Syndicating your content is pretty important these days. My students often get overwhelmed when I tell them all the places they need to submit their blog to including social bookmarking sites, activerain, carnivals… the list goes on and on.
Things can get more complicated when you try to market your blog on and offline, and you can quickly get burned out with manually adding your blog to hundreds of different places.
Well, here’s an easy way to get your blog out to everyone that you converse with on a day to day basis through email. A banner in your email signature that shows people your most recent posts, and provides them with a link to the blog itself.
First, you should have a feedburner account. If you don’t, get one.
Second, login and navigate to Publicize, then Headline Animator
Then, choose a clickthrough URL. By default, this will be your feedburner RSS feed, but I recommend changing it to your blog URL. You can also choose a theme, and customize it however you like.
Once you have customized it to your liking, click activate, and you will have a nice looking banner that rotates with your most recent posts.
At that point, you have a number of options. Feedburner will provide you the code to post the banner on blogger, typepad, wordpress, and a number of different email platforms. It works well for most applications because it simply renders the banner as a graphic, and so any email program that lets you add html to your signature will work.
Alas, there is no support for html in gmail which is my email client of choice. But there are a few work arounds.
Adding a banner feed like this to your email is a great way to build awareness of your blog. There are a number of other ideas to create calls to action within your email, like providing a link for people to subscribe to the blog via email, or an RSS of the most recent comments on the blog. The possibilities are endless. Be creative, and drive traffic to your blog!!
Related posts:
- The Publisher’s Guide to Understanding RSS
- Do You Ping Your Blogs?
- Daily Junk Email in the Life of a Blogger
- Google Launches New Blogger Friendly Search Service
- SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #15
October 17th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
This is great, Justin!
I feel like I have my own mentor. heh.
Take care and keep teaching us more!
October 17th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Great Idea, thanks for sharing! I love your blog keep up the great work.
October 18th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Justin - This is great information. I actually had started using feedburner on my Active Rain blog a few weeks ago. I give the option to recieve the blog in a feed or email. I love the email option which feedburner makes possible.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Justin, thank you for sharing this NEW info to all of us. I have so much homework to do with my website. ok, little by little. have a productive week and weekend. lupe from burbank ca
November 3rd, 2007 at 3:11 am
Thanks Justin, for the Headline Animator Tip. I placed in my Microsoft Outlook email but I have this Grab this animation text under the banner. Anyway to get rid of that? Otherwise, it’s working!!
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Thanks, Justin. I see I need to play around with the width and such to get it to fit just right into my TypePad blog but it works great as a signature for Outlook 2003. You da man!
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
PS to Port Orange Juice…..
There is a little check box when you’re adding the Animator about the Grab This and the default is checked. If you uncheck the box it’ll get rid of the Grab This link.
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Thanks got rid of the Grab This link!!!
November 8th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Another great way to build awareness to a blog. Keep the ideas coming.
November 15th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
J.
Thank you, I can’t wait to implement this, I am a big fan of your posts and a newer re blogger! With people like you to read fill my head with teckie sugar plums I will be at highspeed soon :>)
November 18th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Great post with very useful information. Thanks.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Wow, very cool I am going to have to check into doing this with my blog as well. I think this would be great.
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:24 am
I usually breeze through blogs pretty quickly, looking only for those that highly interest me. i have to say that your is an excellent one. Good tips, especially the FeedBurner Email Tip. What a great way to build a list (very important), and keep your fans up to date on the news.
The Rollin Real Estate Tour 12 Months, 10 Cities, 1 Mission
I’ve implemented the FeedBurner Tool into my site. Check it out and let me know your thoughts…You’ll find the site quite interesting
November 29th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Thanks for the tip. I think it would be nice to have, but as someone said in the comments on Digg, it might become annoying if everyone added their blogs to their emails.
It is a great idea, though!