How-To: Set Up a Feedburner Blog Subscription (Self-hosted)
I just setup a feedburner subscription for my blog so I wanted to walk you through it is fresh in my mind and becuause there are pieces to it all over the place.
1) Install Feedburner FeedSmith plugin. This plugin grabs all other RSS feeds and pulls them into your feedburner account. (Official feedburner installation instructions from Google.)
Download the plugin, then follow the instructions below to begin forwarding all WordPress feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed.Go to Widgets > Add New and search for the feedburner_feedsmith_plugin_2.3.zip on your computer. Upload and activate.To customize your new widget, go to Settings > Feedburner.Keep this tab open and open a new one.
2) Create a Feedburner Account
Go to http://feedburner.google.com/In ‘Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:’ enter your blog address. In this instance it was alyssawilliamson.com.Identify Feed Source (you will have a choice of Feed or Content Feed – choose Feed)Give your Feed a Title and Customized AddressCopy your new feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlyssaWilliamson
3) Customize your Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin
Back in Settings > Feedburner, enter the new feed into your plugin: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ AlyssaWilliamson
4) Enable Publishing of Email Updates
What’s the point of having followers if they don’t know you’ve updated your blog? These steps will allow users to subscribe and receive email updates of your blog, for free!
Go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions. Here you will have two boxes of code that you can copy and paste into your WordPress widgets area. The first code is for a subscribe form, where users actually enter their email address to subscribe – and then go through a two-part subscription process with Feeburner. The second option is a link, that the user clicks on to then add their email address.
Here are some other tips: