The Edublogger

Tips, tricks, ideas and help with using web 2.0 technologies and edublogs

How To Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog

February 6th, 2008 · 12 Comments
Blogging How To · Blogging Tips

In our last post we showed how to add a RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog to make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog and so that you could analyse your blog subscriptions e.g. number of subscribers, Feed Readers they use. This post will show how you can add an email subscription to your blog.

Reason For Adding Email Subscription to Your Blog

However not every reader likes to use RSS, some readers prefer to receive latest posts from blogs using email subscription. This is why you will often see both email subscription and RSS feed options on blogs; bloggers are doing this to cater to the different preferences of their readers.

Readers simply enter their email address and then click on “Subscribe”. They then receive an email notifying when new posts or information have been added to the blog.

There are two main options you can use to add an email subscription to your Eublogs blog:

  1. Drag Email Subscription Widget onto your sidebar (here is more information about using Widgets)
  2. Create and add an email subscription using Feedburner for your blog.

These two options work very differently:

  • Edublogs Email Subscription Widget - emails your reader immediately that a new post has been added to your blog. However to read the post your reader will need to click on a link which takes them to the post on your blog.
  • Feedburner Email Subscription - emails your entire post to your readers on the day after it has been uploaded to your blog i.e. they can read the entire post as an email rather than following the link. Please note images are not displayed in the email. Advantages of Feedburner includes details of your subscribers e.g. number of email subscribers, their email addresses

Which ever email subscription you use make sure you subscribe to your blog using it; so you know what your posts look like when people receive them via email. Normally

Creating An Email Subscription For Your Blog Using Feedburner

Once you have created and added an RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog ( here are the instructions on how to add a RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog) the next step is to set up your email subscription with feedburner (follow the instructions in the diagram below).

Diagram of how to set up email subscription

Adding Your Feedburner Email Subscription To Your Blog

The code for your Feedburner email subscription is located under your Publicize tab. You need to add this to a text widget in your sidebar (follow the instructions in the diagram below).

emailfeedburnerwidget.jpg

FINAL THOUGHT

Please let us know how you go adding an email subscription to your blog; especially if you have additional questions on using it.

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

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12 responses so far ↓

  • 1 avatar   » Professional Tips For How To Increase Blog Subscribers BlogMaestro | Blog Marketing Get Your Voice Heard: // Feb 6, 2008 at 11:47 am

    […] The Edublogger has a detailed post about “How to Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog” […]

  • 2 avatar   madameenglish // Feb 6, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    Thank you. I found this site to be of great help. I am still searching how to be informed if users listed as contributors post on their sites.

  • 3 avatar   Sue Waters // Feb 6, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    Sorry Madam English I not quite sure I understand your question. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

  • 4 avatar   cthompson // Feb 6, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    Thanks for all these great tips; my blog is looking better and better! Will you post on how to add a comment feed?

  • 5 avatar   Susan // Feb 7, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Hi,

    Hope you don’t mind me using your site. Not sure what “edublogs” are, I’m just have a little blog on Blogger. But this is more great info. I forgot to even check to see if anyone was subscribed to my RSS feed, until just re-reading your last post. And I was excited to see a few people had!

    I might try this “subscribe by email” but which do method do you think is better?

    Also thanks for leaving a comment on my site,
    not to be corny but I was excited by that!

  • 6 avatar   pinkpanther23 // Feb 7, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    hi i’m new at this and well i would like to everybody to look at my site and make some comments on some of the topics that i have posted on my wall. it’s called PINK LOVERS!!! stop bye and leave a comment for me and others to read. thanks.
    -pinkpanther23@PINK LOVERS!!!-

  • 7 avatar   Darren Draper // Feb 8, 2008 at 10:25 am

    So many great tips, Sue! Too bad they’re all Wordpress specific.

    With all due respect to your sponsor, are you ever planning on doing a few of these great tutorials on platforms other than Wordpress?

    Surely there are a few great edublogs out there that are built on other platforms.

  • 8 avatar   Sue Waters // Feb 8, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    Hi Claire - yes definitely. I will add how to add a comment feed to the to-do-list.

    Susan - We are happy that any type of blogger, using any blogging platform, gains from using our site. As for leaving a comment I’m always happy to support other bloggers. In terms of Subscribe by RSS or email - ideally you should add both to your site. Most readers will subscribe by RSS using a Feed Reader like Google Reader however a few prefer to use email. If you don’t have an email subscription option than those that prefer email may not subscribe to your site.

    Hi Darren - yes at the moment the tips are more target at Wordpress platform. Obviously when posts move onto using blogging students and tips for being a more effective blogger they will be more generic. However if you read my post on adding Feedburner feed to your blog you will see that I have included the link for additional steps for other blogging platforms. And you may not realise this but quite a few bloggers using other blogging platforms are finding these tips helpful. Take for example Susan from above. She is using Blogger and this information on Feedburner helped her work out how to add the feed and email subscription to her site.

  • 9 avatar   Mr. Peterson // Mar 4, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    I am a 3rd grade teacher and have set up a blog for my students to be able to go in and submit comments and I would like to give small writing assignments on there as well, however… I can’t figure out how to allow them to leave comments and replies to my blogs.

    Each time they go in, the student has to put in their name, their email address and a some kind of spam protection password (???) and then do the code thingy (enter the word you see below–that thing).

    Is there anyway they can just go in and make a username and a password and then that’s it? Most 3rd graders don’t have an email address, and I don’t feel like going into yahoo.com and making 21 fake email addresses each year for my class.

    Is this possible? What I’d like is each student to go in… pick a username… pick a password… and then only have to enter that in to post a comment.

    Please help! Thank you… I love this blog site.

  • 10 avatar   Redirecting Your Blog Feed To Feedburner | The Edublogger // Mar 12, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    […] making it easier for readers to subscribe to your blog using RSS or email, using a Feedburner feed means you can analyse your subscribers e.g. number of subscribers, and […]

  • 11 avatar   jaderiordan // May 1, 2008 at 1:12 am

    i think that making a blog is good for learning and getting your way around the internet and to learn how to use it is a nother good reson.

  • 12 avatar   mert // May 14, 2008 at 9:53 am

    Hi Susan!
    Is it possible to check the number of subscribers to my blog if I use the Email Subscription widget?

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