Here is a quick walk through of how I did it...
One, I was already using the Share and Follow Widget available with WordPress. The Share and Follow widget gives you two main services, sharing buttons to allow people to share and like your blog posts, and a follow widget allowing people to easily subscribe to you on any network. The share functions are usually at the bottom of each page and post and the follow option can be a tab attached to the side of the blog (like on the NashvilleTech blog).
Here is an overview video of how to use the Share and Follow widget:
Next, I headed over to Feedburner to create the Feed account. I used my current MusikPitch Gmail account to set it up. If you don't have an account with Google, you will need to create one to create a Feedburner account (as Google owns Feedburner). Access Feedburner here.
After setting up a Feedburner account, you can "burn" a feed by pasting your RSS URL from your blog into where it says, burn a feed right this instance and click next.
You can find your RSS URL by right-clicking on the RSS button on your blog and copying the URL. Most blog RSS URLs are http://blogname.com/feed/
Go ahead and sign up for all the reporting functions as it is all free!
Once you get to the main dashboard, you'll see a tab that says Publicize. Click this tab and then look in the left column for the Email Subscriptions option.
Activate the email subscriptions option and find the email URL code inside the Preview subscription link box. Now you can paste the code from either box into a WordPress text widget to appear in the sidebar of your blog. I'm already using Mail Chimp for a newsletter and wanted to keep my blog update email subscription separate. So I went into Share and Follow and checked the mail icon to add that subscription option in my follow tab on the right side. Then I added the URL that I copied from the Preview Subscription link box from Feedburner as the goto address for when someone clicks on the mail icon inside the follow widget. I also added some custom text as I did with all my follow widgets.
Now when people click on the mail icon, they are taken to a page where they can sign up to receive new blog posts via email!
Any questions on the overall process? Do you think having a Mail Chimp subscription and blog email subscription is confusing?
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Posted by Ybo