Feedburner, Tags, and Social Bookmarking Makeover Complete! 

The blogging universe changes at break-neck speed. I started this blog with Blogger.com till my needs outgrew the limited Blogger engine so I moved it to a WordPress blogging platform.

In the beginning of my WordPress blogging days, I wanted to try out all the different plugins to enhance my blog. I was tempted to add all these cute little buttons to “add my feed to Yahoo, MSN, Google” etc but I didn’t understand how it could help me increase my web site traffic. During my blogger.com days, I even put up a lot of “badges” of the blog directories I belonged to.
As you can see in my blog, there isn’t any “Add feed” or “blog directory badges” anymore. What I have right now is simply 2 links at the footer to my blog rss feed and my forum rss feed. I removed all of them because they are rather ugly, confusing, take up a lot of space, and because I now have FeedBurner to replace them.
Introducing FeedBurner…

FeedBurner isn’t new at all. I ignored it for a long time because I didn’t quite understand how it could benefit me. I used to think “Why do I need FeedBurner when my blog generates an RSS feed for me automatically?”.

Now I know better.

FeedBurner adds a lot of useful bells and whistles to my blog’s RSS feed that WordPress simply cannot do. Now I am able to track the number of people subscribing to my feed, limit the number of characters per feed item, and have my own FeedBurner feed page.

Take a look at some of my RSS feeds. Click on them and you will see a nice FeedBurner page with all those “add feed” buttons and a list of compatible RSS readers. The old feed was simply a XML file and if you clicked on it with your browser, you would see a bunch of meaningless text.

• Vincent Rich’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Vincent Rich’s Interent Marketing Forum

All my RSS feeds are now processed through FeedBurner. I think of FeedBurner as clothes for my “naked” RSS feeds. FeedBurner makes my RSS feeds look good. I highly recommend you to use FeedBurner if you have a blog. Take an hour or so to configure it at your blog. It’s well worth the effort.

Introducing Tagging…

Before I learnt about Technorati tags, the only tag I knew about in the internet world were HTML tags. Technorati tags are similar to HTML tags but they serve a unique purpose.

See those links at the bottom of this post after the words “Tagged As”? Those are my Technorati tags. I am very new at this and I think they are supposed to add this blog post’s link to a Technorati tag page.

WordPress has a built-in pinging tool that activates after you create a blog entry. Technorati.com is one of my ping URLs and after I ping them, they should visit this blog post and see my Technorati tags.

I actually hid my tags in my source code. Simply view the source and you will see some tags at the end of this blog post’s content. I am not sure if this will work with Technorati because I hid them from human eyes but I am sure a machine will be able to read it. The tags are still part of my RSS feed so I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll have to wait and see.

Introducing Social Bookmarking…

I personally haven’t used these sites. You can bookmark this blog post at some of these social bookmarking sites by clicking on the square icons at the end of this post. I am not sure how these bookmarks will help my blog, I suppose they will help me get some incoming links to my blog when you bookmark this post.

Tagged As: Blogging, feedburner, internet+marketing, rss, tag+and+ping, tagging, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | 3 Comments »