Blogger to WordPress Tutorial: Update Your RSS Feed

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a brand new tutorial for you, and this one is for those that are transferring their Blogger blog to WordPress. One of the very first things … Scratch that, THE VERY FIRST THING you should do after you transfer your domain to your new self-hosted WordPress blog is to update your Feedburner feed to the new site.

It’s a critical step!!!!

This is so that your established followers will follow your new blog as opposed to getting left behind, still following your old blogspot blog while you’re busy publishing posts via WordPress. Cuz that would be bad. I mean, you don’t want to have to re-gain those followers, right?

Okay, so first of all, I’m going to assume that you have your feed burned on Feedburner, right? If you’re not sure how to do this, then read my How to Claim Your RSS Feed tutorial first. Cuz otherwise, this tutorial is pointless.

Ready, set, go:

1. From your Blogger dashboard, click on My Account at the top of the page.

2. Then, find the Feedburner link on your account page & click on it. It should be under the My Products section. (If you have just recently claimed your feed, the link might not show up yet – blame Google for the delay. If that’s the case, go to Feedburner.com, and log into your account that way.)

3. From there, click on the name of the feed you want to update.

4. You will be directed to your feed’s account page, where you will click on “Edit Feed Details” located just under your blog’s name in bold.

5. On the Edit Feed Details Page, there are 3 sections → the Feed Title, the Original Feed, and the Feed Address.

6. Now, before you go any further, you definitely need to STOP and write down the information that is currently there under Original Feed and Feed Address (you’ll need this later) :

Original Feed:

Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/

7. Okay, now update the Original Feed. Replace it with:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/feed/atom

*Obviously, use your own domain name for the part in red.

8. Uber-important → Do NOT change the Feed Address no matter what, even if it includes the word “blogspot.” Capiche?

9. Then click “Save Feed Details.” Voila!

10. One final step: Be sure to install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin (recommended by the peeps behind Feedburner) to direct all of your feeds to Feedburner. Once the plugin is installed on your WordPress blog, go to Settings  → Feedburner Feedsmith → Main Feed → enter your Feed Address (that you wrote down in step 6) →  Save.

Also, depending on your theme, you can (and should) direct your Feedburner feed in the appropriate area. For Thesis theme users, that would be under Thesis →  Site Options →  in Document Head section → under Syndication/Feed URL  → Type in your Feedburner address (from Step 6) → Big Ass Save Button.

And this should go without saying, but please place a subscribe link on your new site, preferably one with high visibility. I mean, you went through all this trouble to keep your existing followers, so let’s make it easy for potential new subscribers to find it, right?

Thanks for stopping by, and stay tuned for more Blogger to WordPress tutorials … coming soon!