Autonomous Industry

TweetFeedburner combines the benefits of RSS and email subscriptions;  Good feature set ups which allow anyone with a pre existing RSS feed for their blog, website, cms to manage and run their own news lists, which WordPress creates automatically for you. Feedburner will allow you to begin testing and communicating with email marketing, which is a huge boost for any online business.  We will go through installation, and editing it’s features.

Wiki Definition

For a bit more information on RSS and Feedburner go to

google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79408

Have your website, blog or CMS admin panel up so that you can edit it’s plugins or insert code to where you wish to see your new features.

Login with your Google account to retrieve your RSS feed(if you don’t yet have a Google account, head to Web Master section)

Head to your blogs home page, or where ever you can navigate to your RSS feed as to copy it

Click the following RSS logo (this is the standard across the web)

Once on the page, copy your feed

Head back to the Google page after you had logged in and copy your feed in to the form provided.

Name your feed as to which people will see on emails, and anywhere it may be published away from your site.

Follow the instructions from here, I will show you a handful of features to take advantage of within your admin panel on Feedburner

Check the relevant boxes, Click through will show me vital information I can analyse at a later date and see how my published feeds are comparing with their presentation and content.

The following page will show you where you can publish your new feed and it’s features to enable new subscribers.  Below that, a brief look at the options you have available within your admin panel.

I’m following the Self-Hosted WordPress link, but since we are copying the code, it is all the same across any web site set ups.

Downloading the following plugin which they link to will change all standard visible RSS feed icons to your new feedburner link.  When they are clicked they will then be able to subscribe how you let them, which feed readers and much more.

Save the plugin on your PC in a folder you can remember, a duplicate of what you have online is always best practice.

Extract the zip file so that you are left with the folder itself with all information inside.

Delete the folder MACOSX, this is not needed.

Login to FTP using your hostings details and head to your blog folder, content and plugins.  Put the plugin Feedburner Feedsmith in to your plugins folder.

While that is uploading, head to your admin control panel of your blog.

Go to Plugins and Installed plugins where you have just uploaded it to using FTP.

Your new plugin should show up below Akismet or any others you already have implemented.  Activate it, no need to submit FTP details as you are doing this manually.

Go to your Settings and Feedburner link.  When installing plugins or othere features, there settings can be either in the main Settings tab like below or in another such as Appearance.

Input your new Feedburner link which you created, and save.  Your site is now updated to link to this feed which Google now hosts for you.

Go back to your Google Feedburner account and click on Smart Feed.  By activating this, your allowing your news to be read how the readers wish to do so.

Still within Optimize, go to Photo Splicer.  If you have a Facebook, Buzznet or Webshots account your can allow your images to be published with your news content.

Under Publicize you can edit the tools to publish your feeds how you wish.  Place them where you want on your own website and edit the look to help bring in more subscribers.

The different widgets you can publish differentiate at the information published and to what you can do with them.  With BuzzBoost the code will show a link to your feed and a small summary which directs the reader to the full post.  There are also widgets within your blog which you can in put RSS feeds to summarise the feeds posts and present it on your blogs sidebar.

To see what it would look like on your site, head to Widgets and move a text box to your side bar as to input the code you have just copied.

Save this after giving it a title to see what it will show.

An Autonomous Industry BuzzBoost feature, here shown at the top of the sidebar and showing the first and only post on the blog.  There is a Feedburner link on some of the features but this is not a problem.  If you use the Aweber email list service, you are still shown aweber.com links when you click a link on an aweber used email list your subscribed to.

A Headline Animator makes your RSS feed logo more prominent than a BuzzBoost and you are given a bit more flexibility with editing its appearance.  I have gone with a small size black background animator.  Clicking the RSS logo when on the site will link the clicker to the feed’s subscribe page.

By putting the code in another widget text box, it will understand what it has to show.  Save this new feature and position It at the bottom of your content, in your header or within a side column.

Again at the top of the side menu, it is visible when a page loads, its above the fold.  Changing the text where it says “Grab this Headline Animator” can help spread your RSS feed and help promote other features such as an email subscribe function which we are about to add.

Just in case your website visitors don’t all love RSS readers, there is an Email Subscription which sends your feed updates via email.  By this we mean that every time a blog post is created, at an automated time that you can set, those who chose to in put their email address instead of subscribing through an RSS logo will receive that blog post via email.

Putting this on landing pages such as your home page or pages specific to new material or offers your band may have is a good idea.  You can increase your email list and RSS subscriptions all in one swoop.  It may not be as powerful as Aweber or other of the paid email marketing services, but its offered by Google, so an important thing here is that your emails will get sent out to the subscriber.

There are a few email marketing guidelines which need to be met in order to have optimum exposure.  A rule of thumb is that if a subscriber does not receive the update, they are then unable to read, share and click back through to your website.

Don’t forget to change the look of your email as it is sent, the news you post will always just be a heading, paragraph, lists and links.  Here you can begin to mold that look to try and get people used to a house style they can associate to.

Just as your RSS feed is updated at least once a day, the email list is sent in bulk once a day.  Choose when your optimum reading time is either  for your local area or for your current fanbase, ideally where do the majority of them reside.

Once activated, copy the code your are given and it is yours to publish where you think it will work.

Here it is within another widget on a WordPress blog.

This is what it looks like without any editing.  It should work with any look  on a website and its the key to the huge creative industry your now involved in.

Back at your Google Feedburner account, activate Pingshot.  In response to this move, update more frequently and prove you have the content to update the search engines, they will love you for now and forever.

Fancy showing off the amount of RSS feed subscribers you have.  In the FeedCount section, Activate your chicklet and put it near your RSS buttons and email subscription form.  This is only representable of the RSS subscribers you have.  The Email list which you collate over time can only be seen in the Email Stats section within your admin panel on Feedburner.  There may be a counter for this too in the future but at least you get some feel of what your Email lists numbers are doing.

Copy the HTML, ( which you can publish anywhere) and put it on your Myspace page or ask your family to put on their own websites and so forth.

Rename a text box to Subscribers if you wish to put it alone, if not just place the code under another widget you are using to gain subscribers.

In the routine later in the guide, you can use services and tools to automatically publish your news to certain networks your attributed with.  With Socialize, a small summary will be posted inside a Twitter comment on the account you attach it too.  Add a Twitter account to this if you have created one already.

Allow Google and Twitter to connect accounts so that the feature can work automatically for you.

Activate it on Feedburner after checking the example.

Now you are optimized and published where you want within your web presence and else were, you can think about monetizing your news feed with Google Adwords, if you have any problems, head to Troubleshootize.

There are a few other free RSS feed and Email subscription services available.  They all have their benefits and negative points.  I would move on from Feedburner to a payed service if my website visitor numbers grew substancially enough for me to try and put more time and effort in.

There are top 1,000 blogs and websites of the internet that utilize Feedburner.  It’s up to you now to manage it as you see fit and try to optimize it around the tools that Google provide.  For more help try the forum support section of this category.