Quick RSS/Feedburner tip to increase your subscriber counts…

Increase your blog subscribers

Here’s a quick tip if you run a Wordpress blog or are a blogger – you probably knows what Feedburner is….if you don’t and you’re blogging in any serious way then you should so go and Google “feedburner” right now and learn about it!

One thing that really gets me is when bloggers don’t setup a redirect of their /feed or /rss URL to Feedburner – not only does this annoy me and make me have to find your Feedburner url but its probably causing some subscriber bleed-off where they’re actually subscribed to the /feed URL instead of Feedburner. Sure not a huge issue but your subscriber counts will be off and you’ll have less control over what these subscribers see.

So to fix it you could mess around with redirects in .htaccess or you could simply install and configure the FD Feedburner plugin for Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/) which will autoredirect your rss URLs on your website across to your Feedburner URL – that will make me happier when I’m trying to subscribe to your feed and will ensure subscribers are subscribed to the correct URL and you subscriber numbers will be higher.

We’ve recommend this to several bloggers who’ve seen Feedburner subscriber counts jump by 100s in some cases:

 To test whether your site is already redirecting to your Feedburner feed simply load up www.yourdomain.com/rss and if its setup correctly you should be automatically redirected to Feedburner. If not, then add the plugin! If you’re not on Wordpress but using another blogging platform then its worth checking whether your platform supports redirection too.

Bonus Tip:
While you’re messing around with plugins, why not setup Yoast RSS footer plugin (http://yoast.com/wordpress/rss-footer/) or the RSS footer options in the Yoast SEO for Wordpress plugin for potential free backlinks from sites scraping your feed.

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