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 “Design” section (a.k.a. “Presentation” or “Themes” in versions prior to 2.5)
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 “Theme Editor” sub-tab, 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!