How to Use Feedburner for Blogs

RSS feed

Feedburner has a ton of built-in tools designed to help blog owners share their feed better. Whether you want to ping other services when you post or allow other blog owners to share your feed, Feedburner makes it easy.

In this guide, we’ll walk through all of FeedBurner’s tools that allow you to publicize and share your feed more effectively. To start, you’ll need to already have created a feed in Feedburner.

Accessing the Publicize Tools

To access the publicize tools, just click “Publicize” along the top navigation.

 1-Click-Publicize

To navigate to the specific tool you want to use, just click one of the services under the Services navigation bar on the right.

 

The Headline Animator

The headline animator will create an RSS feed box that’ll automatically put the newest headlines in. You can place this box on a website for example and every time someone visits, they’ll see the headline of your newest post.

 3-Headline-Generator

Just set your options for how you want the box to look. A preview of how your box will look will appear towards the bottom. Click Activate to generate the code for the headline box.

BuzzBoost

Want to share more than just the headline of your post? BuzzBoost makes it easy. Just fill out your options, then click Activate. The JavaScript code can then be pasted onto any website to create a RSS feed box with anywhere between 1 to 15 posts.

 4-BuzzBoost

Email Subscriptions

A lot of people would rather get their blog posts in their inbox, rather than having to visit your blog all the time or learn to use an RSS reader.

That’s easy, with email subscriptions. Just activate it, then once people are signed up they’ll automatically get your blog posts by email.

5-Email-Subscriptions

Ping Shot

Instead of having other services refresh your feed, constantly taking up your bandwidth, you can just tell Feedburner to send those services a “ping” of data whenever you update your blog.

All you need to do is click Activate.

6-Ping-Shot

Feed Count

If you want to show off how many subscribers you have on your RSS feed, all you need to do is publish your Feed Count.

Select your button and text color and select whether you want a static or animated button. Then click Activate to generate the code.

7-Feed-Count

Socialize

Want to automatically post to your Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts? Feedburner allows you to easily link other accounts to your feed.

Anytime you post on your blog, the post will also automatically be posted to the account(s) you specify.

8-Socialize

To add more accounts to post to, just click “Manage Connections.” Under formatting options, select how you want your posts to look, then click Activate to link the accounts.

Additional Tools

The tools we’ve just covered are the most important tools for publicizing your feed. In addition, there are also a few more tools and options you can change in the publicize options.

  • Chicklet Chooser: Select a slightly different button to take people to your RSS feed.
  • Creative Commons: Choose the type of copyright your feed is protected under.
  • Password Protector: Require a password for people to read your feed. Note that this will deactivate the email subscription option.
  • NoIndex: Deny search engines access from your feed.

 

These are all the tools available to you in FeedBurner’s publicize tools. As you can tell, it’s easy to  publish and use your RSS feed in many different ways, whether it’s on your website, your Facebook page or even a friend’s software.