Convert your Subscribers to Feedburner

It doesn’t mean that if your Feedburner chicklet counter is stuck at zero, you don’t have RSS subscribers. If you are using WordPress, you will notice that there are three versions of your RSS feeds for auto-discovery — RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3.

When you added your Feedburner feeds, it doesn’t automatically count all other who have already subscribed previously. There are ways to fix this real quick:

First, you need to change your meta data for the RSS feeds. Go to your theme template and look for the header file (sometimes it’s the single.php and the index.php files) and you will see a snippet of code like this:

Replace that variable in the HREF tag to your Feedburner URL as such:

This step will ensure that any future subscribers get your Feedburner feeds and not the WP defaults.

Now if you want to move your old subscribers to your new Feedburner feeds, you will need to edit your accounts .htaccess. This file can be found inside your root folder (usually public_html). However, you may not be able to see them thru FTP so you need to use your Control Panel’s (cPanel) File Manager to edit that.

Add this line of code:

Note: Change the ones in bold to your own Feedburner URL.

If you are using a custom permalink structure, you might see tons of codes in there and get confused. Don’t be. Just look for the line on the top part which says “RewriteEngine on” and paste the rest of the code just below it.

That’s it, you’re done. You should bee seeing your Feedburner counter hitting some digits anytime soon.