As we head into week three of this series on Widgets to enhance your Outside Blog, I decided this week I was going to dig into a widget that is a little more complex to set up, but the rewards are even greater. Remember the famous line from Spider Man by Uncle Ben? With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
This week we are going to discuss the FeedBurner Widget. What is FeedBurner? Feedburner does a plethora of things, but the feature we are going to talk today allows visitors to your blog that enjoy your posts to subscribe to your blog and have the blog show up directly in their inbox each time you write a new post.
Now, while I said this is a little more complex to set up, let me assure you that you do not need a Phd. in computer programming to set this up. First, you need to go to Feedburner and sign up.
After you have signed up for Feedburner you will then need to do is burn a new feed. Or, set up a link that you want people to be able to subscribe to. You will see a box that will look similar to this:
Enter the web address you wish to burn and click next. You will then be sent here:
In this box, you will title your your feed and the Address. The title you place is is what will show up as the subject line on every email that shows up in someones inbox, so be careful how you title your burn. After you title your feed and click next a few more times, your feed will be complete. There are a few options you can use to customize your feed even more, but I would suggest not tampering with the default settings unless you really know what you are doing.
Now that we have created the feed, it is time to publish. To publish, you will click on the Publicize tab as seen below.
When you go to the publicize tab a box containing you will then need to click on the email subscriptions on the left side and Activate the Service
The final step on the feedburner site is to copy the Subscription Form Code. This is the code needed to create the widget on your Outside Blog. Make sure when you copy that you copy all of the code or the widget will give you an error message.
The final step in this process is to add the widget FeedBurner (email) to your outside blog. As always, log into your blog, click on the manage my widgets button and add FeedBurner (email) widget. You will then paste in the code in the box and click update.
Congratulations! You have just added the FeedBurner Email Widget to your Blog!
So what are you waiting for? Go add this Widget today! if you have not set up your Outside Blog yet, go do it now! If you are not sure how to set up an ActiveBlog, as usual, Brad has written a tutorial here.
To keep up on all the newest and latest tutorials on ActiveRain you may want to Subscribe to ActiveRain Tutorials by Email.
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I am the Co-Founder of 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors. If you would like more information on any of the topics discussed in this blog, please contact me directly.
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