Don’t leave your WP greet box plugin undone

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I often get frustrated when I find an excellent blog I want to subscribe to, only to find the RSS button or link leads to the bookmarking option. I hate bookmarking blogs, as it requires me to make an effort to click on my bookmarking tab, which I am obviously not going to do on a regular basis.

refers to WP.org

The default bookmarking feed is YourBlogURL/feed/rss, so I suggest this needs to be changed to a proper RSS feed via Google Feedburner (if you want to learn how to create a Feedburner RSS URL, then read the beginning of this e-course ‘Setting up a RSS feed’) which give the subscriber a choice of how they want to receive new posts – through a reader page or cookie on their Google Homepage. There I can glance over each day to see if any new posts have been published, keeping me in touch with what my fellow bloggers have been up to!

What is even more frustrating is when I come across WP Greet Boxes that are still in default mode, eg only leading to the bookmarking option. I, of course, have fully optimised my WP Greet Box (see the bottom of this post), so this post is to show you how to do the same.

Here is an unoptimised WP Greet Box:

And if you click on the link, you get the bookmarking option:

Location in 'Settings'

So after you’ve installed and activated your WP Greet Box plugin, you need to go into the settings of your WP Greet Box plugin to optimise it. Find its link in ‘Settings’ on the left hand sidebar:

Click on the link to go to the WP Greet Box page:

Here you have a complete list of all the different social media platforms your WP Greet Box will work in (there is a much more extensive list than shown here). You will need your RSS URL and other feed and social networking URLs at your disposal, as each entry can be optimised according to its nature.

Let’s concentrate on the default option at the top:

You can see I have optimised it, compared to the example at the beginning of this post. To do this, click on ‘Edit’ at the top right:

The simplest thing you can do is to change the Greeting Icon Link to your Feedburner RSS URL, so the subscriber will have more options to subscribe to your blog.

And if you’re feeling more adventurous, why not change the Greeting message to something more personal, including your Feedburner RSS URL within it. It requires only simple HTML, and can make all the difference to the subscriber.

Once you’ve finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button, and then start optimising the next entry. It can take a bit of time, but let me assure you it is worth it!

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Alice

Alice Elliott is passionate about blogging and helping others to blog. She created the Fairy Blog Mother brand to train, explain and create awareness of blogs using ordinary, everyday language in a highly visual format, especially developed for non-technical would-be bloggers.

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