Offering Email Feeds

One recent thing I’ve noticed on blogs that I read is that they don’t offer or promote their email feeds. You have to remember that not everyone who visits your blog will be so technologically advanced as you, and may not have a RSS reader service that they use. For these people, FeedBurner’s Email Subscription is the way to go.

How to activate your email feed

First of all you will need to activate it on your FeedBurner console, to do so, do the following steps:

1. Log into FeedBurner
2. Select your feed
3. Hit “Publicize” tab
4. Select “Email Subscriptions” on left hand side and hit activate

Promote Email Feeds

Once you have this feature activate, you will be presented with some HTML code that you can easily insert in to a post or your side bar. If you have a page on “help on subscribing“, this would also be a good place to put it. See my page for an example [here].

Email Feeds : Bonus

One extra nice bonus that comes when you have email feeds is that you will be able to see the email address of the people who are subscribed to your feed. This means that you now have an idea of who is subscribing, and in fact you could ask them if they want to be included in your newsletter list or something like that in the future. For example I am aware of at least 1 company of consultants who are subscribed to my blog. Hello upwardaction !

Customize Feed Options

Another thing I like about email feeds is that you have control on:

• When the feeds get delivered : time zone and time are selectable.
• Email Branding : include an image on your emails, fonts, color , etc
• From email address

My final words on Email Feeds would be, if you are not using them, you should !