Making Money Resources

I set up my RSS feed through FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great site with a full array of tools, I would highly recommend them. Here it is, step by step, how to set up your RSS feed using FeedBurner and Wordpress.

Go to http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart and download the FeedSmith plugin.  Save it to your disk, then unzip it.  I have a folder marked “Wordpress” for my plugin downloads, it’s nice to have everything in one spot.  Once it is downloaded and unzipped, open your FTP software (I use Filezilla) and connect to the site where your Wordpress blog is located.  Upload the FeedSmith Plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder (where the rest of your plugins are located).

Once you have uploaded the file, you can activate the plugin.  To do this, log into your Admin page of Wordpress, click on “Plugins” on your toolbar and click activate to start the plugin.

Next, go to Options on the toolbar.  There should be a FeedBurner tab under this menu.  Click on that tab.  It will take you to a screen with a link that says “create a FeedBurner feed for your site”.  Click on this link.  A screen will pop up, either verifying your feed source, or asking you to identify it.  If it is not verified, you should have a link that you can click to confirm it’s validity.  Click this link, it will take you to a feed validator, which should magically give you the correct address to make things work.  Paste this into the Feed URL box and click next to be on your way.

Once you get to this point, you should be able to follow the screen directions as they are pretty intuitive.  I would suggest naming your feed the same as your blog.  One additional piece of work is to update your Wordpress FeedBurner settings with your FeedBurner URL.  To find this URL, go to your FeedBurner account, login, click on my feeds, then on the name of the feed for this blog.  At the top of the screen is a link to edit feed details.  Click on this link and you will see the FeedBurner feed address.  Use this address to update your FeedBurner settings in Wordpress.  You’re all set!

FeedBurner is a great tool.  Before I end this, I want to touch on a few of the great tools they have.  When you are logged in, click on the feed name.  It will bring up a few different tabs.  Click on optimize.  I like the browser friendly option, makes your feed browser friendly so it looks nice and pretty for everyone.  It also gives you a content box to include a message, URL, or whatever to each of your feeds.  Nice.

Also under optimize is smart feed.  You can reach the widest possible audience by using this feature.  It makes your feed compatible with any feed reader.  Nice!

Next, click on the publicize tab.  Check out the ping shot option, it notifies services when you post.  It has a handful of services it will notify, and also lets you add up to five additional services of your choice. 

Click on the monetize tab.  Here you can link your Adsense account into your feed.  It gives you basic controls over the ad types to show, including the channel, ad size, colors, etc.  It even imports your color palette for you.  You can create the code to put into your post right from the FeedBurner control panel. 

Well, that’s it in a nutshell, you can get up and running with an RSS feed in maybe 10 minutes.  Browse around, FeedBurner is a pretty great service.  One more thing you may want to do is to create a graphic for people to click on that you can put on your website to subscribe to your feed.  FeedBurner will do this for you too.  Click on the publicize tab and in the main text area click on the friendly graphic link.  You can choose your image and size, copy the html and paste it wherever you choose.

I hope this has been helpful, good luck everyone!

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