What is Feedburner?
FeedBurner is a web feed management provider, owned by Google. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.
Why use Feedburner?
FeedBurner is a great tool for bloggers to create and manage blog’s feed and make them available for everyone to subscribe to. FeedBurner is sometimes preferred for serving feeds as it has detailed statistics and provide plenty of options to optimize and publicize your feed. It is used by millions of websites/Blogs to syndicate RSS feeds. The service is owned by google, keep that in mind, and so that is certainly a guarantee.
Hosting your feed on Feedburner offers a number of advantages over the default RSS in Wordpress:
- Lets you offer email subscription to your readers.
- To get detailed statistics about your subscribers (like how many people are subscribed to your blog and what articles are getting clicks, and through what kind of feed readers)
- You can cross-promote your feeds if you have multiple blogs/sites.
- Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications available. Feedburner makes your feed compatible with all feed readers.
- Automatically ping several important services when your feed changes.
- You have the option to change the Feedburner url without losing your existing subscribers.
- You have obviously more control over your feeds.
- Save your bandwidth: Your subscribers would actually get the feed from Feedburner instead of your blog’s server.
- Makes it easier for people to share your content on social media.
- Feedburner does offer a lot of compelling features and keeps adding more.
Step 1: Sign in to your gmail account.
Step 2: Go to Feedburner.com.
Step 3: Enter your feed URL to burn a new feed and click Next.
Step 4: Give your feed a title (usually the name of your blog) and the custom address (this can be the same without spaces). When you are done, click Next.
Step 5: Congrats! Your feed address is successfully burned. You will get your feed address like “http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourBlogName”. Click on Next.
Step 6: In this step you may also set up some optional traffic stats tracking and podcasting services if you want.
Click Next » to finish the setup process and enter your feed management interface.
Step 7: You’re now ready to make your FeedBurner feed available on your WordPress blog. Click on the Optimize tab.
Step 8: Under the optimize tab, activate the following services:
- Browser friendly – Improves your feed’s appearance in most web browsers and makes it easier to subscribe to.
- SmartFeed – Makes your feed compatible with all feed readers.
- FeedFlare – Give your users the option to share your feed on social media sites by placing a small footer at the end of each post.
Activate “Link splicer” if you have a lot of links saved to a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon.
With “Feed image Burner”, you can add a logo to your feed.
Step 9: Click on the Publicize tab, then activate the following services:
- Email subscriptions – Automatically send an email update to your subscribers every time you update your site.
- Ping Shot – It helps to speed up the reach of your content by sending a quick notification to several important services when you update your blog.
- FeedCount – This lets you display a nice dynamic graphic on your blog showing off your subscriber count.
- Socialize – Automatically tweet your feeds content to Twitter.
Activate “BuzzBoost” if you want to promote your blog on another site you manage.
Add an email subscription box to your blog
Some people are interested in getting blog updates by email. FeedBurner offers an email subscription service, which automatically notify your subscribers via email when you update your blog. It is a valuable service to readers who don’t want to miss your blog posts.
Here, I will explain in simple steps to add an email subscription box to your wordpress blog using HTML code.
1. Click the Publicize tab.
2. Click on Email Subscription.
3. Copy the HTML code in the subscription management.
4. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
5. Click on Widgets in the Appearance menu.
6. Drag and drop the text widget to sidebar
7. Paste the HTML code into the text widget
8. Title your text widget something like “subscribe to email updates”
8. Click Save and close.
9. That’s it! You have added the email subscription box to your blog’s sidebar.
If you are good with CSS, you can also customize the look of your email form with your blog theme.
Add an RSS subscription icon to your blog
RSS feed is an important element for your blog. It will allow your visitors to receive content updates in their feed reader each time a new post is published. Chicklet chooser basically gives your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog using various RSS feed readers like myyahoo, netvibes, bloglines, etc. Place a standard RSS Chicklet icon on your blog that help users easily add your feed to their favorite feed reader.
Most WordPress themes has some very cool RSS functionality built-in. If yours doesn’t, you can add RSS feed as follows:
1. Click the Publicize Tab
2. Locate and Click the Chicklet Chooser option
3. Copy the HTML code at the bottom of the page.
4. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
5. Click on Widgets in the Appearance menu.
6. Drag and drop the text widget to the sidebar.
7. Paste the HTML code into the text widget.
8. Click Save.
That’s it. RSS chicklet is added to your blog. You can place an RSS feed subscription icon anywhere in your blog (such as header, footer and sidebar) where readers will see.
Redirecting your WordPress Feeds To Feedburner
Now you have two feeds at two different addresses: http://yourblogname.com/feed and http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourblogName . In order to get the most out of your self-hosted WordPress site, you might want to use a plugin to redirect all of your existing feeds to the one you burn with FeedBurner. This way, subscribers will automatically start fetching your feed from Feedburner feed instead of your WordPress feed.
1. Install FD Feedburner plugin.
2. Go to settings > Feedburner.
3. Enter the Feedburner feed URL. (eg: http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourblogName)
4. Click Save.
Now your original feed URL “www.yourblogname.com/feed ” will be redirected to your Feedburner URL “http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourblogName”
You’re done 😀 You can Login to your Feedburner’s dashboard (Analyze tab) anytime to check your statistics.
Hope It helped! Enjoy and happy blogging!