Traffic Tip 2: Publicize With FeedBurner

Now I am back on track. I postponed this topic to give way to two topics that got me carried away because of some useful tips that I got on social bookmarking and Firefox tweaks. I guess my enthusiasm bore a fruit because someone commented on my Firefox topic. :) Yes! The first comment I've got after 28 days. Hooray! But there's a catch; he asked me to visit a site. Wise guy heh! Anyway it's better than none at all.

To go back to my topic (I'm out of track again :) ), FeedBurner offers a handful of free services to publicize your site. I will discuss the three of them here but first you have to sign in first to Feedburner. If you don't have an account yet, click my topic on how to create one at Link Building Step 2: Sign Up To FeedBurner Step By Step. Click on My Feeds and click again the name of the feed that you want to work on. In my case, for example, my feed name is the same as my blog name, so clicked on that and it brought me to the feed tab menu. I Chose the one that said "Publicize".

Ok, so I am now at the "Publicize" display and there's a lot of choices that you can see on submenu at the leftmost column. As I've said, only 3 would be discussed; Pingshot (very important), FeedCounter (equally important), and Chicklet Chooser (very very important).


Pingshot

When you publish new content to your blog, the Pingshot automatically pings different feed reading services. If you are newbie like me and who is clueless about "ping"-ing and what it does. Well, "ping" is definitely not a sound of a gun shot nor a toy gun. I am also a newbie and I am not in the authority of expertise to expound to you what it is all about. Try reading Ping at Wikipedia.

On the left sidebar of the screen, click "Pingshot". It displays a list of all reading services that it can contact on publish of new content. The screen shot below is an example:


Choose the "read services" that you want, but four of them are already checked and can't be unchecked; Technorati, MyYahoo, Bloglines and Newsgator. Me, I also checked Google and Pingomatic and I recommend that you do the same so that there's no need for you to go to the sites of the two services and ping them yourself manually whenever you have new content posted. At the bottom part of the screen before the save button, you can choose 5 more services in dropdown list just like I did at the screen shot above. When done, click the save button.


FeedCounter

Scroll down this page and look at the bottom of the right margin. You can see a light green rectangle that says "readers" inside it and "by feedburner" underneath it. That is the feed counter. To create your own, at your FeedBurner screen, click the FeedCounter option at the left submenu. You will see the same as the screen shot below:


You can have that counter by choosing Blogger in the "Use as widget in"
dropdown list. Click "Go!" button, but be sure that you are logged in Blogger.com before you click that. A new Blogger.com window will appear and then, at that window, Select your blog in the dropdown list and then click "Add Widget". View your blog to see the result. If you want you can rearrange it according to your preference.


Chicklet Chooser

At the FeedBurner submenu, click "Chicklet Chooser". At the screen, choose the feed icon that you want and then at the bottom part of it, you will see again the "Use as widget in" dropdown list. Choose "Blogger", click "Go!" button and then do the same thing that you do in FeedCounter. View the result and rearrange according to your taste.


So that's it. You have now implemented the three important services to automatically publicize your contents.

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Link Building Step 2: Sign Up To FeedBurner Step By Step

Notice that I have a FeedBurner counter at the bottom of the right sidebar. I set it up yesterday and it looks like it did me a favor when I checked it out just right now, I've already got 2 subscribers (Thank you, I appreciate your interest with this blog). FeedBurner is one of the few best tools I know that can drive traffic to your blog. What it does is very complicated but it made them simple to ordinary bloggers like me who doesn't have extra time to learn about new stuff.

So that is our 2nd Link Building Step. Sign up with FeedBurner and boost a little bit your traffic. I will give you an idea on how I implemented FeedBurner in this blog and at the last part of this post, you will find a video, I found in YouTube, that teaches in details how to integrate the FeedBurner account into a Blogger.com account.


At the FeedBurner.com main page, I entered the URL address of this blog as seen in the screen shot below, and then clicked the "Next" button:

The system would then prompted me to identify the feed source, either of the two can be chosen (Atom or RSS), but I preferred the RSS feed. Then the "Next" button again:


It gave me the new RSS feed where I can used to redirect my Blogger.com posts instead of pointing then to its own RSS feed. It has an option to rename before clicking the "Activate Feed".


Then you are congratulated by FeedBurner for successfully setting up the initial configuration. Instead of clicking the "Next" button, in which would bring to a more complicated setup, I clicked the "Skip directly to feed management" button to put me in the main menu.


Below is the main menu:


At the menu you can see the difference options that you can do with FeedBurner. It is out of the scope of this post, but will be tackled in the future.

If things are still complicated to you, below is a very good video shot, that I promised you, of how to go about it:



There are still a lot things that we can do with FeedBurner and I will try to discuss them to you one by one in the future. But if you want to study it in advance you can google it and there's a lot information you can get from the net. You can also try to search YouTube for some visual tutorial.

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