Simple Steps to Set Up Feedburner

By Charles Chestnut

The FeedBurner Idea

The basic premise behind FeedBurner, for any reader who may not know, is rss or Really Simple Syndication. This allows bloggers to submit there feed to the network and in turn any readers who want to can simply subscribe and view a live text feed of the blog in any online reader. Each blog has its own feed URL which the posts are published on. Subscribers using FeedBurner, or other similar feed readers, then subscribe to the blog posts without having to visit the site every day. It is much easier for subscribers to read the site with a reader. Although it is much harder to monetize than a normal blog it helps to build readership and following thanks to its ease of use.

Some Simple Steps to Set Up FeedBurner

1. Head on over to FeedBurner.com and set up a free account for your blog.

2. Next, you will need to set up your blog feed. If you already know your blog feed than you can enter it in the field that is provided (you can't miss the field). If you don't know your feed it is generally something like yourblogtitle.com/feed. However, you can also just enter the URL for your blog and Feed Burner's automatic feed searcher should pick it up for you. Just follow the setup process through until the configuration page and be sure to click the Pro option because it is now free since Google has acquired it.

3. Now you need to put the code for your feed onto your site. This will allow people to subscribe to your blog. If you do not have any rss or feed buttons such as this one go to the publicize tab in the FeedBurner main page. Select the option to add chicklets and this will allow you to choose one that you like and give you the code for that chicklet. Then, either using a wordpress textbox widget or imbedding the code directly into your script place the widget on your site.

4. Technically you need to imbed the code for your feed into your widgets but a very simple way to do this is to download the wordpress plugin FeedSmith. This will do all the FeedBurner coding work for you. Simply download FeedSmith. Next, upload it to your plugins folder. Once it is uploaded you need to activate it and enter your feed URL, which if you remember you can find in your FeedBurner account homepage.

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