FeedBurner and Blog Promotion
Today I installed Wordpress FeedBurner plugin to add some flare to my feed. And learned a great lesson about blog promotion while doing it!
This plugin lets you redirect and track all your feeds through Feedburner. It even allows you to place AdSense ads on your feed items, if you have enough readers. One of the best things about FeedBurner is their FeedFlare feature. It lets you add some interactivity to your feed. When you install FeedFlare, small links appear on your feed where you can add the post to Delicious, e-mail it to a friend and do some other nifty things. You also can add these features to your site. FeedFlare provides a script for your blog template. After adding a script, all the above mentioned features can be added to your blog posts.
I did that here, on my blog, and you can see it on the main page and on a single post pages, if they appear on the main page. However, since Diary does not have its separate feed yet, it does not work on Diary posts.
While working with this plugin today, I also learned a valuable lesson. Even if you are a beginner, you can find good opportunities to promote your blog, when your are working on it’s customization. The idea about the promotion opportunity came when I read this post by Darren Rowse.
For those who don’t know, Darren is one of the most famous and successful ProBloggers, now earning six figures from blogging. He’s been at it for more then 3 years now. And he has been using FeedBurner for a long time. But he DID NOT KNOW ABOUT FEEDBURNER PLUGIN until yesterday. That is, until he was pinged by Rachel from Cre8ed Design about the post she had written on this plugin.
“So where’s the lesson?” you may ask. Here it is:
I could have written the post about this plugin on Wednesday, when I started this blog! I’ve been using FeedBurner plugin since I started my first blog- Blogdotes. And I could have pinged Darren about it, or e-mailed him, or left a comment on some of his posts. Now, Rachel already knows Darren and has designed his blog, so she has instantly gotten his attention. And there’s no guarantee that Darren would have read my e-mail or paid attention to my comments on his blog. But you never know. And, I think, that IF Darren would have read my post, he probably would have liked it. And he probably would have put a link to the post on his blog and that would have given some great publicity to Beginner’s Blog.
So the takeaway from all this is the following:
When you’re are working to customize your blog, adding themes, plugins or some clever hacks to your site, write it down somewhere. Maybe make a post on your blog, like I do with my Diary, about this great feature or plugin you just installed. And, if you see that some other bloggers do not use this feature, and you think that it might be useful to them, don’t be shy. Inform them about it through trackbacks, comments or direct e-mail. It doesn’t cost you a dime. They might not pay attention to you. So what? You still have a post on your blog. You also have a comment on their blog with a link to you that someone else might click. But if they read and like your suggestions, great publicity opportunities might be just around the corner.
I believe there are lots of such opportunities, even for beginners. I found one within the first 10 days of blogging (btw, it was also related to FeedBurner). I was subscribing to Eric Giguere’s newsletter on Google tips. In one edition he talked how to use Google Base to promote your blog. I tried his tip and, while working on it, discovered that I can do it better using FeedBurner feeds. I did not have this blog then, and my only blog was humor related, so I could not post anything there. I put all the suggestions in an e-mail, saying that if he liked the suggestions, he can put them into his next newsletter. And he did it, with a reference to my blog. My AdSense earnings for the day the newsletter was published are the highest to date. Now, I was doing some paid promotion that day, so I can not purely attribute them to Eric. But I was doing similar promotions before, and the earnings were at least 30% lower. (We are talking only about $.50 here, but still, it was very inspiring when I earned almost $2 in a day).
And what about today? Did I already miss this great opportunity? Well, I missed the best part of it, but I’m still pinging both Daren’s and Rachel’s posts with a trackback, and a link to this post may appear in their comment sections anyway. What happens later is beyond my control 
