In order to get traffic, you need publicity. Speaking of publicity, the best thing that could happen to your blog is to get mentioned in a major newspaper, magazine, or an extremely popular website. Just one link to your blog from the New York Times, CNN, or making the front page of Digg could result in a major traffic and search engine boost. Of course, if you get mentioned in Digg, your website will probably become inaccessible because of the sudden burst of resulting bandwidth consumption. That aside, you could do worse than get your blog noticed by the big guys.

OK, you're writing exceptional content, we've covered that. How are those journalists going to notice your blog? They are very busy folks who browse a huge number of articles daily in order to find the one or two they will cover in their next Sunday's column. For this, they use an RSS reader. RSS stands for, among many things, Really Simple Syndication, and it provides a means for people to subscribe to a website's "feed", meaning that their reader program will alert them when one of their favorite websites has produced new content.

The good news is that Wordpress and the Ads Minded have already taken care of things for you. There's a handy link bottom right that lets readers subscribe to the site feed by a click of the mouse.

The even better news is that by burning your feed with FeedBurner, you will be able to publish a nice-looking feed which automatically adjusts to the requirements of the user. There are various ways of publishing a feed, including Atom, RSS and so on, and with FeedBurner you don't have to provide a link for each standard, just one link to the FeedBurner server will do.

But the coolest thing about FeedBurner is that there are various tools and special features you can use to make your blog more in tune with the times, more web2.0 if you will. These include buttons for social bookmarking, feed subscription statistics and so on.

The negative thing about FeedBurner is that, at least for me, it was really difficult at first to understand what it is exactly that they do. They don't do a very good job in explaining the advantages of the service to potential users. I'm still not entirely sure, but I know enough now to conclude that at least for the newbie blogger, it's worth publishing your feed with FeedBurner, if only for the little buttons (chicklets as they call them) and feed statistics that they provide.

So now I'm going to burn Innerblogger.com with FeedBurner and take you through the steps of the procedure in case you want to do the same. These steps, again, apply to Wordpress and specifically the Ads Minded Theme.

First, sign up at FeedBurner. Enter your blog URL and follow the instructions to register an account. If in doubt, just choose the default options, such as RSS 2.0 feed. When you are presented with the option of clickthrough statistics, do as you please but I chose not to activate it because I don't fully understand what it means for my blog to have the links directed through FeedBurner. Besides, you can always activate the features later.

When it says your feed is ready, click on the Publicize tab. Select the Friendly Graphic link, choose the smaller of the standard feed icons, and scroll down for the code. Copy the code to your clipboard.

Next, go to your Wordpress Theme Editor and edit the Ads Minded Theme. Choose to edit index.php first. Paste the code to incorporate it to the title code - look at the image below for the location. Note that you should remove the

and

from the start and beginning of the code you just pasted. Once you've done for the index.php, do the same for single.php, look at the picture below for details. Check that you code looks like this after the paste (remember that you can always check my complete working code on the Pages section in the sidebar):

The red area is the pasted code, please note the little green box where you should add a couple of spaces in your code

That's it! Just update the files, then reload your blog and admire the new cool RSS icon that's sitting right next to your post titles, both on the main index page and on every single post page.

Next, we're going to remove the old RSS links from the sidebar. Now I'm taking a little break though, check back soon

In Wordpress Theme Editor, edit sidebar.php. Look at the picture below: Delete the highlighted code and update the file. Now the sidebar has been cleaned up from the redundant RSS feed links (you'll also note that I removed the See All Posts link as well, just because I felt it had to go)