How to Add a Feedburner FeedFlare to a Blogger Feed

If you have already burned the feed of your Blogger (Blogspot) blog at Feedburner you can easily add a FeedFlare to the footer of the feed. FeedFlare is agreat tool that helps you to distribute your content, inform people, and create a community around your blogging activities. Adding a FeedFlare to the feed of your blog allows readers to select from a range of social bookmarking links which appear at the end of each post. FeedFlare offers its subscribers a number of easy ways to email, tag, share, and bookmark their blog content by linking them with a range of services such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Technorati, del.icio.us and Mixx.

Adding a FeedFlare to your Blogger feed is fairly easy; you only need to add a snippet of code to the template of your blog. Don´t worry, I´ll guide you through this process by providing a step by step walkthrough. Very little technical knowledge is needed, so everyone from the newbie Blogger to the most experienced Blogger should be able to do add a Feedburner FeedFlare to his or her Blogger feed in no time.

To see a FeedFlare in action this instant check out the end of each post in the Eblogger Tricks feed.

How to Add a Feed Flare to Your Blogger Feed

If you have yet to burn your Blogger feed at Feedburner please refer to my articles Blogger RSS Feeds and Why You Should Burn Them at Feedburner and How to Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner for instructions on how to burn your feed as well as benefits of burning your blog's feed at Feedburner.

1. Login to Feedburner using your Google Account. From the My Feeds page click on the link to your blog.

2. By default you will be taken to the Analyze page so you need to select the Optimize tab from the menu.

3. Select FeedFlare from the menu on the left.

4. To create a simple FeedFlare check the boxes of the options you would like. At a mininum I suggest you select email and comments count (for Blogger) in addition to StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, and Facebook.

5. Once you have selected the desired options you can change their order in the Preview/Reordering box below using drag and drop to shuffle the links around. I think it is a good idea to have comments either at the beginning or the end of the list as readers are more likely to notice them in this position.

6. Click on Activate. Do not close this window as you will be returning here.

7. In a new tab or window login to Blogger (if you are not already logged in) and navigate to Layout --> Edit HTML.

8. I suggest you back up your template as a precaution by downloading it to your computer.

9. Check the box beside Expand Widget Templates.

10. Scroll down till you find the following line of code (or press CTRL + F to bring up the toolbar and enter the following code into the search box):

11. Return to the FeedFlare page at Feedburner and select Blogger from the drop down menu at the bottom of the page to get the HTML Feedburner code. A dialog box will appear with some instructions. Copy the code found under option #1 where it says “Editing Blogger Layouts”. To copy right click your mouse and choose select all to highlight the code and then right click again and choose copy.

12. Paste the Feedburner code into your template directly below the line of code in your template you just located <div class='post-footer'>.

13. Click on Save Template.

14. Return to Feedburner. Immediately below your blog's title and just above the Analyze tab you will see two icons. Click on the RSS icon (left button) which will bring up your blog feed.

15. Scroll to the bottom of the first post and you will see your new FeedFlare in action.

FeedFlare Options

For smarter looking links you may choose to customize the appearance of your FeedFlare by tweaking the CSS.

To prevent stealing of your original content otherwise known as blog scraping or splogging you can add personal FeedFlares such as a permalink to a copyright notice and a permalink to you, the author of the blog.

In this post I have shown you how to create a Feedburner FeedFlare which appears at the bottom of each post in the feed of your Blogger blog. By adding a FeedFlare to the footer of your Blogger blog you help build an online community around your content by offering your readers a number of choices regarding how to share, link to and act on the information contained in your blog.