How to Set Up and Configure WordPress

Promoting Your WordPress Blog - Optimising Your RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that allows information to be syndicated to RSS news readers, blogs or anyone who wants to receive it.

It's a great way to automatically distribute your posts.

For example, I use RSS feeds to publish excerpts of my blog posts in my static sites. It provides visitors with snippets from my blog articles and encourages them to click through to read the full post.

All blogs have a couple of RSS outputs as standard (posts and comments). But there are two main RSS technologies and some RSS readers are not able to accommodate both.

To get around this I strongly recommend that you set up an account with Feedburner.

It reads the RSS feed from your blog and converts it to a format that can be read by all readers.

It also enables you to offer automatic updates by email (many people are not familiar with RSS and prefer email), and it gives you some great statistics on your RSS subscribers.

Once you have ‘burned’ your blog feed you will be given a Feedburner Feed URL. This is what you should use whenever you provide your RSS feed link - for example if you want to distribute your posts to your Facebook account.

Here's How To Set Up Feedburner

Click here to go to Feedburner, and on that page either sign in to your Google Account or set one up.

Once you've signed in you'll see this screen:



In the box under 'Burn a feed right this instant' type in your blog url, and then click next.

Once Feedburner has found your blog's RSS feed you'll see the screen below:



Type in a title – any title you like – and complete the url of your feed by giving it a good permalink. I've used demosite in both fields here, but you can use whatever you like. Click 'Next'.

As long as the name you choose has not already been taken you'll see this screen:



If the title you choose has already been taken you'll get an error message and be taken back to the previous screen so you can choose another title and permalink. This is what happened to me which is why the feed url in this image is 'demosite27', not the 'demosite' I typed in originally.

Once your feed title is accepted click 'Next'.

You'll see this screen:



Select the items you want and click 'Next'. You'll see this screen:



Here's where you can select a chicklet (or RSS subscribe button) to place on your blog. Select the 'Self Hosted WordPress' option.

As well as your chicklet code, you'll be directed to the code that will enable you to offer email updates, and to the plugin that will re-direct all your blog's feeds (posts and comments) through your Feedburner account (which I highly recommend).

Once you have the code(s) you need, simply paste them into a text widget on your blog and you'll have your RSS buttons and RSS email sign-up boxes in place.

If your theme already has an RSS button then re-directing your RSS feed through Feedburner will be done automatically as long as you install the plugin (Feedburner FeedSmith) that's linked to in the Self Hosted WordPress section.

The Feedburner Feedsmith plugin will need to be installed manually - see the installing plugins chapter.

OK, that's it - you're all done – and the next time you access your feedburner account you can do it through your Google account.

Next we'll look at a simple blog marketing and promotion strategy.