Many blog follower subscribe to several, if not tens (or even hundreds) of blogs. Subscriptions can be done via RSS reader or through email. I highly recommend offering RSS via email. Google’s Feedburner is a free service (albeit with some bugs) that you can use to deliver your blog’s latest posts direct to subscriber email boxes.
1. To enable Email Subscriptions through Feedburner, log in to your Feedburner account and hit the Publicize tab.
2. Next, click on “Email Subscriptions” under the Services on the left.
3. The first page – Subscription Management – provides you with subscription form code that you can past onto your blog or into your sidebars to create an email sign-up box.
4. The next tab – Communication Preferences – allows you to customize your confirmation email. This is the email the new subscribers will receive after they first sign-up to confirm their subscription.
5. The third tab – Email Branding – allows you to customize and brand your emails. On this page you can change fonts, colors, and font-sizes. You can also add a logo to your emails.
I strongly recommend customizing the “Email Subject/Title” to include your latest post title. You can do this by adding “${latestItemTitle}” to the title.
In addition, you can customize the title if you have 2 or more items in your email feed. Feedburner provides you with the following tips:
With two or more items in the update, ${n} shows the total number of items, and ${m} shows the number of items beyond the latest.
Examples
The WiC Project: ${latestItemTitle}
The WiC Project: “${latestItemTitle}” plus ${m} more
The WiC Project (in this message: ${n} new items)
6. After customizing your emails, you will want to click on the final tab – Delivery Options – to specify when you want your email delivered. Play around with the different times for your emails to be sent and find the best time for your readers (or when the most people click through or read your items.)
Leave a Reply