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Increasing Your Blog Readership Using FeedBurner and Email Signatures

Posted on February 23, 2007

I agree with Robert Cringely, FeedBurner is going places.

I called FeedBurner today to ask about some solutions to support corporate blogging and spoke with Jake Parrillo from the Business Development Team.  We drifted to talking about blogs in general and about ways to generate traffic to a blog.  He told me about a free FeedBurner service called Headline Animator, which according to FeedBurner allows you to:

Create and customize an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML.

The result will look similar to this:

Jake told me that he uses the Headline Animator to spread the word about his blog by including the banner in his email signature.  Outstanding!  He says it’s really helped to increase readership.

Email signatures are just one idea; you can of course place the banner anywhere.

Setting it up is really easy.  (See the Headline Animator Overview and FAQ for more details):

1. Set up a FeedBurner account
2. Burn your RSS feed
3. Click on the Publicize tab
4. Click Headline Animator
5. Configure the theme (controls the size and colors of the banner; there’s an “Email Signature” theme) and the Title
6. Click Activate
7. Copy the resulting snippet of HTML and paste it anywhere you like.

I just configured a Headline Animator banner for my blog’s RSS feed and included it in my Yahoo email account’s signature.

Thanks Jake!!

p.s.  Too bad there haven’t been too many tech IPOs lately, I’d love to get in on this one.

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