How to Publicize your Blog Posts using Google Feedburner?

Michael Dadona a.k.a Mike asked me to publicize my blog using Feedburner. But I didn't have any clear idea about what Feed means and how to burn it. I just know to burn my fingers when I try to feed my son with his angry or eager bites. But what is this Feedburner all about? Later I went to Michael Dadona's blog itself, where he had given an awesome clean instruction that helped me to understand about Feedburner and easily do the publicize job.

Now I thought of putting that in my own ways, reiterating step by step guide to publicize the blog using google Feedburner. Let us start.

What is Feedburner?

Before saying about feedburner, it is a must to tell about RSS. RSS means  Really Simple Syndication. It is an easy and effective way to gather data from various other websites (which are your favorites and from where you would love to get updates). When you visit some website and found it interesting, you can subscribe to their RSS, by which you will get the latest update from that website / blog without the need to visit it individually. After seeing the update, you can either neglect if you are not interested or go that site to get more details. I just put it in as simple as possible words. RSS has more benefits than what I said. But as a blogger I guess this is sufficient for time being.

OK, now where comes the Feedburner here? I said, you can subscribe to some others website. But if you own a website or blog and want others to know about your update, you should have the RSS for others to subscribe. According to Google definition, "Feedburner is a product acquired by Google, which helps publishers analyze, optimize, publicize, and earn advertising revenue from their RSS feeds". Feedburner is an enhancer to RSS, adding more cool functionalities without you to do much modifications or jobs.

The main and popular use of Feedburner is using it for publicize of your blogs. Let us say, you have more than one blog and you want to tell the visitors of your Blog-1 about the updates in Blog-2. So, what would you do? Sit and write a page giving links to your Blog-2? How much time and effort is required to do it?

Most of my visitors to this blog may be thinking me as a serious person with a goal of earning high through Internet tactics. 99% of them would not be aware of my other blog, where I write about Love and Romance, my other face of life. So, I now used Feedburner and now my Romance blogs update is shared here in this writing blog. A break in mid of serious works.
Feedburner made it all simple. By using that, it is all done in just a matter of minutes. Here we go with a step by step guidance of how to achieve it.

Step 1

Go to http://feedburner.google.com/ and login with your google user name and password (ahh ya, the very same Gmail id and password).

Step 2

You will be taken to the page where you need to add the blog URL. The image I have given below has already two of my blogs added for Feedburner. Give your blog URL as shown and click on Next button.

Mythili Kannan_Google Feedburner_Add Blog

Step 3

On click of next button, you will be taken to a page, where you will be asked to select the option of having Atom or RSS. I have selected RSS as my Feed Source. Click on next button after selecting the required option.

Mythili Kannan_RSS

Step 4

The next page will show you other options of customization, which are really not important for me. So, I selected the "Skip and go to feed management directly" option.



Mythili Kannan_Google feedburner

 Step 5

This takes to a page, where you can see 5 tabs namely analyze, optimize, publicize, montionize and troubleshootize. Click on the Publicize tab.

Mythili Kannan_google feedburner publicize

Step 6

You would be able to see a list of services provided on the left side tab. Click on the BuzzBoost link.

Mythili Kannan_BuzzBoost in Feedburner

Step 7

The next step takes you to a page where you need to fill / select the options like how many posts you want to be shown by the Feedburner and so on. I select a minimum of 5 posts and a maximum of 10 posts, as something more than that will look like a non ending list in the blog, with a long way to drag. You can see rest of my options in the below image. After all settings done, click on the "Activate" button.

Mythili Kannan_Activate BuzzBoost

Step 8

The next page gives you a piece of script to be embedded in the blog, where you want the Feedburner list ot be displayed. Let us say, you created the Feedburner for your Blog-1 (in my case, let me say I created a one for my http://mythilishiju.blogspot.com/, then I want to place this code in my http://write-and-earn.blogspot.com/)

Mythili Kannan_Feedburner code

Step 9

Go to www.blogger.com/home and go to the design --> Page Element of the blog and click on Add Gadget, where you want to place the Feedburner code.

Mythili Kannan_Blogger Page Element

Step 10

A page opens with various list of options to add as gadget. In that select HTML/Javascript (you need to click on the + symbol corresponding to this option) as shown in image.

Mythili Kannan_Add HTML/Javascript Gadget

Step 11

You will get a box, where you need to place the Feedburner code, copied from the feedburner site for your blog. Place the code there, give a title and save it.

Mythili Kannan_Add Javascript code

Step 12

Now you can see the Gadget added to the Page Element. Save the Page Element.

Mythili Kannan_Save Page Element

Step 13

Now, go to your blog and view the Feedburner displaying the updates from the other blog, attracting your visitors to visit your other blog too. I have shown it by an yellow color rectangle in the below image.

Mythili Kannan_Feedburner added to the blog