How To Make An E-Mail Subcribtion Box Via FeedBurner

Email subscriptions enable your readers to receive your posts by email, and can be a great tool for helping develop a regular readership to your blog.

In order to offer your blog posts by email, you will need to sign up with a feed management service who will then manage email subscriptions for you, and will send updates to your subscribers each time you update your blog. I use Feedburner's free service for email subscriptions. You can see my email subscription widget below any posts :). Here's how you can set up an email subscription box for your own blog:

1. Visit Feedburner.com and insert your blog URL into the box, then click "next".
2. On the next screen, select the feed you would like to offer subscriptions for. The default for Blogger is Atom, which you can customise to be long (full post), short (first paragraph) or simply headlines in your Blogger dashboard.
3. Once you've chosen the feed you would like to publicise, you can then edit the title of the feed and the URL where it can be located.
4. Then create your free account with Feedburner (or sign in if you already have an account) and click "Activate feed".
5. Now, your feeds will also be publicised by Feedburner and you should be able to log in to your Feedburner dashboard. So let's create your email subscription box! Click on the feed title for your blog, and then the "Publicize" tab at the top of your dashboard.
6. Look for the "Email subscriptions" link in the left column and click this. Choose the language you would like to use to publicise your feed.
7. If you are using New Blogger (layouts templates), you can easily insert an email subscription widget into your blog sidebar. Find the "Use as a widget in..." section and choose "Blogger". You will then be directed to your Blogger dashboard to confirm insertion of this widget and rearrange its location in your layout.
8. If you are using Classic Blogger templates, you should copy the code section and paste this where you would like the email subscription box to appear in your blog.

Once you have set up your email subscription box, you can customise the look by opening the widget in Layouts. You can alter the text, font and even the alignment to suit your tastes.

You can choose further options from Feedburner's service through your Feedburner dashboard, such as notification by email when someone subscribes/unsubscribes to your feed, track clickthroughs, etc. Feedburner also supply feed subscription buttons which you can use to publicise your blog feed for subscribers to read in a feed reader.

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Tutorial : FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004.FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds.

Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds. FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of October 5, 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast and videocast feeds.

On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million. One month later, two of their popular PRO services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users.

On August 15, 2008, Google completed migration of Feedburner into its group of services. Publishers who have completed migration will access Feedburner via feedburner.google.com

Blocking

Although the main page is accessible and one can use its APIs, the actual feeds generated by Feedburner are blocked in Mainland China. This decision could have been made in order to make users choose the Chinese alternative FeedSky or due to the fact that one could use Feedburner to access content from blocked blogs.

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