If you look at the right sidebar of the blog you'll notice that I've just added a subscribe form. Now this is not just any old subscribe form because it does something special. You see, when I add a new blog entry those who've signed up via this form will automatically get an email telling them of the new article without me doing anything. In other words, the subscribe form on my blog works much like an RSS feed.
Now you're probably wondering why I've added this type of form to my blog since people can get blog update notices via the RSS feeds already available. The answer is - because a lot of people don't use RSS readers.
So how can you add a special form like this to your blog?
There are 2 ways:
- You can use a free service like feedburner.com
- You can use a paid service like aweber.com
Now I won't go into the details of setting up a form via a free service since I used my aweber account to generate my form. However I will tell you why I went with aweber rather than a free service.
- As a respected online responder service I know aweber will make the mailings can-spam compliant. The others may also be can-spam compliant but I don't know that as a fact.
- I have control of the subscriber list. I can email them, delete them, move them, etc. With a free service I may have access to the list so I can move it but I can't do anything else with it.
Now if you choose to add a blog to email form to your blog aweber has a video to help you get it set up. Unfortunately blogger.com has changed since the video was made so here are the 2 important things you'll need to know when you set up your form.
- If you're using the new blogger you won't see a site feed as shown in the video. You'll need to get a site feed and I used feedburner.com to get mine. You can then enter your feed address created by feedburner.
- To add your form you no longer have to edit the blogger html template. You can simply use the add page element feature to add the code to your sidebar.
To learn how to automatically send email updates about your new blogger posts to your blog subscribers watch this video.
And for those of you hosting your own WordPress blogs, you can read the instructions for setting up the broadcast feature for your blog here.
To Your Success,
Susan
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Tags: blog, email, broadcast blog updates, convert rss to email
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