How To Use FeedBurner With WordPress

This arti­cle is all about how to use Feed­Burner to power your RSS feeds.  This arti­cle focuses on using Word­Press and Feed­Burner together.  The con­cepts apply to other Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems, but the step-by-step is for Word­Press. I cre­ated a video that cov­ers a basic overview of the work­flow and ben­e­fits of using Word­Press and Feed­Burner together which you can see by scrolling down. The rea­son we want to use Feed­Burner to power our RSS feed opposed to using the built in feed from Word­Press is because Feed­Burner gives us soo much power.

You can track tons of stats, view your stats with charts, and use that infor­ma­tion to make your con­tent bet­ter for the reader.  You can take advan­tage of Feed­Burn­ers wid­gets (called chicklet’s) to make it eas­ier for the reader of your web­site to sub­scribe to your feed. Go ahead and click the Sub­scribe but­ton at the top of my blog, when you do so you will see an image sim­i­lar to the following:

From this menu, you can add the feed to you’re my yahoo, newsgator’s online reader, your Google.com/ig web­site and more. If you do not cur­rently have an RSS reader, be sure to check out my post called What is RSS and How Do I Use It? for more infor­ma­tion as well as rec­om­men­da­tions. If your reader is not sup­ported, you can still copy the feed url from the address bar, and sub­scribe by adding that to the RSS reader of your choice. For the end user, it makes no dif­fer­ence if you’re using Feed­Burner, or if your using your own built in feed.

The main dif­fer­ence for them is it becomes so much eas­ier to sub­scribe to your feed, but for you (the web­site owner) it means the world. You can see at a glance your sub­scribers, what arti­cles they are read­ing, any­time they click on some­thing, how many you have.  It is fan­tas­tic. With this kind of infor­ma­tion you can start cre­at­ing more con­tent that your users like.  This makes them more likely to come back to your site, and helps more peo­ple.  No need in spend­ing an hour a day writ­ing your daily post on what your cat ate for break­fast if no-one is actu­ally read­ing it.

Video Overview of The Process

Ok Ok, Lets Get Started!

Get­ting a Feed­Burner account, couldn’t be eas­ier. Go to feedburner.com and click Register.

You need to give them the requested infor­ma­tion.  If your using Word­Press, your RSS feed is going to be → http://mybloghere.com/feed/ You type this in, and once Feed­Burner ver­i­fies it, your new feed will be http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed. Now that we have a Feed­Burner account (you might as well go pro, it’s free!) we need to inte­grate it into our WordPress.org blog.

Inte­grat­ing Feed­Burner With WordPress

The best way to inte­grate Feed­Burner with Word­Press is to use Feed­Burner. You can get it by vis­it­ing the direct link to Feed­Burner here. Once you have the plu­gin, unzip it, and upload it to your plu­g­ins direc­tory (inside you’re your wp-content folder).  After you upload it, click acti­vate, then under Set­tings click FeedBurner.

Inside the address bar type in your feeds.feeburner.com address then click save. It will take a lit­tle bit of time before it fin­ishes redi­rect­ing, but it shouldn’t be too long. Now your site is fin­ished.  When­ever some­one clicks your RSS feed, they will be redi­rected to your Feed­Burner feed.  Please remem­ber that when you update, it will not be updated auto­mat­i­cally on Feed­Burner, but it will show up shortly.

Adding Email Subscriptions

If you want to give your read­ers the option of get­ting your blog updates via email, it is very easy when using FeedBurner.

1. Login to your feedburner.com account, go to the Pub­li­cize tab, and click Email Sub­scrip­tions, acti­vate the option, and add the code to your website.
2. You can also choose to add a link.
3. If you want to add your sub­scrip­tion form to your blog, one easy way to do it is to go to your Word­Press Dash­board.  Under Appear­ance click Widget.
4. Add a new text widget.
5. Copy the Feed­Burner Code to your text box.
6. Save your changes, and your done.

I hope you have enjoyed this post, be sure to sub­scribe to my rss feed by click the sub­scribe but­ton at the top, and while your at it, sign up for my newslet­ter, which includes even more valu­able resources that I will not be post­ing here. Good Luck! Remem­ber to encour­age your read­ers to sub­scribe via RSS, you can send them to this post ->  What is RSS and How Do I Use It? to learn how to use it, and what tools I rec­om­mend. Talk to you soon Oh, and if you want to learn how to increase your traf­fic to over 500‑1000 vis­i­tors a day, you should check out my new site Enlight­ened Blog­ging.

Tagged as: FeedBurner, How to use FeedBurner, How to Use RSS, RSS, WordPress, WordPress 2.7 RSS