WordPress How To: Adding Subscription Options
I previously wrote on the importance of giving your blog readers multiple options for subscribing to your blog. One persons’ preference will not be someone else’s, so make sure you offer people options.
It was easy for me to add an RSS and an email option to my WordPress blog, so I created this tutorial to help others do it. If you use a different platform, check the help section for instructions. Also, please note that some WordPress themes may already have these options added to it. Check the one you use – or any new ones you are thinking of adding – and see.
To add subscription options, go to you Dashboard, and click on Appearance, then Widgets.You will need to add a text widget because this is where the code will go. Give it a title that will help your re aders find it. I was extremely creative and original and titled mine “Subscribe to Blog Updates”, but at least it is clear!
Next, you need to get the code for the feed. I used Feedburner. To use them, go to the Feedburner website and sign up (or sign in, if you already have a Google profile), then enter your blog url.
You then get the page for your blog. Across the top of the page are five tabs; click on Publicize. On the left side are a list of options.
Click on Email Subscriptions, and scroll down the page for the subscription code. You have code for two options – a form for people to complete, and a link for them to click on. Decide which one you wish to use, copy the text, then return to your WordPress site and paste the code into the text widget you began earlier.
To add the RSS option, click on the Chicklet Chooser on the left side, then follow the instructions. At the bottom of the page is the code for adding the chicklet to your page. Copy, then paste into the text widget as you did with the email option.
The last thing to do is decide where on your page you want your subscription options to be . From the widget page in WordPress, the right side will show a list of widgets being used. You can click on each one and drag it to a different location. Your subscription options widget needs to be easy to find, because some people will not take time to look for it, no matter how much they like your blog. Make it easy for them! Many blogs put it at or near the top of the page, and that is where I usually look for it.
Finally, go to your blog and take a look. Does everything look OK? Try out the links. Sign up for your own blog feed. That way you know the sign-up process works AND it lets you see how the appear to your subscribers.
So there’s the way to add subscription options to your WordPress blog. If anyone tries this and has any questions, please post a comment or email me and I’ll try to answer them. If you have created a tutorial on adding subscription options to other blogging platforms, please post a comment with the link to help out others.
Subscribing To Blogs
Last week Denise Wakeman posted a poll on the Build A Better Blog blog asking whether readers prefered to subscribe to blogs by RSS, email, or another means.
All the blogs I subscribe to come by RSS to my Google Reader. I have three email addresses going onto my inbox, and I don’t need any more mail in there to go through. The new posts sit in my Reader until I have a chance to look at them. This is what works for me, and that is fine.
What isn’t fine is that I failed to realize that not everyone would use this method. As Denise pointed out in her post, most people don’t know what RSS is, and get their updates by email. She had been told, however, that more people were using RSS, and so conducted to poll to see what her results would be.
She’s followed up with another post, and the results are this: 52% use email, 44% use RSS, and 4% use other.
While the results may be closer than some people thought, what it told me was that I could be missing out on a lot of people wanting to sign up for my blog. (OK, humor me and let me believe that a lot of people want to sign up for updates!) I had only offered the RSS option.
That is now corrected. I took a few minutes to learn how to add the email option, and if you look in the column on the right, it is there along with the RSS option.
Feel free to take advantage of this and sign up for either option!
Anyone else find this interesting? Have you offered both options on your blog? If so, what were your results?
Not sure how to add one or both options to your blog? I’ll have a WordPress tutorial posted later this week – and if you subscribe to this blog you won’t miss it!
