Connect your blog feed to Feedburner

Feedburner, owned by Google, is a very useful tool. If you redirect your blog feed through Feedburner you will have access to detailed stats about your feed subscribers, plus there are many tools within Feedburner to help promote your blog.

First of all you'll need to find your blog feed. This varies from one blog platform to another. In Blogger, for example, it will be in the format

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default 

(be sure to substitute "blogname" with your blog's name, for example this is the feed for this site - http://bloggingforcreatives.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default - not very pretty, right? But it won't be - the feed is simply a representation of your blog's posts (or other element, such as comments) which can be read by other blogs and by 'feed readers'.

For example, I subscribe to blogs in Google Reader, and I read them in Feedly (which is powered by Google Reader but with a more user-friendly interface.)

If you have a hosted WordPress blog on WordPress.com, the format of your feed will be

yourdomain.com/wp-feed.php

and if it is hosted on another server the feed address should be

 yourdomain.com/wordpress_install_directory/wp-feed.php

Remember, your blog's feed is not the same as its web address or URL.

Once you know the address of your feed, get it redirected via Feedburner.

Go to http://feedburner.google.com/  if you have a Google Account you can sign in here. If not, hit 'Sign up'.

Once you're into Feedburner, you'll be prompted to 'Burn a feed right this instant.'  Just paste in your feed address and burn your feed.

You will be presented with your Feedburner feed address, which in the case of this blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloggingForCreatives

Then you need to go to your blog dashboard and enter this as your new blog feed address. In Blogger, go to Settings - Other, and click on 'Post Feed Redirect URL'.  In Typepad, go to 'Settings - Feeds'. With a hosted blog you'll generally find it under 'Settings'.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, there is a Feedburner plugin you can install for easy configuration with Feedburner.

Once you're all set up, go back to Feedburner and start exploring all its functionality! More about Feedburner features in another post.