Even better, the basic service is free!

Signing up is pretty straightforward too: When you go to the FeedBurner home page, the first thing you see is "Ready to burn your feed? Start here."

Enter your Weblog address, then click "Next"

Now you have to choose which of the following you want to sign up for:

  • Standard Stats or Total Stats "Pro"
  • Browser-Friendly Burner
  • SmartCast (for podcasters)
  • SmartFeed (makes your feed work in any browser)
  • Google AdSense (you'll already need an AdSense account and already have been approved for Google's AdSense for Feeds program too)
  • Link Splicer

... and on and on. A remarkably sophisticated set of options, actually. For me, though, I just go for the basics, Standard Stats and SmartFeed. Add a feed title and a feedburner URL that you'd like, and click on "Next" again.

Almost done. Create an account, click on "activate my feed' and you'll be ready to go! When I went through this process for my new Growing Your Business with Google weblog, it took about four minutes total.

Once you've created your feed, click on "Launch Your Publicity Tools" and you'll be looking at a bunch of different graphical options, starting with FeedCount:

Feedburner's FeedCount

If you're confident that you have lots of subscribers - or are going to have lots of subscribers - then this is a good choice. But if it shows that you have 7 or 13 subscribers, well, that might not be quite the message you want to convey.

A more entertaining alternative is what they call a Headline Animator, which some of my colleagues use to great effect in their email signatures:

Feedburner Headline Animator

Too enthusiastic or too big? You can do what I did, and just settle on a simple little graphical element by using the Feedburner Chicklet Chooser:

Feedburner Chicklet Chooser

Click on that option and suddenly there are lots of different elements you can add to your blog template as easily as using cut and paste:

Feedburner Chicklet Chooser Options

I picked a couple of these and added them to my own template. Have a peek at findability.info and you'll see how it all fits neatly into the site.

I hope that helps you out getting started with Feedburner!



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Comments

Dave,

if someone is using WordPress for blogging, there is a WordPress Feedburner plugin called Feedburner Feed Replacement (http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress_feedburner_plugin/) which forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from. This means that subscribers to the blog don't need to re-subscribe to a new feed address.

Posted by: Tom Raftery at August 9, 2005 1:26 PM

Howdy Dave,

I've been wanting to use FeedBurner to get the knowledge of how many people are reading my blog, but I don't want to break my rss feed links that people might be using now. I'm guessing I'm fine with just adding a FeedBurner link, and removing the link to my old feeds, but still leaving the feeds so people using Bloglines don't complain.

Am I missing something? Would you recommend I stop publishing my old feed after some number of days and a warning for people to switch to my FeedBurner feed?

Thanks...
Erik

Posted by: Erik Weibust at August 9, 2005 7:51 PM

Erik, you're exactly right. Leave your old feeds intact - your blog software will doubtless keep creating them without a problem - but replace your old RSS buttons and subscribe links with the new FeedBurner alternatives. Voila!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at August 10, 2005 6:26 AM

Thanks Dave. If just created my first lot of feeds thanks to your helpful advice. Now I just need some readers!!

Posted by: chris at September 11, 2006 8:24 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!









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