Not all visitors to your WordPress blog will be familiar with RSS feeds or how they work, while some other visitors just don’t want to mess with using a feed reader. RSS isn’t the only push-delivery method out there: email subscription is another great service to offer to your visitors.
First you’ll need an email subscription service that’ll send out the emails for you. The service I recommend is Feedburner. Check out my email subscription form in the sidebar to see how it looks and works.
First setup a Feedburner feed if you don’t have one already. Then follow these steps:
- Go to Feedburner.com and login
- Click “My Feeds” in the upper-left-hand corner
- Select your feed from the list
- Click the “Publicize” tab
- Click “Email Subscriptions” on the left
- Make sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”
- Copy the HTML code in the box
- Login to your WordPress blog’s administration area
- Go to the “Appearance” section (a.k.a. “Design,” “Presentation,” or “Themes” in versions prior to 2.7)
- If you’re using Widgets in your sidebar, click the “Widgets” sub-tab. Add a “Text” widget to the sidebar you want, and paste the HTML code in the configuration section. Save your changes, and that’s it!
- If you’re not using widgets, you’ll need to have basic knowledge of HTML. First click the “Editor” or “Theme Editor” subpanel, and select “Sidebar” from the list. Usually sidebar modules go between <li></li> tags; some other themes use <div>. Paste the code in your sidebar between the appropriate set of tags in the location you want, click Save, and you’re done!
Subscribe to feed
Great information !!
Thanks John – that was just what I needed to know – and really well written.
Cheers – Robin
i love it!!! i’ve been trying for so long. i tried to search for keywords…opt-in…before finally landing here. You have no idea how much you have made my day.
Thanks for your comments! Glad I could be of help.
Wow – really great directions. I have been to many sites & blogs, and I must say yours was the esiest to follow and most helpful. Thank you!
Hay thanx, it seems to be so easy for newbies.
I was looking for it and you explained it in pretty easy manner.
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that is really nice ! thanks for sharing !
I think Feed Burner is the best place to advertise you Blog with, thanks for the help about Email subscribtion, I’ve use it with my site feed
Thanks a lot for this!:) It’s just crazy how I was about to give up on my theme since I didn’t think my sidebar worked properly plus my learning curve for adding widgets was kind of slow haha Good thing I found this and my feedburner is up! Nice!
Thanks..just what i wanted.
Very useful , i just added it to my website
thnx
Thanks a lot for the tutorial.
Cheers,
Sam
Perfect. Thanks.
Hey,
thanks for pointing that out – it saved my webspace about 1.5mb for a plugin.
Thanks. I dugg it!
I’m a novice blogger, and have been fiddling with how to get a Feedburner box on my site for a while now – your post saved me more fiddling, and made the process easy as pie. Thanks!
Just what I neede to understand how to edit my WP template so that it will work (it came ready with email option, but I didn’t know how to make it mine…)
Thanks!
John:
You are a life saver. I was looking for an easy tutorial on this and you hit the spot.
PERFECT!! – that was just what I needed to know – and really well written.
Thanks Bro
Thanks John. I was looking for an easy set of instructions.
wow, thanks… that was really useful
It’s as simple as that! I have been trying for days how to make email subscription work. Thanks for this great info!
Excellent instructions! Thanks so much!
Thank you. What I was looking for. Muchas Gracias.
This is awesome!! One of the best well directed tutorial, thank you!!
thnx a lot for such a nice and easy explaination.
I echo the other comments about how perfect these instructions were. Thanks.
Can you help me!? I did this a few weeks ago and the emails going to subscribers are a day behind my current post. Any ideas?
@WaistingTime: Try logging into your Feedburner admin and adjust the “delivery time” so that it is after the time of day when you typically publish your posts. What’s probably happening is that you usually publish your posts at, for example, 9 am, but FeedBurner is set to deliver your emails at 7 am, so it waits until the next day to send them out. Try setting FeedBurner’s delivery time to something like 3 pm for example.
Excellent Post, got my email up and running in 10 min! thanks!
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excellent instructions..had it working in a few minuets
Thank you so much. I had been playing around with how to do this for way too long. Following your instructions it only took me a few minutes. Awesome.
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Thanks for the clear and simple explanation.
I know you’ve posted this over 2 years ago, but I found it through Google, and thank you! Thanks to you, I now am able to get email subscriptions through Feedburner!
For some reason when I paste the code into the WordPress text widget it deletes part of it and I’m not sure why – I should have:
Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner
but I’m getting
Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner
after I press save? Any ideas why
@Susie: Check and make sure your WordPress user account is an Administrator. If it’s not, this may be why WordPress is “filtering” the code.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I’m glad the tutorial is helpful for so many people.
I just wanted to double check because I am a little confused, I read this article in the FeedBurner help section http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78978
it says “If you’re using WordPress.com to publish your blog, you will not be able to add the subscription form for FeedBurner Email Subscriptions service to your sidebar. Drat. Double-drat”
Why does it say that?
It offers a solution “you can offer email subscriptions to your biggest fans by placing a simple “Get {Your Site Here} delivered by email” link in your WordPress.com blog sidebar instead of the standard form”. This seems to work, would you recommend doing this?
I’m new to all this and I don’t know what to make of it. I added the subscription form and it seems to work but I get errors when I check the site using http://validator.w3.org/ should I be concerned about them?
There were two main errors that cropped up:
1)there is no attribute “target”
2) document type does not allow element “input” here; missing one of “p”, “h1″, “h2″, “h3″, “h4″, “h5″, “h6″, “div”, “pre”, “address”, “fieldset”, “ins”, “del” start-tag
Look forward to hearing from you,
Thank you
Will
@Will: The FeedBurner documentation is referring to WordPress.com (the hosted service), not WordPress.org (the software). If you use self-hosted WordPress then you will be able to add the form.
Those particular validation errors aren’t a cause for concern. They shouldn’t give search engines or browsers any trouble.
Nice and easy explanation. Thanks for the tips.
They have two options one of it is typepad. But that code works just fine on WordPress!
Hi John,
thank you for the reply. FYI to get rid of the validation error I got rid of the attribute “target”, and modified “onsubmit” so that it reads:
onsubmit=”this.target=’pop’;window.open(”,’pop’,'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520′);return true;”>
Thanks
Will
Stupid question – I pasted the html code into the text widget box and all the html code appears on my website. What did I do wrong?
Thanks,
Stacy
Email Subscription is a must have for any blog to build user base.
I must have tried half a dozen searches and a whole bunch of things that didn’t work for my site.
Then I found this, followed the steps and bingo! Shiny new subscribe button in my sidebar! Thank you sooo much!
Thank you! I’m so grateful for this information. It worked seamlessly.
Thank you !! This is the only page I found that actually made sense on the first reading!!
Have done all you said and email subscription is up and running…except no one is getting emails, including me. Just trying to troubleshoot and would love some tips.
Cheers for your post, I’ve been struggling with other widgets for hours now! This really helped a lot.
hey man, thanks for this! i have searched almost a 1000 times to obtain a detailed article like this.