How to add an email subscription form to your blog

Earlier in the week, Wayne John from Southern California Web Development commented on how it would be great if you could subscribe via email to Technology Bloggers. This way you could read the latest and greatest content as an email, and then just visit the stuff that interests you to comment etc.

After a little puzzling I managed to enable FeedBurner’s email setting and add a subscribe widget to the sidebar.

Google FeedBurner LogoTo subscribe via email like many already have, please enter your email in the box on the sidebar, or even in the box below 🙂

Enter your email address to get free updates about new articles!

As this blog talks about WordPress, RSS feeds and stuff like that, I thought I might as well help other bloggers set up a similar system 🙂

What do I need for people to be able to subscribe via email?

Well first of all you need a feed. WordPress handles this nicely so that shouldn’t be too difficult! Second you need a feed manager. I use FeedBurner. It’s simple and easy to use. The problem with it at the moment is that it is really slow at updating, meaning that when I post an article at 2 in the afternoon, only 8 o’clock next morning does the feed update – for example. This isn’t a major issue for email subscription at the moment though.

How do I enable FeedBurner email subscriptions?

Click on the profile of the blog you want to enable emails for, then go to the ‘Publicize‘ tab. From here look down the sidebar and find ‘Email Subscriptions‘ – click that. You should then get a page looking a bit like the one in this picture.

Enable/Activate FeedBurner Email SubscriptionsThen click Activate!

You will then be taken to a page called ‘Subscription Management‘. Here is where you get your code! Now you can ether get the box code or get the code which links to the subscription page. I chose to have a box, but you take your pick. Add the code to your site/blog and hey presto! Test it out yourself if you like, but the code should work and your readers should now be able to subscribe to your blog via email.

Can I customise the FeedBurner code?

Yes – to a degree. I am not 100% sure what Google’s policy is on modifying the code, but I imagine they are okay with it. My default code would make Technology Bloggers ‘subscribe box’ look like this

Enter your email address: 

Delivered by FeedBurner

but my modifications make a much smother (I think so anyway) this

Enter your email address to get free updates about new articles!

Happy subscribing and happy creating readers and bloggers 🙂

9 thoughts on “How to add an email subscription form to your blog

  1. I’m shocked by how many bloggers aren’t aware that Feedburner doesn’t enable this by default. I’m more shocked by those that don’t provide this to their readers!

    For the blogs that I want to keep in touch with, I subscribe by email. It comes into my inbox, which I already process like a work queue every single day. I don’t use a reader at all. I could never work that into the way I operate for some reason.

    I think it’s awesome that you also show how to set it up, so maybe more bloggers will now enable this feature, and people like me can subscribe without having to ask them to enable this simple, yet powerful feature.

    Thanks for the recognition too!

    • Christopher (admin team)

      Great to here it helped someone Marc!

      Thanks for dropping us a comment 🙂
      Christopher – Adim Team

    • Christopher (admin team)

      Great to here, I can see it in action on your blog!

      Thanks for the comment 🙂
      Christopher – Admin Team

  2. Hi Christopher,
    Yes, the things you have told in the article will surely impress the bloggers who came with their new blogging sites. All those stuffs regarding comments and updates in the blog will really become easy.
    Thanks for such an nice article.

    • Christopher (admin team)

      You are most welcome Samantha 🙂

      Why not power your feed via FeedBurner? You can then allow people to subscribe easier and subscribe via email, as explained above.

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