Enable Email Subscription with Feedburner

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:

  1. Go to Feedburner.com and login
  2. Click “My Feeds” in the upper-left-hand corner
  3. Select your feed from the list
  4. Click the “Publicize” tab
  5. Click “Email Subscriptions” on the left
  6. Make sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”
  7. Copy the HTML code in the box
  8. Login to your WordPress blog’s administration area
  9. Go to the “Appearance” section (a.k.a. “Design,” “Presentation,” or “Themes” in versions prior to 2.7)
  10. 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!
  11. 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!
Tags:
By John Lamansky | Posted in Tutorials

Did you enjoy this post? to get even more WordPress tips, news, and resources!

StumbleUpon

42 Comments

  1. Aswani
    Posted May 20, 2008 at 4:16 am | Permalink

    Great information !!

  2. Robin
    Posted June 19, 2008 at 7:16 pm | Permalink

    Thanks John – that was just what I needed to know – and really well written.

    Cheers – Robin

  3. Hanifa
    Posted June 26, 2008 at 12:23 am | Permalink

    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.

  4. John Lamansky
    Posted June 26, 2008 at 10:36 am | Permalink

    Thanks for your comments! Glad I could be of help. :-)

  5. Salim
    Posted August 2, 2008 at 6:10 pm | Permalink

    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!

  6. Jazzian
    Posted September 17, 2008 at 11:52 pm | Permalink

    Hay thanx, it seems to be so easy for newbies. :-) I was looking for it and you explained it in pretty easy manner.

  7. Nome
    Posted November 3, 2008 at 12:29 am | Permalink

    that is really nice ! thanks for sharing !

  8. Ahmed Gaber
    Posted January 12, 2009 at 11:33 am | Permalink

    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

  9. Ed
    Posted January 22, 2009 at 8:27 pm | Permalink

    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!

  10. Raman
    Posted January 31, 2009 at 10:02 pm | Permalink

    Thanks..just what i wanted.

  11. Nader Hamandi
    Posted June 24, 2009 at 9:40 am | Permalink

    Very useful , i just added it to my website

    thnx :)

  12. 80sartist
    Posted July 2, 2009 at 2:19 pm | Permalink

    Thanks a lot for the tutorial.

    Cheers,
    Sam

  13. WhamBam
    Posted July 11, 2009 at 9:03 pm | Permalink

    Perfect. Thanks.

  14. Tobias
    Posted July 15, 2009 at 8:44 pm | Permalink

    Hey,

    thanks for pointing that out – it saved my webspace about 1.5mb for a plugin.

  15. Fiona
    Posted July 29, 2009 at 6:47 pm | Permalink

    Thanks. I dugg it!

  16. Sarah
    Posted August 13, 2009 at 11:45 am | Permalink

    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!

  17. Shmaya David
    Posted September 4, 2009 at 7:44 am | Permalink

    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!

  18. Brian N. Hewlett
    Posted December 9, 2009 at 4:23 pm | Permalink

    John:

    You are a life saver. I was looking for an easy tutorial on this and you hit the spot.

  19. Romi
    Posted December 23, 2009 at 9:18 pm | Permalink

    PERFECT!! – that was just what I needed to know – and really well written.

    Thanks Bro

  20. Tom Moy
    Posted January 7, 2010 at 1:41 pm | Permalink

    Thanks John. I was looking for an easy set of instructions.

  21. Lee
    Posted January 10, 2010 at 7:53 am | Permalink

    wow, thanks… that was really useful

  22. Ermel
    Posted February 2, 2010 at 10:58 pm | Permalink

    It’s as simple as that! I have been trying for days how to make email subscription work. Thanks for this great info!

  23. Melisha
    Posted February 7, 2010 at 9:23 pm | Permalink

    Excellent instructions! Thanks so much!

  24. Txomin
    Posted February 25, 2010 at 9:48 pm | Permalink

    Thank you. What I was looking for. Muchas Gracias.

  25. phpgeek1982
    Posted March 2, 2010 at 6:31 am | Permalink

    This is awesome!! One of the best well directed tutorial, thank you!!

  26. shoaib hussain
    Posted March 2, 2010 at 4:31 pm | Permalink

    thnx a lot for such a nice and easy explaination.

  27. Michael Coughlin
    Posted March 29, 2010 at 8:01 am | Permalink

    I echo the other comments about how perfect these instructions were. Thanks.

  28. WaistingTime
    Posted April 3, 2010 at 11:19 am | Permalink

    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?

  29. ESTA
    Posted April 12, 2010 at 3:53 pm | Permalink

    Excellent Post, got my email up and running in 10 min! thanks!

  30. John Lamansky
    Posted May 11, 2010 at 3:02 pm | Permalink

    @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.

  31. Anwar
    Posted May 19, 2010 at 11:23 am | Permalink

    excellent instructions..had it working in a few minuets

  32. Julie
    Posted May 26, 2010 at 7:59 pm | Permalink

    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.

  33. Al Ferreira
    Posted June 4, 2010 at 8:54 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the clear and simple explanation.

  34. Maggie @ Tethered Mommy
    Posted June 13, 2010 at 11:06 am | Permalink

    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!

  35. Susie Price
    Posted June 14, 2010 at 4:29 am | Permalink

    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

  36. John Lamansky
    Posted June 16, 2010 at 5:06 pm | Permalink

    @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.

  37. John Lamansky
    Posted June 16, 2010 at 5:09 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for the comments, everyone. I’m glad the tutorial is helpful for so many people.

  38. Will
    Posted June 30, 2010 at 7:22 pm | Permalink

    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

  39. sam123
    Posted July 5, 2010 at 2:46 pm | Permalink

    Nice and easy explanation. Thanks for the tips.

  40. Kamal Hasa
    Posted July 30, 2010 at 12:35 pm | Permalink

    They have two options one of it is typepad. But that code works just fine on WordPress!

  41. John Lamansky
    Posted August 17, 2010 at 7:48 pm | Permalink

    @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.

  42. Will
    Posted August 27, 2010 at 5:45 pm | Permalink

    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

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*