Setting up Feedburner Feeds

Have you ever wondered about that pretty subscriber counter most blogs have on their pages? How do they know exactly how many people are following them?

It’s called FeedBurner.  I’ve been using it for a while now and it never occurred to me how much POWER such a service can have! Not only are you provided with statistics, but you can add ads to the feed, get a counter, update twitter automatically, and a whole spectrum of other features.

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this short tutorial:

• getting a FeedBurner Feed
• Setting it up
• incorporating the feed into your website.

Getting a Feed

This is actually the easiest part. All you need is a google account and go here. Once you’re at the dashboard, look over here:

Okay, now go to your blog site. I’m using one of my newer blogs so just type in the URL.

• In my case, I typed in http://www.livingsmartgreen.com/ Click next.
• If you have several RSS feeds available, such as RSS, RSS2, or Atom. Pick one of them. Click next.
• The feed title and address should be already filled in, if not, just type those in. 
• Click next. It should tell you that everything’s done! Click next anyways.
• Check off all the boxes there for extra statistics. Next.

Yay, now you’ve got your feed!

Setting up that feed!

You should be at the main feed page (not the dashboard). Here’s what mine looks like:

Looks good so far. The “analyze” part will not work just yet. You’ll have to wait for that so let’s skip to “publicize” the most important part. Here is the deal, FeedBurner offers A LOT of services, most of which you will never use. Some of them are truly just annoying services so don’t bother. Try them out, and have fun. Here are the essentials:

Go to “PingShot” first and activate it. There are some services that like to get notified whenever your RSS feed changes. This will boost your traffic, hopefully.

Next, go to “socialize” and add your twitter account if you want. Your feed will be reposted on twitter (thus you don’t have to use the WP>twitter WordPress Plugin). Under “hash tags” choose the “Create hashtags….” option. That’s all you need, activate the service and be on your way.

Go to “creative commons” and choose the appropriate license. This makes sure you retain the rights to your content. It’s a smart thing, trust me on this one.

As for the rest:

• Headline Animator creates a banner that shows off your latest feeds as well as a link to your site.
• BuzzBoost does something similar, except it creates a gadget. If you have been following my blog for the past few months, I always had it in the left sidebar under the meta.
• Email subscription. Another nice gadget that lets users subscribe via e-mail rather than RSS. Try it out if you want to.
• FeedCount. Okay, this is everyone’s favorite. This is that little counter thing that tells everyone on your blog how many people are subscribe. If you want it to look fancier, I suggest you use this tutorial to create your own little piece of PHP code and get an actual text value for the number of subscribers. You will probably have to enable the awareness API for this to work.
• Chicklet Chooser. Another nice gadget. This one is used for the actual Feed. If you don’t already have an RSS icon or want to use one of Feedburner’s pre-made icons, go ahead and activate this and customize your own icon. Copy the code, and paste it to your site where you want it.
• Password Protector and NoIndex. Password protector is used if you want to protect your feed from other people. ie. make it private. NoIndex makes sure your feed is not submitted to any search engine (I suggest against it.

That’s pretty much it. If you go to optimize, you will be able to add some new functionality to your feed such as e-mail replies, images, and shortened URL’s. I don’t see the point in that so let’s move on. If you go to monetize, you will be asked to go to google’s AdSense. Log into there if you have an account set up. Go to AdSense Setup and add a Feed. Straightforward setup.

WordPress/Blog Integration

It’s easy to integrate your FeedBurner Feed into WordPress.  Go to Plugins > Add New and serach for “FeedBurner”. Install and activate the plugin called: FD Feedburner Plugin. Moving on, under Plugins, you should find Feedburner Configuration. Go there. Here’s my setup:

I checked off two of those options, you don’t need to. It’s up to you. If you cannot remember the Feed URL, go back to that main page and click on the RSS button. Use that link:

Save the options and you’re done!

What’s the next step?

The next step is optimizing your feed, analyzing the data, and doing whatever. There are a lot of choices to make and a lot of features you can take advantage of. Just have fun and see what you can accomplish!