Enabling Email Subscriptions to Your Blog

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Adam Green

If you have been wondering ‘How to enable email subscriptions‘ to your blog, here is a recent post from Cary Snowden on how to create a subscription option on your blog to capture subscribers…

Creating Followers Via Email

Enabling email subscriptions means that your visitors can subscribe to your content and receive automated updates whenever you post new content. It’s a great way to keep everyone informed, and acts like a regular newsletter from you.

There are three ways to set up subscriptions to your ListPipe blog account:

1. RSS is already built into your site. If you have visitors that are savvy to RSS, they can easily subscribe to your content by visiting your ‘feed’. If your site is being hosted by ListPipe, then your feed will look like this: ‘http://yoursubdomain.yourdomain.com/feed’. People who are savvy to RSS will already know this, but to get new users to subscribe to your RSS feed you can email them this link and invite them, or post an article inviting them to join.

2. Feedburner is a service provided by Google that is free, and includes a remarkable publishing service that allows you to accept, maintain and publish to subscribers automatically. Using Feedburner, you can invite people to subscribe to an email notification each time you post new content by giving you their email address. Feedburner takes care of the rest, and is very reliable and easy-to-use.

To set up Feedburner, you will need to do a few things. Here is a basic instruction list:

Start by creating a Google account. (You may already have one; if so, move on to the next step…)
Start up a free Feedburner account. This will take just a few minutes and is pretty easy to do.
In Feedburner, go to the Publicize tab and enable Email Subscriptions.
Copy the block of code for your Subscription Link from the bottom of the Feedburner window and paste it to a page on your blog.
Alternatively, you can also paste the Subscription Link to a new widget in your blog. This will allow the Subscription Link to appear in your sidebar navigation and will show it on every page, no matter where on your site your readers happen to be. To do this, log into your blog and click on the Appearance tab on the left. Under Appearance, click on Widgets. Drag the Text widget to the top right under ‘Sidebar 1′. Open the widget and paste your Subscription Link Code into the box. Add a title such as ‘Subscribe to my blog’, and click Save at the bottom of the widget form. Your new link will now appear at the top of your sidebar navigation!
NOTE: When you use a widget, you change the default sidebar navigation to the widgets template. This means that your other links will seem to have disappeared when you check your site. To restore your original sidebar navigation, Add the Pages, Categories, Archives and Meta widgets under your new Subscribe widget. You can also add the RSS widget to give users a clickable access to your RSS feed. Play with the Text widget to add personal notes or other functions to your sidebar.

If you get back to your site and can’t find the link to get back to your login window (because your sidebar navigation has disappeared), go to your home page and add ‘/wp-login.php‘ to the end of your URL to log back in and add the appropriate widgets (Tip: add the ‘Meta’ widget to get your login link back on the navigation).

You can read the full article about Creating Followers Via Email.

Get Connected To Your Social Networks!

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Adam Green

One of the best ways to spread the word about your Xocai business is to start a blog; I’ve made it easy for you in my Free Blog Offer.

The best way to get the word out about your blog is to repost your content to your social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We’ve made this easy, too! In fact, if you take three minutes to connect your account, we’ll do it for you every time we post new content to your blog! How awesome is that!?

You are now able to connect your Xocai Blog to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, including either your personal wall or your company page! Every time we post new content to your site, we’ll automatically retweet to your Twitter page or post to your Facebook page (or both!). Each post includes an excerpt of the article and a link back to your site. This is a great way to increase your exposure, and to get great SEO links back to your site.

Here’s How:

1. Log into your Facebook account, then…

2. In a new tab/window in your browser, Log into your Control Panel.

3. Click the ‘Twitter Facebook’ button.

4. Click the ‘Link Facebook’ button (this process works the same for the ‘Link Twitter’ button).

5. You may be asked for your Twitter or Facebook login information at this point*. If not, move to #6 below…

6. Facebook is asking for your permission to link to ListPipe Link. Click ‘Allow’ at the bottom of the screen to continue.

7. Finished! That’s all it takes! To confirm that you have a connection, notice that the ‘Link Facebook’ button has changed to ‘Unlink Facebook’ in your Control Panel window.

You can unlink your Facebook account at any time by logging into your Control Panel, navigating to the Facebook Twitter button, and clicking ‘Unlink Facebook’ (or ‘Unlink Twitter’).

You can deauthorize the application in your Facebook account, too. Simply login to your Facebook account and select ‘Account’ in the upper right-hand corner. Choose ‘Privacy Settings’, then at the bottom-left, under ‘Applications and Websites’ select ‘Edit your settings’. Then in the ‘Applications you use’ section, select the ‘Edit Settings’ button to the right. You will see an application called ‘ListPipeLink’. Just click on the ‘X’ to remove the application. Done!

Get connected with your social networks and start sharing great content about Xocia chocolate, automatically!