Customizing Email RSS Feed Titles with Feedburner

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Jan 172011
 

I have to give a big thanks to Dennis Edell who actually told me how to setup Feedburner to send out a different email subject if there are is than 1 article in the RSS feed.  So I did a little more testing and came up with a good idea to help others customize their Google Feedburner RSS Feeds for email.  If your blog has more than one article posted in a 24 hour period on some occasions but not all occasions there is a good reason to have two separate titles for your RSS feed.  If your blog always has more than 1 article every RSS update then you can use a single title to cover the many subjects, or you can actually just use a single title that shows the # of articles in the feed if you want to use 1 subject for all emails.

Here is a video tutorial on customizing your email branding options with Feedburner:

For those who want to read instead, to change your email branding options, log into your Feedburner account.

  • Click on Your Feed Name, then Publicize
  • Click on Email Subscriptions to the left
  • Click on Email Branding drop down

image thumb29 Customizing Email RSS Feed Titles with Feedburner

Here you check mark “Change Subject” when an email has 2 or more items and you get the option to set a unique subject when more than 1 article is listed in your RSS feed.

Some helpful tips and variables can be used on Feedburner.

  • ${latestItemTitle} will display the title of the latest article
  • ${n} will show total number of articles in the latest feed
  • ${m} will show number of articles after the first in the latest feed

This allows you to create custom subjects like:

Top 10 Chrome Applications from DragonBlogger.com

You would use:  {latestItemTitle} from DragonBlogger.com

Or

4 new articles published on DragonBlogger.com

which would be ${n} on DragonBlogger.com

Or

Top 10 Applications + 3 other articles on DragonBlogger.com

which would be: ${latestItemTitle} + ${m} other articles on DragonBlogger.com

These are just some suggestions to help optimize your Email RSS Subject Titles.

-Dragon Blogger


Customizing Email RSS Feed Titles with Feedburner

Justin Germino

Owner at DragonBlogger.com
Working in the IT Industry for over 13 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.
Customizing Email RSS Feed Titles with Feedburner

@dragonblogger

Technology, Gaming and Wordpress blogger who runs gadget giveaways, helps others with blogging tips, monetization, earning and more!
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Customizing Email RSS Feed Titles with Feedburner
  • http://trafficcoleman.com/ TrafficColeman

    Thanks Justin…This was very helpful…I really didn’t think this could be change..I will know now if I have more then one post going out in a given day..

    BTW..Can you can contact me on my contact page..Its very important..I need your help.

    “Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Sent you email

  • http://techsharing.net Pumama

    I didn’t know this trick :D Thanks Justin… At now, My Rss Email is stronger :)

  • http://programstomakebeats.net/ Jason

    Justin – I had actually just learned how to do this last weekend and I have been playing around with for a little, but your quick tutorial helped me learn a lot more. Thanks for letting me know about the variables I can use. I really appreciate this.

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Glad you found the video helpful.

  • http://www.hottiehair.com Crystal @ Las Vegas Hair Salons

    Ditto I didn’t know about this trick either and from the looks of my Google reader I don’t know if very many bloggers do. Excellent insight.

  • http://blazingminds.co.uk/ BlazingMinds

    I remember doing this some time back with my feedburner, it certainly lets your feedburner emails look a bit more professional ;)

  • http://www.techdaring.com/tag/android Android

    I just login to my FeedBurner account and still not found it yet. :( !

  • http://www.vergent.net jenn @ t1 service

    Yet another trick I didn’t know! You really have some great stuff on this blog! Thanks for providing written instructions in addition to the video. Videos are cool, but I can read soooo much faster than I can watch a video. . . plus I like to refer back to the instructions, which is harder to do with video. Nice work.

  • http://sjbn.co/ Saket Jajodia

    Hey! Thanks for this great info, I never knew we can do this in FeedBurner…

  • http://www.patchworkoftips.com/ Udegbunam Chukwudi@Patchwork Of Tips

    I’ll be using the first option for my feeds

  • http://enterdel.com/ Linda@enterdel

    Thank you very much, I’m looking for this trick and I found it here. I will customize my feedburner soon

  • http://thenoobdiary.com Abhineet Kumar

    Always had a confusion regarding this. Now, I can use it to full effect when I do multiple posts at a time.

  • http://www.tracyingram.com tracy ingram

    Thanks for the info, I was having trouble with this and gave up awhile back.

  • http://www.blog.web6.org Kimi@wordpress video tutorial

    Haven’t touched that feature of Feedburner, it will definitely add more “branding”.

    Thanks for the awesome video!

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Thanks for reading the article.

  • http://basicblogtips.com Ileane

    Hey Justin, there is so much to explore in the FeedBurner interface and this is a great tutorial describing all of the options. I did know about this feature but I didn’t make any changes to it #1 because I never have more than one item in my feed and #2 because I didn’t know how the different variables worked. Thanks for showing us the ropes!!

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      This helped as I switched from a 1x per day blog to having posts 2-3 times per day on as many days as I could.

  • http://www.techpraveen.com Praveen

    Wow nice tip :) I added logo and titles. My email feeds looks cool ;)

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Yeah, the logo really does help the cosmetics of the RSS email. Glad you found it helpful.

  • http://imsickof.com/ Trisi

    I’ve never given a thought to the rss email feeds. I’m glad I came across this post. I’m also going to work on a small logo to go with the emails. Dennis is a cool cat for pointing this out.

  • http://www.kloudzcomputing.com/blog/ Shree

    I had no knowledge about the Feedburner feature which allows the RSS feeds to be customized for email. Thanks for the article as well as the video.

  • http://www.armaniaftershave.com jd@armani aftershave

    Great step by step guide. Glad you put in the video aswell. Will have a go at setting this up not really explored using customizing RSS feeds for emails that much. Last time i messed it up by this time i will do exactly what you said.

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Glad you found the tutorial helpful.

  • http://www.peppervirtualassistant.com/ Axcell Van

    Thank goodness! This surely made life easier. I didn’t know one could customize an e-mail with RSS feeds. The tutorial video was very detailed and made Feedburner easier to use.

  • http://www.bookmarkingdemonguide.com/ Alex Gracian

    Thank you for sharing another very informative article. I never had any idea that customizing email rss feed would just be easy like that. The video also made it more easier. All I did was to customize my feed while watching the video. And it sure did work!

  • remy etienne lebeau

    hi all.. how can we force feedburner to just send one item or article per email?? i am having an autoblog and it does not look good to have one title for multiple articles within 1 post…appreciate your help.. thanks..

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com/ Dragon Blogger

       @remy etienne lebeau Why not just change to have custom title saying X # of new articles for you to read?  I actually don’t know how to force feedburner to only pick up the last single article.