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Get More Subscribers With An Email Subscription Box

Posted October 19, 2009 in How-To, Marketing 31 Comments »

get-more-subscriptions
Many of us freelancers run blogs, and with good reason. Creating a blog is one of the best ways to prove your expertise, build a strong following, and get more clients. Making it easy for your readers to subscribe is a key factor in building this following and growing your blog, and it is a fact — not all of your readers know how to use RSS.

So are you missing out on potential subscribers without an email subscription box? Most definitely so.

top-email-boxIf you are unsure what I mean by ‘email subscription box’, see the “Enter your email” field to the right? This allows users to enter their email and subscribe to your blog from every page of your website. They don’t have to click through to another page to subscribe, making it much easier for readers to subscribe.

You will find my subscribe box prominently on the top right of my site Just Creative Design (see screenshot above) and at the top of many other blogs. In this article, I will guide you through how to get an email subscription box for your own blog.

How To Get An Email Subscription Form

Even if you do not know much about HTML, getting the email form on your blog is quite simple… There are two ways of doing it — I will show the easiest way first and then long winded way second (which is how I originally got the code).

Read the second way if you use Typepad or Blogger.

Option One:

  1. Copy the code below (Ctrl+C)

<form style="padding:3px;text-align:left;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target= "popupwindow"onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=YOURBLOGFEED ','popupwindow','scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="YOURBLOGFEED" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /></form>

  1. Sign into your blog (preferably a self hosted blog).
  2. Create a new text widget (or edit the file where you want the email subscribe box to appear).
  3. Paste (Ctrl+V) the code you copied into the text widget.
  4. Change the 2 bold parts you see above (YOURBLOGFEED), to the name of your RSS feed. If you are unsure of your feed name, you can sign into your Feedburner account to check.
  5. Save and your done

Option Two:

This is the long way of getting the correct code for your blog.

  1. Sign into Feedburner
  2. Click on your blog’s feed
  3. Click the ‘Publicize’ tab

image-354

  1. Click ‘Email Subscriptions’ found on the left side bar.

image-355

  1. If you use TypePad or Blogger you can use the Widget they provide. If not, highlight the code found in the first box, then Copy (Ctrl+C)

image-356

image-17

  1. If you are happy with that code go to step 8 or if you want to do a bit of easy code tweaking go to step 7.


  1. OPTIONAL: Editing the code to make the form box look like below.

image-18

If you wish to remove the border & ‘Delivered by Feedburner’ or change center alignment to left alignment, read on.

If you want to delete the “Delivered by Feedburner“, delete the line that says this:

<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>

If you want to delete the border from around the sides, delete this part of the code:

border:1px solid #ccc;

If you want to left align the box (rather than centered) change the word

'center' to 'left'

ie. If you did all of the three things mentioned above the code would be:

<form style="padding:3px;text-align:left;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target= "popupwindow"onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=YOURBLOGFEED ','popupwindow','scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="YOURBLOGFEED" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /></form>

Copy the newly edited code and go to step 8.

  1. Sign into your blog. Create a text widget and then paste the code into the widget (or where ever you want to box to appear). Save and your done!

Questions, Comments, or Tips?

If you’ve got any questions about doing this for your own blog, feel free to ask in the comments and either myself or someone else from FreelanceFolder will be more than happy to help out.

Also, if you’ve had experience with this on your own blog, feel free to add your personal tips and ideas into the comments.


About the author: Jacob Cass is a 21 year old designer from Sydney, Australia, who freelances under his business Just Creative Design which doubles as a wildly popular design blog. Jacob also judges logos for the Logo of the Day website and runs the Logo Designer Blog - a blog dedicated entirely to branding & logo design. Jacob’s talent has brought him numerous international awards and his work has been published in books worldwide. Jacob is also in the process of writing his own book focused on logo design.


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31 Comments
  • User Gravatar
    Jacques//An1ken
    October 19th, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    Awesome Post Jacob, Keep up the great posts, this is a simple explanation for any user to add the subscribers box to their site.

    Regards,
    Jacques // An1ken // Creativeoverflow.net

  • User Gravatar
    FreelanceShack
    October 19th, 2009 at 1:17 pm

    A great article and some excellent tips. May I just say, however, that a pop-up box for subscription is a no-no for me. Unless it is used once per IP and will never bug you again. The box you mentioned is, on the other hand, useful.

    Thanks!

    FreelanceShack

  • User Gravatar
    Federico Viticci
    October 19th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

    Amazing post, I’ve just set up a subscription box on my website: http://www.macstories.net/

    Thank you!

  • User Gravatar
    Mike Smith
    October 19th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    good article and good tips. I always make sure I set sites up with the email subscription box because there’s a lot of non tech-savvy users out there still who don’t have a clue what RSS is and what it does :)

  • User Gravatar
    Lexi Rodrigo
    October 19th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    Thanks for the step-by-step tutorial Jacob! I admire your online marketing savvy for somebody so young.

    I don’t use Feedburner myself. I think I’m just too lazy. And besides, I’m already using Aweber. Is there any reason I should use Feedburner as well?

    Thanks in advance,

    Lexi

  • User Gravatar
    Teen Blogger
    October 19th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Great Post.

    I was actually looking around on how to get a email subscribtion box on my blog and you’ve given a greay post on how to get a nice and simple email box on our websites.

    Thanks, will be setting on my blog.

  • User Gravatar
    Troy Peterson
    October 19th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

    hello,
    Great article…

    One thing that will improve your signups as well, is to replace “Subscribe” with “Get Updates”.

    Many people tend to associate “Subscribe” with some type of committment. This is typically carried over from the old days of Magazine subscriptions, where people had to commit for a year and pay a price.

    Even with the name “free” on it, people are still hesitant.

    I recommend trying “Get Updates by Email” or “Get Updates by RSS”.

    Of course, it’s always good practice to do a/b testing to find the best results… but, it’s well worth the small effort to make the changes.

  • User Gravatar
    mari
    October 19th, 2009 at 6:36 pm

    Thank you! This is just what I needed, straightforward how-to and the ability to make it look a less cluttered. (My biggest problem with most widgets)

  • User Gravatar
    JAy Hoots
    October 19th, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    Just put this into practice and saved a ton of work.! Thanks a ton

  • User Gravatar
    Jacob Cass
    October 19th, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    Wow, I think I wrote this article about 4 months ago, good to see it finally published!

    FreelanceShack,
    I haven’t come across a problem with the pop up box – even with most pop up blockers, it still pops up and if it doesn’t most users are savvy enough to realise that nothing happened.

    Lexi,
    I am not very familiar with Aweber as I have been using Feedburner this whole time. I think some use both though?

    Troy,
    Interesting point you make there, I am going to update my email box now. Thanks for that. Give and you shall receive heh?

  • User Gravatar
    Wellington Grey
    October 19th, 2009 at 9:44 pm

    Just a quick question: is there a way in feedburner to see how many subscribers are doing so via the email box vs rss or does it just give you the aggregate numbers?

  • User Gravatar
    Kevin Donnigan
    October 19th, 2009 at 10:25 pm

    Jacob, nice post! I’m on my way to get a box now :-)

    Troy: You make a fantastic point. I bet everyone who read this just made that change…

  • User Gravatar
    Kevin Donnigan
    October 19th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

    Just added the good ‘ol subscription box. Thanks Jacob!
    http://www.anythinggraphic.net/blog

    :-)

  • User Gravatar
    Stephen Webb
    October 20th, 2009 at 8:32 am

    Fantastic tutorial! An email subscription box is useful for any freelancer of website where distributing information is key to its success. As good and useful as RSS is, not everyone (particularly older generations) know how to use it, or even what it is.

    As such if you only have RSS on your site or blog then you are potentially missing out on numerous potential visitors. I think with the rapid development of RSS the traditional subscription box has been replaced without thought of these visitors.

    Thanks for the excellent tutorial here, it is great for any site! Maybe in the future we can see a few more tutorials like this on useful applications for freelancers sites. With the ever expanding library of jQuery applications I’m sure there are more items that can be included!

  • User Gravatar
    Juliet
    October 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am

    Hi

    Very good point! And very comprehensive guidelines. Thank you.

    I just need to consider myself to let others know that an email options is a must!

    Call me old-fashioned, but I never subscribe to RSS feeds – only email. (I have four websites / blogs of my own and use the internet for a large portion of the day, so it’s not because I’m a newbie.) There have been some websites that I simply haven’t subscribed to because there was no email option.

    Perhaps one day I shall “upgrade” but, in the meantime, I like to see e-mail subscription options ;)

    Juliet

  • User Gravatar
    Char (PSI Tutor:Mentor)
    October 20th, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    Thank you! Just what I needed to tidy up the subscription form.

  • User Gravatar
    Designium
    October 21st, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Very simple and effective article… ty

    Going to try it as well

  • User Gravatar
    Jeremy
    October 22nd, 2009 at 2:02 am

    excellent tutorial on the subscription box, I’ll be sharing this with my freelance clients for sure!

  • User Gravatar
    designium
    October 22nd, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    pretty amazing! just tried and in first day got 5 subscribers :D

    simple and effective… and you can enjoy your costumers/visitants with some value on form field like i did:

    <input type="text" value="icanupdateyou@home" id="search-input"

  • User Gravatar
    Harrisburg personal injury attorney
    October 23rd, 2009 at 10:58 am

    Just put one on my site. It’s a really great tool, one that I appreciate more than other subscription forms. Such as another link that will take you to a subscription page, or a pop up subscription. Thanks for the help.

    Andrew

  • User Gravatar
    Designium
    October 23rd, 2009 at 11:23 am

    @Harrisburg personal injury attorney – In this one you´ve a pop up window to confirm the data and with capta for anti spam !!! :D

  • User Gravatar
    Designium
    October 23rd, 2009 at 11:24 am

    Andrew on this one you´ve pop up window also :D

  • User Gravatar
    dymphna
    October 25th, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I recently started a new blog and knew I had to add this feature but was not sure how to. You made it simple for me to do.

  • User Gravatar
    Rick Blatter
    November 6th, 2009 at 9:47 am

    Great idea, like the sound of it all

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