In this video, we’re gonna take a look at FeedBurner, and I’m going to show you how to sign up for FeedBurner and also list your current blog feeds into FeedBurner itself. So what you need to do is go to www. FeedBurner.com and then click on the Get Started link here.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/feedburner-createfeed.swf[/evp]
Since FeedBurner is now owned by Google, so make sure you have a Google account. For example, if you already have a Gmail email address, it means that you already have a Google account. And you can use this same log-in information to get your FeedBurner account. So I filled up the information here and I’m going to click on Sign In.
So if I scroll to the bottom, I’ll see a section here where it can enter WordPress RSS feed and convert this feed into a FeedBurner feed. So now, the question is, How do I get the URL or the link location for my WordPress RSS feed?
Now, although there are a lot of ways to actually get your RSS feed and – well, actually, if you know how it works, it’s pretty much standard, but if you don’t know how it works and this is the first time you’re looking for feed, then make sure that you have activated the default WordPress theme which kind of looks like this – you get a blue header, and just go to the bottom, alright? So I’ll scroll right to the bottom and you will see at the bottom here, there are two links: for Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS). Now, all your blog posts will be inside the Entries (RSS) and any blog comments will be under Comments (RSS).
What you really wanna do is only use the RSS feed for your blog post. So I’m going to right-click on this, and copy the link location, and when that’s done, I’m going to go back to FeedBurner and I’m going to paste the RSS feed here.
Now, there’s an option here that says “I am a podcaster.” What this means is that by default, a lot of WordPress blogs would only be posting content in the form of pure text and images. But if you want to add in mp3 content or other downloadable media like flash videos or avi videos, then you’d want to make sure that you have some podcasting features in your FeedBurner, so I’m gonna click on this just in case I wanna use such content in the future, and I’m gonna click on “Next.”
Okay, so now, my feed has been imported into FeedBurner, and as you can see, the feed title here…and the next thing you need to make sure is the feed address. So of course, our FeedBurner would suggest the default Feed Address where you’ll base on your feed title. But if you feel that the feed address is too long, you may want to shorten it…right, so I’m just gonna shorten it to “plrwp,” in my case. And then, I’m going to click on “Next.”
Okay, so there you go, and this is my new FeedBurner RSS feed. So I’m gonna click on this feed to see how it looks like, and you’ll see here the page generated by your FeedBurner, so when someone clicks on this RSS feed link, they will see a page like this with some of the options for them to subscribe to your blog content automatically, using a lot of feed aggregation services or feed reading software like NewsGator, even Yahoo! Audio, the Google feed reader as well. So they have a lot of options to stay connected to your blog and receive all the latest updates from your blog itself.
And if it’s close to the bottom, you’ll be able to see that these are all the latest blog posts from our blog, so you can see that even the images I embedded…so that means that this feed is working pretty well.
Okay, so now that I’ve claimed my feed, and…what I want to do next is to set up a podcast or analyze my traffic, and to do this, I’ll just go back to my main FeedBurner page by clicking on the FeedBurner icon here. Okay, so you can see that my new PLR WordPress video’s feed has been created, and I can just click on that. So right on top here, you can see that there’s a link here for me to edit my feed; I can delete my feed, I can even transfer my feed. But mostly, what you need to be concerned of is the top navigation here, which allows you to optimize your FeedBurner feed, and also to publish your FeedBurner feed, and finally, to make money from your FeedBurner feed.
So first thing I’m gonna do is click on “Optimize.” So as you can see, there are several options for me to further optimize my new FeedBurner feed. And you can always feel free to explore some of these functions, most of which, I guess, you won’t really need. But what you’ll want to do is click on SmartFeed, and you can see here that it says “Make my feed compatible with any feed reader application.”
Why this is important is that because previously, RSS feeds were created in a different format, and then they have RSS Version 2 as well, so you want to make sure that your new FeedBurner feed is backwards-compatible with any sort of feed reader and application. So I’m gonna click on “Activate.”
Okay, so once that’s done, the next thing I want to do is activate FeedFlare. And FeedFlare is basically a tiny but very useful function in FeedBurner that allows you to add a lot of different functionalities inside your FeedBurner RSS feed itself. For example, you can allow users to email your interesting blog content to their friends, and you can also allow them to automatically add, or to bookmark your blog posts in Del.icio.us and Digg, or they can even share your blog post on Facebook.
So this is definitely a very useful feature to have in your FeedBurner RSS feed. So what I’m gonna do is I need to activate this first, so I’m gonna click on “Activate.” So once the FeedFlare has been activated, now, what’s left for me to do is to check what are the additional features that I want on my feed.
So I’m not gonna select everything; I’m just gonna show you some examples. So for example, maybe I’m a very strong user, or for Facebook, so I may want to allow people to share my blog content onto Facebook, and I may also want them to submit my blog post to Digg, and also perhaps to Stumble Upon. So now, I’m going to go to this section here, and you can see that all these features that are selected have already been added into my FeedBurner fee itself. Now, what I can do is just click on the individual items here, and I can drag it to change the order in which these items would appear. Okay? So once I’m satisfied with the order of the FeedFlares, I’m going to “Save.”
So now, let’s go back to the actual FeedBurner feed form – my new blog that I just created, and you can see it pretty much looks the same old here – but at the bottom of each post now, you’ll be able to see all these links that appear, which are basically the FeedFlares that I have selected inside my FeedBurner account. So while someone is reading your latest content through your RSS feed, you can always click on any of these links to…you know, just spread your content. And this is really, really useful for you to get more traffic to your blog.
So those are some of the important optimizations that you can make to your FeedBurner account, and of course, you can add an unlimited amount of RSS feeds to your FeedBurner account.