How To Use Feedburner

FeedBurner is a web feed management and launched in 2004. FeedBurner has custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based contents publishers.

RSS

The easiest way to receive the latest posts from our favourite blogs is to subscribe to RSS using feed readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines, NetVibes.

RSS (means Really Simple Syndication) retrieves the latest content from the sites we are interested and pulls them into your feed reader where we can read them all in one location rather than visiting each site separately.

RSS in Plain English to learn more!

Feed Burner

Blogs have RSS feed which is detected by automatically and commonly used to feed readers when the blog URL is added to the reader.

If we want to make it more obvious and easier for readers to subscribe using RSS, or want to know exactly how many people subscribe to our blog then the best option is to add a Feedburner RSS feed and email subscription to our blog.

Feedburner is a free web service, enhances bloggers and podcasters ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.

Setting Up  Feedburner Feed

1. Go to Feedburner and sign in to Feedburner with our Google Account (create a Google Account ).
2. Add our Blog URL to Burn a Feed Right This Instant and click Next.
3. Leave RSS 2.0 source selected and click the Next button.
4. On the “Welcome” page, make sure our title and FeedBurner address (URI) of our new feed and then click Next Button.
5. On the Congrats! page click Next Button.
6. On the stats configuration page select, Clickthroughs and We want more!  then click Next Button.

Adding our Feedburner Feed To our Blog

This is used to add RSS icon and easily subscribe options to our blog sidebar using a text widget as explained below

1. Click Publicize Tab> Chicklet Chooser in your Feedburner account and copy the HTML code.
2. Go Appearance> Widgets on our blog dashboard.
3. Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets).
4. Add the text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets into the Sidebar area on the right.
5. The widget will open automatically — just to add HTML code from FeedBurner, click the Save and then Close.

Adding The FeedBurner Email Subscription

It’s very important to add an email subscription option to your blog sidebar as some readers prefer to receive latest posts from blogs using email subscription.

1. Click on Publicize Tab > Email Subscription in our Feedburner account and click on Activate.

2.   Copy HTML code.

3.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in our blog dashboard

4.  Click the desired Sidebar to expands.

5.  Add the text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets into the Sidebar area on the right.

6.  Widget opens automatically — just add HTML code for Feedburner email subscription, click the Save and then Close.

7.  Readers simply enter their email address and then click to “Subscribe” and Feedburner emails our entire post on the day after it has been published on our blog.

Redirecting All Our Blog Feed To Feedburner

We redirect all our blog feed to Feedburner we won’t get accurate subscriber numbers because some of our readers subscribe using our original blog feed.

If we are an Edublogs supporter we can redirect our blog feed  as follows:

1.  Go to the Settings > Feedburner on our blog dashboard.

2.  Add our Feedburner address and click the Save Changes.

3.  Now all our feeds are automatically redirected through FeedBurner and we can able to track subscriber numbers accurately.

If you do not have the blog about FeedBurner feeds, then get it by now.

Jithin K