Make money blogging in South Africa

Feedburner is one of the most useful web 2.0 sites for blogs. It adds a host of functionality for your RSS feed like stats, feed publishing options and a way of monetizing your feed.

It really is simple to get setup. Simply head on over to Feedburner.com and enter your blog’s URL. Feedburner then gives your RSS feed a unique feed address which you can choose to publish as is, or by using a wordpress plugin, can redirect your original feed to your newly created Feedburner feed.

Feedburner services

Firstly you are able to track the number of RSS subscribers your feed has. From that you can analyze your feed and find out which RSS reader your subscribers are using. One of the most interesting stats that have surfaced over the last couple of months (thanks to Feedburner) is that Google Reader is now the biggest and most popular RSS reader!

Not only can you analyze your stats, you are able to offer your readers a number of ways to subscribe to your feed. When a user clicks on a link to your feed, they are taken to a page that allows them to subscribe to their feed in their preferred RSS reader. Feedburner also offers your readers that don’t use RSS to subscribe to your feed by email. This really is an awesome feature to offer on your blog.

Feed optimization, also called FeedFlare is the another awesome service Feedburner offers. You can now add options to the bottom of each post in your RSS feed that gives your subscribers the option of emailing, tagging and sharing your content. You can also have a message added to each of your posts, if you feel it is necessary. (Some bloggers like to add a disclaimer to their posts, just to remind people that their content is copyrighted. :-))

Feedburner Wordpress plugin

If you are running Wordpress and Feedburner you have to add the Feedburner plugin by Steve Smith to your blog. What it does it redirects your current feed to your new Feedburner feed so that you can track all your subscribers, and not just your new subscribers.

RSS feed tips

Once you have burnt your feeds with Feedburner and hooked up the Feedburner plugin, I suggest that all your links to your feed should not be the Feedburner RSS link, but your blogs default RSS link. For example, my RSS feed points to http://www.problogging.co.za/feed/ - which then redirects to the Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/probloggingcoza) using the plugin. It’s just looks like you are publishing your own feeds, and with all those tools Feedburner offers, makes you look like you have added a host of functionality yourself!

So go ahead and subscribe to my feed, by clicking on the world’s biggest RSS button below. If you prefer email, enter your email address, and every time I post something new here, you will receive my content, fresh to your inbox.

BuzzWord #3

OPML

A file containing a list of RSS URLs. Often used for sharing feeds amongst users.