How To Easily Add Subscription Buttons To Your Blog

Here's a question a reader emailed me this week regarding the addition of site feeds and site feed subscription buttons...

Can you tell me how to add a feed to my blog?

I've seen some blogs with subscribe buttons/banners with about 10 feeds on them, e.g., Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.

How do I get these buttons from Yahoo, etc., and then add them to my blog? Any ideas?

Thanks,
Stacy

Those Site Feed Buttons

Good question. It's actually very simple. And you're not really "adding a feed" to your blog - your blog already has a site feed incorporated into it. You're simply adding the means by which your readers can "subscribe" to your site feed.

Those buttons (or feed icons as they're also called) that you see on peoples' blogs are just that - the buttons that allow people to subscribe to their site feeds. And since that's important, you'll notice a few here on Aaron Cook dot Com™ as well.

For example, right below my photo area, and to the left of my Contact Me link, you'll see my main FeedBurner feed icon (this icon is provided by FeedBurner). And slightly below that you'll see four other sexy, little buttons.

Three of those buttons are provided by AddThis (highly recommended) and the other one is provided by Google. These buttons will make it easy for people to bookmark your blog and to subscribe to your site feed through a variety of different sources.

Setting Up Subscription Buttons

So how do you set these up? Easy. To get subscription buttons for your blog's site feed, and to get your feed syndicated by FeedBurner like this, just go to FeedBurner.com and set up a free FeedBurner account.

FeedBurner will give you the HTML code for the buttons and all you do is simply copy and paste that code into your blog's template or layout wherever you want the buttons to appear.

And don't forget to check out AddThis as well. It's an excellent (and free) service and I definitely recommend using it with your blog.