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Use a FeedBurner account to promote and deliver your WordPress blog’s RSS feed
By braddock | May 12, 2008
I found some great WordPress blog tips and recommendations from Lorelle VanFossen and John Pozadzides this weekend. John had some good tips on promoting your blog’s RSS feed.
A great free RSS service John mentioned was FeedBurner. I had heard of FeedBurner before, but figured my feed was created in WordPress for me I didn’t have any need of it. I put a bunch of those little RSS feed icons 
around my blog and that was that.
Well, FeedBurner can do alot more than just deliver your RSS feed. After setting up my account and “burning my feed” as they call it I took a little tour of their services.
The first thing I get that I didn’t with my regular RSS feed is Stats. I love stats! The Analyze tab on your FeedBurner homepage shows you how many subscribers you have, how people are reading your feed, and which posts they are reading.
There’s another great set of stats available to you when you use FeedBurner. -I’m going to take a moment to mention that FeedBurner was recently purchased by Google. Your Google services like Adsense and Google Analytics are now integrated into your FeedBurner account. With Google Analytics built in you get your site stats through FeedBurner as well.
I can see my site visits, which posts visitors are reading, and even how people found my site in the first place. All of these RSS feed and site stats are right there on your FeedBurner homepage. Cool, eh?
Next, you have a tab named Optimize. There are some great tools here. You can give your feed visual formatting and include a message to your readers at the top of your feed. Smartfeed makes your feed compatible with any newsreader. The best one though, is FeedFlare.
FeedFlare appears at the bottom of each post in your feed. It allows readers to email that post to someone, view post stats like total comments, or submit that post to a social networking site. You select the options you want for FeedFlare and it generates HTML for you to paste into your theme. Here’s FeedFlare in action at the bottom of one of my posts:
I’m hoping the “Digg This!” link gets worn out. There are plenty of other ways to optimize your FeedBurner feed, I just haven’t had time to play with them yet.
The Publicize section is where you can start to spruce up your blog with some FeedBurner bling. There’s a selection of those little RSS icons for you to use, they call them chicklets.
You can create a form to allow your readers to get your new posts via email. This one is very cool, I put my form in my sidebar. If you’re proud of your feed circulation you can post the number of subscribers you have in a little FeedBurner button.
FeedBurner will notify the most popular feed reading services when you write a new post, but you can add 5 services you want notified as well.
I never paid to much attention to my RSS feed, but now it’s supercharged and I have it working to publicize my blog as well. I’m going to spend alot more time digging into FeedBurner and I’m sure I’ll talk more about it soon.
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Topics: Blogging with Google, WordPress |
