It’s Your Blog is a weekly series about taking ownership of your blog and making it the best it can be, because, well, It’s YOUR blog. It reflects you, represents you and is an extension of you. Join me Mondays for It’s Your Blog.
I can’t tell you how many blogs I visit that don’t have their RSS Email Subscription activated. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I get annoyed when I visit a blog, it’s spectacular so I want more, but there’s no option to subscribe by email.
There are even some pretty well-read, popular blogs I’ve come across that don’t have a subscribe by email option. In my opinion they would be even more popular and more well-read if only they did. I really can’t see why you wouldn’t want to offer this option to your readers.
Here’s the thing. My RSS reader is chock full of feeds, and there are, like, 1,560 unread posts in it right now. It’s full of blogs that I subscribed to eons ago, and lost interest in. If I add your fabulous blog to that mess your posts will be lost in the sea of others. I will quite possibly never think of your blog again.
Why don’t I just clean out my RSS reader? Because I’m lazy, as are most other people.
If I subscribe to your blog by email it will show up in my in box. I’ll see your headline and the first few lines of your post in my preview pane, and I’m way more likely to actually read your post.
It’s really simple to activate your RSS email subscription through Feedburner. (I’m assuming you have a Feedburner account. Most bloggers do. If not go get one. It’s free.)
How to Activate Your RSS Email Subscription
1. Go your Feedburner Account. Click on the feed for your site.
(Yeah, there’s my other blog I was going to start until I realized I’m not organized enough to manage two blogs. Again, it’s the whole lazy thing.)
2. Then click on Publicize. Then Email Subscriptions.
3. Click on Activate at the bottom the dialogue box.
Boom! There you go. Your email subscription is now active. Email will appear as one of the options when people click to subscribe to your blog.
If you want to promote your email subscription option a little more, and you should, add a subscription form to your sidebar. It’s easy. Feedburner wrote the code for you already. After you activate your email subscription you’ll see the subscription form code.
If you have a WordPress blog just copy what you see, and paste it into a text widget in your sidebar.
If you have a TypePad (Why?) or a Blogger account select that from the drop down. In Blogger copy and paste into an HTML gadget. If you use any other CMS — Again, why? — I can’t help you.
It’s YOUR blog. What are you going to do with it?
Disclaimer: The author apologizes for the above statements about other CMSs. She has strong opinions about why the world should run on WordPress.
Thanks for this post! I’ve been wanting to add this element to my blog for awhile now and didn’t know how to do it (or that it was that easy). Thanks for walking me through it! Jenn