Feedburner for your site

There’s actually another Google tool that I use very frequently. I can’t believe I forgot to include it in my Google Treasure Chest post. Feedburner makes tracking subscribers to your RSS a snap. If you’re new to blogging you may not quite understand what your RSS feed is. Get to know about this. Most successful bloggers will tell you that most of their readers use the feeds rather than actually visiting their web site. It’s much easier to see and read all of the writers or bloggers who interest you on a common page, an aggregator. While we’re talking Google, they have Google Reader which serves this purpose. Gator and News Monster are two other aggregation products used by many people.

The beauty of using a service like Feedburner is that it gets your feeds out there in the common forms used by various tools. You want to share your posts as widely as possible. Eventually an occasional ad in your posts will get out to the readers on aggregators. You should rush advertising to your feeds. Feedburner can automate ad placement but I think it’s better to build readship before throwing an ad in there.

So where do you start? First you’ll want to set up a Feedburner (FB) account. If you have a Google account for Adsense or Analytics or other tools you can just sign in using that ID. One piece of information you’ll need for your setup in FB is the ‘feed address’ of your blog. An easy way to find this is to click the orange RSS button on your site. It should take you to a page full of text. Simply copy the URL from the browser address bar. Most Word Press themes should set your feed to something like ‘yoursite.com/feed’. The raw feed for this site is ‘http://johnhauer.com/feed/’. In the FB setup process you’ll be asked for the ‘Original Feed’, paste your feed address here. It will ask for a name of the feed. Keep it short and meaningful since it will become part of your FB feed address. That’s all you need in FB right now.

Now get into your wp-admin dashboard on your WordPress site. Under the ‘Plugin’ menu on the left sidebar click ‘Add Plugin’. This will take you to a search page. Here you should enter ‘FD Feedburner Plugin’ and click search. You should see a plaugin with that exact name near the top of the list. Click the install button on the far right of that line item. Click through until the plugin is activated on your site. You will now see a ‘Feedburner Configuration’ option under the ‘plugins’ sidebar on the left side of your dashboard. Open that page, there’s only one option we need to fill in. ‘Redirect my feeds here:’ needs to have your FB feed. Switch back to your Feedburner page and retrieve your FB address. Go to ‘Edit Feed Details…’ to find this. It should be something like ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/JacksBlogTips’. (That the FB feed for this site.) Fill that in on your plugin page, click save and you’re done. All clicks on your subscribe buttons will now be redirected to Feedburner.

The stats you get from FB are very useful. In addition to stats there are other useful items buried around your Feddburner interface. There are settings you need to look at.

First go to the ‘Optimize’ tab on the FB dashboard. I would suggest you activate these three options, BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed and FeedFlare. In FeedFlare you should choose email subscriptions plus whatever else you want to add as a button. (Digg, StunbeUpon, etc.)

Next go to the ‘Publicize’ tab on the dashboard. I’d recommend you go for the Email Subscriptions and PingShot options. These will make your feed open to as many platforms as possible.

I would hold off on ‘monetizing’ tab. I think you’re better off waiting until you have a good solid following. I’ve found that my subscribers drop off if I add advertisements within the feed. I would take the approach of adding advertising within your posts rather than adding Google ads via this option. I sense that there are a certain number of people who are turned off by those ads. Of course everything comes down to what works for you. Experiment and play. Keep track of results. What works for you may or may not work for me. Have fun.

FD Feedburner Plugin