Feedburner for Dummies

You know what it's like when people keep asking the same question? I figure it is a trend, and my job is to address it. So thanks to all of the "What is RSS?" or "How can I send my posts to subscribers by email?" inquiring minds that I bumped into last week. So in Bulldog style- keep it simple and as few steps as possible- here is the low down on how to get feedburner working for you.

1. Go to Feedburner.com and under burn a feed now, enter the address for your blog.

2. You will see three different types of feeds- atom, index and rss. Click on the first choice which is atom. Don't worry about what that means, just click it, and hit next.

3. You will see that your feed has a web address that will look like this: http://feeeds.feedburner.com/yourblog. Now enter a user name and password. If you are like me, write it down because I already forgot mine.

4. Go to continue, and now you are going to see some options. Under the free StandardStats, click on Clickthroughs and then next. Now here is where it gets fun!

5. You want to Publicize your blog, right? Click on the publicize your feed tab and under the Make it Easy to Subscribe, click on the Friendly Graphic link.

6. Choose one of the new Standard Feed Icons. I chose the small one because, well, size doesn't always matter and if you haven't noticed, I like smaller things on my blog.

7. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page. This is where TypePad is so dog- gone good! It is compeletly integrated with Feedburner. Click on AutoCopy to your blog, and check the blog that you want. You will then be able to view your weblog, and you will see the awesome orange chicklet on your blog! It will show up at the bottom of of your sidebar contents, so you will want to click on change content order and get it up at the top of your blog.

8. Now that you are done, sit back and relax or take a nap. You have done enough for one day.

Tomorrow we will talk about more enhancements, but lets just take this one step at a time.

Comments

[TheFehrman]

Hey, do you know how to add new Podcasts to a feedburner site? I can't figure out how to u[date it with my latest posts.

Thanks,

Tfehrman

[Kirsten Farris]

Thanks for the question. Here is how you get your new podcasts on feeedburner.

1. Go to feedburner, and on the front page where it says burn feed, enter your URL and then click on I am a podcaster.

2. On the next page, click on the third feed, which is your rss.xml feed for your podcast. Now your feed should be going through feedburner.

Good luck, and thanks for the question.

Kirsten