How To Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog

In our last post we showed how to add a RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog to make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog and so that you could analyse your blog subscriptions e.g. number of subscribers, Feed Readers they use. This post will show how you can add an email subscription to your blog.

Reason For Adding Email Subscription to Your Blog

However not every reader likes to use RSS, some readers prefer to receive latest posts from blogs using email subscription. This is why you will often see both email subscription and RSS feed options on blogs; bloggers are doing this to cater to the different preferences of their readers.

Readers simply enter their email address and then click on “Subscribe”. They then receive an email notifying when new posts or information have been added to the blog.

There are two main options you can use to add an email subscription to your Eublogs blog:

  1. Drag Email Subscription Widget onto your sidebar (here is more information about using Widgets)
  2. Create and add an email subscription using Feedburner for your blog.

These two options work very differently:

  • Edublogs Email Subscription Widget – emails your reader immediately that a new post has been added to your blog. However to read the post your reader will need to click on a link which takes them to the post on your blog.
  • Feedburner Email Subscription – emails your entire post to your readers on the day after it has been uploaded to your blog i.e. they can read the entire post as an email rather than following the link. Please note images are not displayed in the email. Advantages of Feedburner includes details of your subscribers e.g. number of email subscribers, their email addresses

Which ever email subscription you use make sure you subscribe to your blog using it; so you know what your posts look like when people receive them via email. Normally

Creating An Email Subscription For Your Blog Using Feedburner

Once you have created and added an RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog ( here are the instructions on how to add a RSS feed from Feedburner to your blog) the next step is to set up your email subscription with feedburner (follow the instructions in the diagram below).

Diagram of how to set up email subscription

Adding Your Feedburner Email Subscription To Your Blog

The code for your Feedburner email subscription is located under your Publicize tab. You need to add this to a text widget in your sidebar.

  1. On your blog dashboard, go to Design > Widgets
  2. Scroll down to Text widget in your available widget area (left hand side of dashboard) and click on Add.
  3. Click on Edit on the Text widget that has been added to your current widget area.Image of adding a text widget
  4. Paste code for Feedburner email in Text Widget.  Click on Change.
  5. Click on Save Changes at bottom of Current Widget area (right hand side of dashboard).

Image of Email Widget

FINAL THOUGHT

Please let us know how you go adding an email subscription to your blog; especially if you have additional questions on using it.

For accurate statistics on your subscriber numbers you should redirect all your blog feed to Feedburner!

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

51 thoughts on “How To Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog

  1. What is the capacity of Email the Feedburner email can take? Unlimited? Can Email list be transfered into this Feedburner email subscription

    1. Hi Charles,
      Google discontinued support for Feedburner a number of years ago so you may want to look at different options instead of setting it up. Good luck!

  2. I followed the simple instructions and everything worked perfectly until I went to my home page and clicked on “subscribe.” I get a page that says it is a “404 page.” Is this feature only for supporters now? Or where did I go wrong?
    Thank you!

      1. @Sue Waters, I started over from the beginning with a new text widget. It doesn’t give me the error page, but there is no field for the viewer to enter an email address. Is there a separate step for this?

        1. @mrscarpenter, Sorry to ask the question but I do need to – Can you confirm that you grabbed fresh HTML code from Feedburner? If so, I’m probably going to have to get you to send me the HTML saved in a text file attached to an email so I can test it for you.

          1. @Sue Waters, Yes, I even deactivated it so I could start completely from scratch. I inserted the fresh code, but still nothing. I have the code saved so I can email it to you if needed. So much new “academic language” that it is hard to know if I am doing it correctly!

          2. @mrscarpenter, just leaving a comment here so I remember where we are at. I’ve now added the Feedburner email to your blog sidebar.

  3. I tried it for a few days before we had daily posts going up. Just tried posting a test post and didn’t get notification. Are you saying today’s posts get emailed tomorrow?

    Does this generally work for everyone else? If I am the only one with problem, I have to think it will start working. This is on a fairly simple wordpress site and I didn’t have trouble cutting/pasting the feedburner code into the text widget and getting that up. Also, with it working for the verification, that has to be a good sign.

    1. Yes normally the posts are sent through the next day. I suggest you also sign up using a gmail account and see if there is any difference.

      It is always possible that your email system is blocking the emails. With Edublogs we can have one of our emails go through and then the second email be blocked with some email systems – not sure why. Email filters move in mysterious ways is my answer.

  4. I have created an rss feed, activated the email subscription feature on that feed in feedburner, and put the subscription form on my blog and subscribed 2 emails to it to test. It appears to work normally, asking me to type in a captcha string, then telling me to check my email box. I go to my email inbox and there is an email with a link to click on to confirm. I click on the link and it says I’ve successfully subscribed.

    I then go to my feedburner account, and that feed says there are 0 subscribers. What gives? Is there a delay? Shouldn’t the subscribers appear immediately?

    The form executes perfectly and has the correct feed name on it.

    1. Good question. Yes it normally takes about 24 hours for the subscribers to start showing in Feedburner. You will also see a bit of fluctuation daily depending on what feed reader people are using.

      1. I did the feedburner thing on our Scholarship of the Day blog at http://www.scholarships.financialaidtips.com. Have tried 3 email addresses to make sure it is sending daily blog posts. On all 3 email addresses, I get the register email, click the validate link, the addresses show up in feedburner subscriber listing but I never receive the emails on any of the 3 accounts. Any ideas? Don’t think it is getting caught in spam since i got the opt in emails. Not sure if our readers have the same trouble or what??? We have scheduled posts daily – shouldn’t those be getting sent out every day to the subscriber list?

        Thanks for any help.

        1. It does take 24 hours normally from when you write a post to it being sent by Feedburner. How long has it been since you subscribed and when you wrote the last post?

  5. Thanks Sue, I love the way you do a step-by-step guide through. Did anyone experience this problem? I tried to add the’ subscribe my email’ code to my widget (following your very clear steps) but the subscription box didn’t appear on my blog (which rendered it useless). Tried it a couple of times … no success. Tried the other option for adding email subscription via feedburner (where the reader is taken to a separate feedburner page and fills in details there) and that worked fine.

    1. Yes Marie I’m sure you aren’t the only person that has had that issue. Not sure why it is happening but glad to know that you managed to find a solution. Perhaps because yours is a Global Teacher blog – wonder if restrictions are a bit different?

    1. @pnichols Glad the instructions were helpful and you were able to add the email subscription to your blog. I have a large number of users that prefer subscribing by email.

  6. @league218 It may be that they are working on the email widget or this is a feature that will only be available to Edublogs Supporter – read the latest announcement for more information.

    I’ve checked Feedburner and I’m definitely able to add the email widget. You just keep it as the Typepad option and copy all the code. If you still can’t embed let me know and I will see what I can do.

  7. Hi Sue,

    I am having the same problems as johnkenworthy. It will not retain the whole html. Any solution since July?

    Also, as of yesterday afternoon, I had the email widget from Edublogs, and then it disappeared, and could not find it on any theme. That’s why I went with Feedburner, and now that doesn’t work. 🙁 Any help I can get. Thanks so much.

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