Your complete guide to RSS – Part 3 – How to build and promote your RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Since this post is going to be a bit long, I am going to break it into 2 parts; Building your Feed and Promoting your Feed! So, let’s get down and dirty folks…

Building your RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Ok, technically, you won’t have to build your Feed, as almost all the blogging platforms build a RSS Feed for you by default; Yes, Wordpress, Movable Pad, Blogger and almost everything else. Usually, with Wordpress, you’ll be able to access it with ‘http://YourBlogDomain.com/feed/’; for RSS ‘../feed/rss’ and for atom ‘../feed/atom’. Yes! You get both with Wordpress.

Now, let’s take your feed one step further. Let’s BURN it! Yes, that’s what they call it in the fastest growing ‘thing’ on the internet; FeedBurner. There are many reasons why you should utilize FeedBurner. And the most important thing is, they give your feed some personality. With fancy buttons featuring almost all the RSS Readers in the world, subscribing to your blog, would be made really simple. It will give you total control over your feed and life would be more enjoyable - J - This is one place where they live up to the name, Really Simple Syndication.

All you have to do is go to FeedBurner.com, register yourself, and burn your feed. You can do so by entering your blog’s URL to the ‘big box’! And the rest? FeedBurner will do it for you. And the setup is really user friendly so you would not be lost. Just one reminder though. It’ll ask what kind of Feed you want FeedBurner to entangle itself with. If I’m not mistaken, It’s probably a choice of Atom, RSS 0.90 and RSS 2.0 – I recommend using RSS 2.0 – simply because atom is not as widespread as RSS (I explained this in the first part) and 2.0 is ‘greater’ than 0.90!

So there you have it! Your own FeedBurner Feed!! You’ll be presented with an interface with lots of options. Hey, don’t worry. You’ll only need a few at this moment and chances are likely you won’t use half of them, ever! And with the Feed address you chose; that would be something like – http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed; you’re ready to promote your Feed with all the personality in it.

Promoting your RSS Feed with FeedBurner

How do you promote you RSS Feed? Hmmm… Let’s think a minute. Why would someone want to use your RSS Feed? To get a really-simple subscription for your blog, yes? Bingo! So that’s what you should do, and that’s why you should promote your feed. Let’s see how FeedBurner can aid us in that.

You see the big orange button in my sidebar, yes? That’s the standard symbol for subscribing. It symbolizes a RSS Feed for a blog. Now click on it! You’ll be directed to my FeedBurner Feed. Something similar to your Feed, right? So once a visitor goes here, he can subscribe to my blog and become a loyal reader of mine utilizing pretty much any RSS Reader on this planet. So why don’t you also get the big orange button?

Simply log on to your FeedBurner account, click on ‘My Feeds’ in the top left corner of the page, select your Feed from the table that appears and in the options page, simply click on the ‘Publicize’ tab. In the navigation bar to the left, select ‘Chicklet Chooser’. You’ll be presented with many chickelets for various RSS Readers, and of course, the orange button is right at the top. Select the button, copy the code that appears in the bottom, and paste it anywhere in your blog’s template. I recommend using the sidebar, since it’s always visible.

It’s optional, but you can always display a few other chickelets as well like Bloglines, Google Reader and My Yahoo! if you got a bit of extra space in the sidebar. Simply select the Chicklet, get the code and paste it!

So our hunt ends there! That’s the first step in promoting your RSS Feed. Now when a visitor finds your blog interesting, that person will click on to the RSS Feed and there onwards, FeedBurner will do the rest. Cool huh?

There are so many other things that you could do to promote you Feed like promoting it to RSS directories with and without utilizing additional FeedBurner tools. We’ll cover some ground on that tomorrow; with the post titled “Harnessing the maximum from your RSS Feed – tips and tricks!” – And if you still haven’t subscribed to MindBlogger Feed, boy! You’re missing out on a lot!