I don't know if this topic has been covered or not yet, but I just set it up over the last day or so, and I was so excited that it actually worked that I had to share!
Follow the steps below to set it up for yourself with your own blog.
- Know your Active Rain blog URL...for example, mine is: http://activerain.com/blogs/the10hourva
- Go to Feedburner.com and sign up for an account.
- Create a new feed...this is where you paste in your Active Rain blog URL from #1. Click Next
- A little screen pops up with the Feed Title and the new feed URL - you can change the title and the ending on the Feed URL if you like. Once done, click on Activate Feed.
- Another little screen pops up and gives you you a link for you to give to people to subscribe to your blog feed...keep that handy as it's good to use in email signatures, use with button graphics to make a "subscribe now" button, etc... Click Next. Oh, and FYI, my link is: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=2668598&loc=en_US
- On this screen, clicking anything is optional...read through and decide for yourself, then click Next. (I just checked the Clickthroughs box)
- Now you've got a screen with a bunch of tabs towards the top. Click on the one that says "Publicize".
- Go down towards the bottom 1/3 of the screen where it says "Boost Your Cross-Promotion Potential" and click on BuzzBoost.
- Now there are some settings here that are personal preference. Number of Feeds to display (I selected "all"), you can change the title, just go on down the page and make the selections...I selected Full HTML for "Display Item Content". I didn't change anything else on this page...just click ACTIVATE.
- Copy the script code that shows up on this page and paste it into the html on the page of your website that you want it to show up on. That's it! You're done! If you want to see what it looks like, you can see it on my Real Estate Virtual Assistant Blog called The 10 Hour VA
Best of luck to you...feel free to email me if you cannot figure out how to set it up, I'll help if I can. (Please allow up to 24 hours for a response from me.)
AFTER NOTE: Todd Clark was kind enough to comment and remind us all that we should subscribe to our own blogs via email as well so that we know what our subscribers are seeing. Here's a link to his post with more on that subject.
ANOTHER AFTER NOTE: I noticed tonight that when I was reading my AR blog on my website, that the individual post links weren't working. After researching all over the Internet and not finding a solution, I decided to try using the Atom feed instead of the RSS feed, and for whatever reason, that solved the problem! If you find you're having the same problem, just log into Feedburner and "edit feed details" on that feed by pasting in the new feed URL that ends in /atom (you can really just go replace the /rss on the end of your feed with /atom) - make sure you save the feed changes, once you do that it should work fine!
FINAL AFTER NOTE: A couple of you wonderful people who commented were concerned about what importing your blog into your website would do to your search engine results. I contacted Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings (www.HighRankings.com), who is well known with web developers for her intelligence and insight when it comes to all things SEO, and she had this to say about the "Members Only" posts: "...don’t worry about it. The search engines aren’t members so they don’t even know the original content exists. They will only see the other version." And this to say about all other posts: "It would still not really be a problem. Google would just choose which version to show in their search results." Thanks, Jill!!!
Comments (103)Subscribe to CommentsComment