I received this question from one of the members here on AdamWWarner.com.
Hi Adam,
I was looking around on your site and didn’t find this information, but that could just be me. The question is – Whenever Jamie posts something on her blog, I get notified the next day – the post arrives. Same thing happens for your blog. (wpmodder) I get notices of your posts.So, WP guru, what’s the key?
Thanks!!
Milt
http://manykites.org
Thanks for the great question Milt! This is a popular feature on many websites and is known as an RSS to email subscription service. There are many ways and many services you could use to accomplish the same goal of sending people updates to their email every time you add new content, but in this tutorial I’m going to show you what I consider to be the easiest method. Best of all it’s completely free. The service is named Feedburner. The first thing you need is a Google account. If you don’t have one, you should…they offer all kinds of free services that I’ll be covering in future tutorials.
Once you’re logged into your Google account, click on Settings–>Google Account settings.
Once in your Google Account settings, look for Feedburner listed under the My Products heading. If it’s not there, you’ll need to add that to your Google Account product listing. You should be able to find it by clicking the More link to see a full listing of available Google product services.
Once you click on the Feedburner link, you’ll see a window similar to the one below that gives you the option to “burn a feed”. In other words, you’re going to tell Feedburner where to find your RSS feed address. Now, if your site is built in WordPress (and most likely it is if you’re reading this), you should know that be default WordPress provides several different RSS feeds “out of the box”. This makes it easy for services like Feedburner to find your feeds. Simply enter your website address and Feedburner will find one, two, or more of your feeds and ask you which one you’d like to use.
Choose the feed you would like Feedburner to use and hit Next.
You have the option here to define a different feed address. Feel free to make it something easy to remember.
Once you’re done here, you’ll be presented with a few more options. They’re self-explanatory so I’ll skip the details. After you’re all done, you’ll see a screen like the one below with a series of tabs. Click on the Publicize tab.
You’ll then see an option for Email Subscriptions. Click that.
Click the Activate button.
You’ll now be presented with the code that contains the Email Subscription Form. We’re going to put that form inside a Text Widget in the WordPress backend Widgets area.
If you don’t want a form, you can also choose to copy a simple text link to the Email Subscription Form.
Go to the Widgets area of your WordPress backend and paste this code into a Text Widget. You’ll also want to give it snappy title to prompt people to “take action”.
On the front end of your site, now you’ll see the Email Subscription Form.
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