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Making a del.icio.us blog with FeedBurner
Thursday, 24 January 2008 — by Wayne Smallman
As a seasoned ‘blogger, you’ve already got yourself a Google FeedBurner account, right? Hidden within could be a treasure trove of del.icio.us delights, waiting to be served up to your feed readers…
Knowing what to write about is an every day challenge for most ‘bloggers. Not being psychic, we can’t know for sure what out audience wants — or can we?
Feed your subscribers — serving up the right content
I’ve set my FeedBurner account up so that my del.icio.us bookmarks are part of my feed. It’s a standard feature of FeedBurner:
- Sign into to your FeedBurner account and click on the feed title.
- Click on the “Optimize” tab at the top.
- Click on “Link Splicer” menu item down the left.
- Select “del.icio.us” from the “Link service” options.
- Enter your account username.
- Click the “Save” button.
From now on, you’ll see your del.icio.us bookmarks appear in your feed along side your own articles.
Now, here’s where it gets really interesting — after a while, you’ll notice that your subscribers will read certain articles more than others.
That is your cue. Still within FeedBurner:
- Click on the “Analyze” tab at the top.
- Click on the “Item Use” menu item down the left.
- To the middle of the page, take note of the number of Views and Clicks for the articles under Item Popularity.
- Take those top articles as themes and write around them.
Your subscribers are worth their weight in gold, so you must treat them with care. They are your super advocates, and by appealing to their tastes in a very specific way, you’re giving them more of the stuff they like.
However, this isn’t me telling you to abandon the topics that interest you. Oh no, or why else would you have subscribers in the first place?
Here’s me suggesting you make use of an invaluable resource, maybe helping you keep your subscribers sweet with a del.icio.us feed…
Recommended reading
« The future of Social Networks — The ideal Home Page design »
I dunno Wayne. I can see several benefits, from the reader and blogger viewpoints, but when I subscribe to a blog’s newsfeed I want to read the content from that blog rather than follow links to what the blogger is flagging elsewhere, especially if the blogger is then going to write their own post at a later date based on which of those tasty morsels they found turn out to be most popular. I’m sure other people will have the exact opposite view in that they’ll prefer to read the del.icio.us morsels and ignore the actual blog posts
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