Using Feedburner with your blog

Feedburner is an excellent tool if you use blogs or RSS feeds in your home internet business.

It is is now a Google owned company and since they became involved - as you'd expect - it's been given even more 'bells and whistles' than before.

To get a new account, you have to sign-up for Google ... but as you probably already have an Adwords and Adsense account already, that shouldn't be a problem.

Note: If you already have subscribers to your existing RSS feed, they will continue to receive it in their regular readers.

After you switch to a third-party feed like Feedburner, any new subscribers will receive that new feed.

A good tip is to write a mini-post before you switch, informing your existing subscribers of the pending change.

You can ask them to subscribe via your new feed URL, which you provide as a link within your mini-post.

Signing up

The process is simple and straighforward.

If you have a Google account already, just sign-up via your regular login.

If you don't have a Google account, go directly to feedburner.com and you'll automatically be redirected to the new sign-up page.

Simply enter your regular RSS feed into the box marked Burn a feed right this instant, click on the 'Next' button and you're away.

It's worth changing the name of your feed at this stage as Feedburner often makes it something a bit unusual.

For example, the feed link for this website is:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/web-work-at-home

Originally it was something less attractive like webworkathomecom, so you can see why it needed to be changed.

Why should you use it?

# It provides information about the number of subscribers that you have.

# It lets you publicize your feed using a variety of popular sign-up options (see image below) including Google, MyYahoo! and Pageflakes.

# It gives you various ways to promote a page, including FeedFlare, which enables you to add Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg links to the bottom of each feed item.

# It can easily be monetized via integration with Google Adsense (as seen in the image below).

Integration with Google Adsense

This is perhaps one of the cleverest things about this service and the administration is done via your Google dashboard.

In the options page (see below) you select the 'Adsense for feeds' option.

As is the usual routine with Google Adsense, you change settings for text/image ads and create a channel, which enables you to accurately monitor income via this RSS feed.

In addition you stipulate how often the ads occur (after every feed, after every two feeds etc) where the ads display, colour options and whether to exclude some posts.

After that, the monetized feed sits alongside all your other ads and you can tweak, change and modify whenever you please.

Extras

# You are offered lots of publicizing options to promote your new feed, though I tend to stick with a straighforward 'universal option' like the one below:

Subscribe in a reader

 # You are offered the option of letting users subscribe via email which is a nice 'added extra' for non-RSS users.

Option A:

Option B:

Subscribe to web-work-at-home.com by Email 

# You can make your feed available via HTML (they provide the code) so that you can promote your content via your other websites.

As you can see, it just sits nicely in the page below, though I didn't have to do any coding to produce this content:

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:

There are many more promotional tools included, as well as detailed graphical and statistical information about how your feed is doing.

This is certainly a free service which you should check out if you're using RSS feeds in your home internet business, and you may choose - as I have - to fully embrace it and throw your lot in with Feedburner.

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