Preliminary operation
As mentioned in the opening phase of the tutorial, FeedBurner is a service owned by Google. Therefore, if you are a content creator and want to use it to manage your site's feeds, you must first create a Google account.
If you do not have a Google account yet, connected to this web page, click on the item Create an account which is located below and fill out the form that is proposed to you with all the required data: name, last name, username (which will then be the first part of the address @ Gmail.com obtained) and Password to log into your account. Then press the button NEXT and, in just a few clicks, your registration will be completed.
If you need more information on how to create a new Google account, consult my tutorial dedicated to the topic.
How FeedBurner works
Once you've created your Google account, you can take action and find out in more detail how FeedBurner works. The service, to count the readers, creates a new address with the contents of the feed of your blog or website. The new address must be replaced, in the pages of the site, with the original one. Readers who add the feed released by FeedBurner will be counted.
In other words. You subscribe to the service by entering the address of your current feed; FeedBurner gives you an address like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nome da te scelto with the contents of your original feed and, at that point, you must replace in the pages of your blog / site the address of the original feed with the one created by FeedBurner.
Remember to keep generating the original feed with the various updates, because FeedBurner will visit it at regular intervals, download its contents and make it available in the new feed. All clear? Well then let's move on.
Create a feed on FeedBurner
First, you have to register on FeedBurner. Connect, therefore, to the home page of the service and log in to your Google account. On the page that opens, enter the address of your original feed in the field Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here and click sul pulsating Next.
Then give your feed a name and the address of the new feed by typing them in the fields Feed Title e Feed Address and push button on the pulsating Next which is located at the bottom left. The feed address will have the form feeds.feedburner.com/Nome.
If the chosen address is available, the feed will be created. Then click the button Next and, in the new proposed screen, if you are interested in knowing which were the most clicked articles of the new feed, put a check mark next to the item Item clickthroughs.
By also putting the check mark next to the item I want more! Have FeedBurner Stats also track, you will be able to discover the popularity of the individual contents and obtain statistics about the clicks made by your readers.
Finally, press the button Next and you will complete the process of creating your feed on FeedBurner. It wasn't difficult, was it?
Hide the old feed
As already mentioned, FeedBurner uses the original feed released by a blog / site to populate the new one, so the new one should not be deleted and, on the contrary, it must be constantly updated.
One thing that needs to be done, though, is change the address of the old feed with the new one in the pages of their blog / site and invite their readers to update the feed address in the aggregator they use to read the news.
View feed statistics
To consult the statistics of your feed, access the main page of FeedBurner, log in with your Google account (if necessary) and click on the name of your site or blog. Then move to the tab Analyze and use the side tabs to view all the information of your interest: then click on the tab Subscribers to view the number of readers who have subscribed to your feed (with relative graph on the progress of subscriptions); on the tongue items to view statistics related to views (views) is click; on the tongue Map Overlay to find out which parts of the world the most views come from and on the board Uncommon uses to consult the statistics relating to non-typical uses of the feed (eg automatic blogs that have included the feed inside them, external widgets, etc.).
If you want, you can choose the day or the period of time for which to view the FeedBurner statistics by expanding the drop-down menu Show stats for (top right) and selecting one of the options available in it: last 30 days for the last month; last 7 days for the last week; all time for the entire period of existence of the feed or a specific day, to view only the statistics referring to a particular day.
Advertise the feed
By selecting the tab Publicize of FeedBurner, you can find a number of tools that will help you promote your feed and, consequently, increase the number of subscribers to it.
Going into more detail, by selecting the tab Headline Animator from the left sidebar you can create an animated banner with the titles of the latest news included in the feed (to be inserted later on your site or in other sites); by selecting the tab Email Subscriptions e clicking on your button Activate you can create a form for subscribing to the news of your site via email, by selecting the tab socialize and by associating a Twitter account to FeedBurner you can automatically post the news of your site / blog on Twitter and so on.
I also point out that you can enter aimage showing the number of readers of the feed on your site or blog by selecting the item FeedCount from the left sidebar, by selecting a style (static o animated) it's a colore for the widget to be created and pressing the button Activate which is located at the bottom. Once this is done, you will need to copy the HTML code provided by FeedBurner and paste it into your site or blog.
Subscribe to FeedBurner feeds
If you are not a content creator, but a reader who wants to use FeedBurner to receive news from your favorite sites, you can achieve your goal in a very simple way.
First, if you haven't already, you need to choose the program or service to use as aggregator to read the news. Personally I recommend you Feedly, which works directly from the browser, is free (in its basic version, which allows you to subscribe to 100 sources and 3 different feed services) and is supported by numerous aggregators in the desktop and mobile environment.
If you want to try it, linked to its main page, click on the button Get started for free and then choose whether to log in with Google, Facebook, with the same Feedly (therefore with your e-mail address) or with another of the supported services, by pressing one of the buttons that appear in the center of the screen.
Once logged in, to subscribe to a feed generated by FeedBurner, click on the button add content located at the bottom left and select the item Publications & Blogs from the menu that appears. On the page that opens, paste the feed address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/[nome]) in the field Discover subject matter experts and A-list publicationsaward Submit on your PC keyboard and click on the button Follow which appears below to complete the subscription to the feed.
If you do not know what the exact address of the feed you are interested in is, visit the blog or the site to which it refers, click on the widget, on the link or on the button. FeedBurner and copy the address you find in the address bar of your browser. Alternatively, click on the button Subscribe with Feedly to subscribe directly to the feed via Feedly.
If you don't like Feedly, you can try Inoreader, which works in a very similar way and is also supported by many apps dedicated to RSS feeds.
How to register and use Feedburner
