Business Blog Marketing Booster Part 1 - Feedburner

So you've heard marketers understand how blogs and blogging can grow your business. Now what? Well, besides creating a business blog and blogging at least twice a week, there are number of other things you can do to further improve your business for blogging. In this series of 'plain-English' articles, I'd like to share 5 powerful tools and techniques to really improve your business blogging strategy.

Part 1 - Feedburner

When you create a blog, it will almost certainly have created a 'feed', which means that every time you post, subscribers to your feed will automatically receive the new content. Feedburner is a 'service of power management' and there are several reasons why you should set up with one of their free accounts.

One reason is that Feedburner does subscribe to feeds much easier - especially important if your target market is not particularly expert blog. If you've ever clicked on a 'subscribe to this blog' link and was given either a download prompt or been served a page of text unintelligble, then you understand how this confused and confusing (actually) on request may be.

Feedburner does an alternative flight to your feed through their servers. Why does that make a difference? Because when readers click on the Feedburner link managed 'Join', are taken to a page that clearly explains what to do next, making the process quite a bit 'less fear and therefore much more likely that they will complete the process.

Feedburner also allows you to monitor the numbers of subscribers and to add something called 'FeedFlare'. This means that you can add a link to 'subscribe' at the end of every post you ever write. It also adds an 'e-mail to a friend' link so that readers who find the interest charge can just as easily promote your blog to their friends and colleagues - the last word of mouth marketing tool.

Once you got your account set up, you can insert a 'feed icon' to your blog instead of a plain text link. This little orange and white square is the universally recognized icon of a feed which means that people can quickly see where to click to grab your feed. Feel free to use the unique icon 'subscribe' I created for my blog on your blog. Just 'right click' on image and save it on your computer ready to put on your blog. Exactly how you do this depends on what you use the platform, TypePad users simply need to create a new typelist the link to view the image in this post might help to do this.

It 's also a good idea to provide your visitors with an explanation of their options for reading (receiving) your feeds via a sort of feed reader or aggregator. You can do this by creating your personal message and a link to it or to find an explanation elsewhere in relation to that. It could also provide a link to your favorite feed reader - in other words, you should do everything in its power to demystify blogging, for you and your potential customers and Feedburner will help you do.

Claire Raikes. .......