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!

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23 Comments

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

    Great information !!

  2. 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. 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. Posted June 26, 2008 at 10:36 am | Permalink

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

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

    Thanks..just what i wanted.

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

    Very useful , i just added it to my website

    thnx :)

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

    Excellent instructions! Thanks so much!

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