How to Setup Feedburner on an Artblog

In case you didn’t notice, I use Feedburner here for anyone who wants to subscribe. Feedburner makes it very easy for visitors to subscribe and stay up to date with this art blog. I find it helps tremendously in gathering readers, along with promoting my art online.

I will show you how to setup Feedburner on your own Blogger accounts, and explain some features you can use to gather more subscribers… with very little effort!

I use Feedburner for several reasons:

I can keep track of my subscribers, seeing how many I have at a certain point in time.
To make my feed available to virtually anyone, through services such as Newsgator and Bloglines.
I set it so that it automatically pings a bunch of services, without any effort from myself whatsoever - every single time I create an art blog post.
If I want to point my feed subscribers to a separate blog (in the event that I switch blogs), I can.
There are several other perks to Feedburner which I use, and will explain to all of you below.

Tutorial on Setting up Feedburner

Log into Feedburner.com with your Google account, the same one you use for your Blogger.

Now it’s time to burn your blog feed!

Input your blog address (http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com) into this box, and press “NEXT”

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Choose either atom or RSS to redirect your art blog feed. It doesn’t matter which one, because I will show you later how you can use Feedburner to redirect anyone to the feed you choose.

Click “NEXT” again.

On this page, you are presented with your Feed Title and Feed Address. Take a note of that by copy and pasting it into a notepad document.

Press on NEXT again… then once more to skip the page displaying your feed address

From there, simply check these boxes… “Clickthroughs” and “I want more!”

The Artist Painting Artwork

Redirecting Your Art-Blog Feed

Right now you should see your dashboard.

I will now show you how to redirect your artblog feed to your Feedburner feed right away, since this is the most important part!

Go to your Blogger account and “Settings” for the blog… then “Site Feed”.

In the post feed Redirect URL box, place your Feedburner feed address (the one that looks like this… http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURBLOG) and click “Save Settings” at the bottom.

Now that this important step is complete is complete, lets go about setting some of the great features.

Fine Art Drawing Abstract

Smartfeed – Under the “Optimize” tab, Smartfeed allows anyone subscribing to your art blog, whether it be Atom or RSS, to be redirected to the Feedburner feed. Make sure to activate this so you will not lose any readers!
Feedflare – Once this is set up, various “add this” icons appear at the end of each of your artblog posts, so readers can easily share it with others.
Email Subscriptions – Under the “Publicize” tab, this will allow you to have a way for your readers to enter their email address and subscribe by email.
Pingshot – This automatically, without any effort from you, sends your feed to a bunch of services every time you post.
Feedcount – With Feedcount you can let your readers know how many subscribers you have. The best practice is to only use this after gathering at least 20 subscribers.
Socialize – Socialize allows you to link any Twitter account to your blog.
Chicklet Chooser – Use this as a means of readers subscribing to your art-blog!

So, as you can see, all the features of Feedburner takes a while to setup. But, the best thing about is when it’s done, it’s done. You will rarely have to go back to the site, except to check your stats or burn another feed.