Using Feedburner - Part 3 - Showing Your Feed Count

Remember when I talked about social proof? Well, a good way to increase your social proof is to show off how many blog readers you have. You most likely already do this by showing your followers somewhere on your blog, but did you know that you may actually have more readers than that widget shows?

By using Feedburner's "Feed Count Chicklet", you can show these "hidden readers" on your blog as well! These simple instructions will walk you through setting up and installing that chicklet on your blog:

1. Log into your Feedburner account and click on the feed you want to create a Feed Count Chicklet for. (If you don't already have a Feedburner account set up, please go here first: Feedburner Step 1)

2. Click the tab near the top of the window that says "Publicize"


3. On the left hand side of the page, click the link that says "FeedCount". Your page should now look like this:


4. Decide which of the two chicklet styles shown looks more appealing to you, and click on the button beside it.


5. Below the style choices, you will see a color grid. Choose a color for the body of your chicklet. Then, click on the button beside text and choose a color for your text from the grid.


6. At the bottom of the window, click the button that says "Activate". Your screen should now look like this:

(If you don't like the way your chicklet looks, you can change the colors by repeating Step 5. To see the changes, simply hit "Save" at the bottom of the window.)

7. Once you have your chicklet looking like you want it, copy the code below it and open a new window.

8. In the new window, log into your Blogger dashboard and click "Layout".

9. Click "Add a Gadget" and choose the "HTML/JavaScript" option.

10. Paste the code you copied into this widget and hit "Save".

Your new chicklet will show up on your blog now, and the number of readers will automatically update as your subscriber list grows!

If you have any questions, please let me know.

♥

Read more...

Using Feedburner - Part 2 - Adding an Email Subscription Button

Remember how I told you yesterday that Feedburner has all these cool little tools? Well, today we're going to use one to add an email subscription button to our blog pages. (It will look like the one in the upper right corner of this page!) So, if you want one of these handy buttons, just log into your Feedburner account and follow along!

1. Once you're logged in, you should see a screen that has your username and your feed name(s), like this:

Just click the name of the feed you want to create a button for.

2. Along the top of the page, you will see five tabs. Click the one that says "Publicize". You should see this:


3. On the left of the page, click the link that says "Email Subscriptions". It will look like this:


4. Scroll down till you see the part of the page that says "Subscription Form Code". Below that is a box full of code, like this:

Copy all that code, and then go open a new window with your blogger dashboard showing.

5. On your dashboard, click "Layout" then click "Add a gadget" where you want your subscription box to go.

6. Choose the 2nd option ("HTML/JavaScript").

7. Paste all the code you copied earlier into that box, and hit "Save".

Now, if you hit "View Blog", you will see a cool little subscription box! (If you want to see how your feed looks, or how the box works, just enter your own email address in the box, and hit Subscribe". Later I'll show you how to make your feed more user friendly, so it's a good idea to do this now to get an idea of the "before and after" effects!)

Let me know if you have any questions/issues! And let me know when you get them installed, as I'd love to see your new subscription boxes in action!

♥

Read more...

Using Feedburner - Part 1 - Setting it Up

Feedburner is a nifty tool that google provides us to help optimize our RSS feeds. It not only allows us to feed our blog content, it provides tools for feed tracking, email subscriptions, and feed promotion. There are all sorts of awesome little goodies just waiting to be snatched up on Feedburner, but to get to them we need to set up our accounts. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to Feedburner and sign in using your existing Google account.

2. Once you've logged in, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Type (or copy/paste) the address of your blog into that box, and hit "Next".

3. Feedburner will now "autodiscover" your feed address. You will be taken to a screen similar to this:

As you can see, you may have more than one option for your feed address. To keep it simple, choose the first one and hit "Next"

4. Your screen should now look like this:

Change the address of the feed (the second box) to something you can remember easily. (For instance, I will change mine to "NinjaJenn") When you're done making changes, hit "Next".

5. Assuming everything went ok in the last step, you should see this:

As long as your screen looks like that, hit "Next".

6. Find the three empty check boxes that look like this:

Go ahead and put a check in each of those boxes and hit "Next". (These are free extras that Feedburner offers, and we will discuss what they mean later. Just accept them and move on for now. LOL)

7. You should now see a screen like this:


You're done registering your feed on Feedburner, but now you need to redirect your blog feed to Feedburner. Go to your blogger dashboard and follow these directions:

1. Click "settings" on your blog and then click the tab that says "Site Feed".

2. Find the area of the page that looks like this:

Copy and paste this into the box:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NinjaJenn and change the part in red to the address of your blog (that you created earlier over on Feedburner).

3. Click "Save Settings" at the bottom of the page.

Congrats! You've now set up your Feedburner account, and linked it to your Blogger! From here on, all your feeds will be redirected through Feedburner.

* Check back soon for Part 2 in the "Using Feedburner" series. (There are tons of cool things it can do for us, so be sure not to miss them!) *

♥

Read more...