Asking someone to “subscribe” to your blog used to mean signing them up on an email list. On a regular basis you would send out an email from that list with news about your site or blog encouraging them to return for a visit.
Today’s notion of subscribing to a blog goes way beyond an email newsletter.
When you ask someone to subscribe to your blog, you need to be specific. Blog subscriptions now consist of:
- Email announcements
- Email alerts of new posts or activity
- Email monitoring of comments on the blog
- Email monitoring of comments on a specific post
- Email newsletter subscriptions
- Submission to social bookmarking site submission services
- Full site feed
- Site comments feed
- Category feeds
With so many ways to “subscribe” to a blog, I’ll do my best to cover some of the most popular subscription methods for each of these types of communication. For information on social bookmarking site submission WordPress Plugins, see Social Bookmarking Submit Links on WordPress Blogs.
If you have a favorite WordPress Plugin for handling your various subscriptions, please let us know in the comments below.
Email Mailing Lists
Email mailing lists allow you to contact your subscribers and users with information about your blog, updates, recommendations, or a form of mini-newsletter. These WordPress Plugins work with your blog’s Users list or an email mailing list management program or service integrated into the WordPress Administration Panels.
Mailing List pour WordPress (French) (English translation) is one of the more popular mailing list management Plugins. It allows the blog administrator to send messages with attached files, if desired, to members of the list or other recipients. It allows includes automatic notification of blog updates.
Viewfinder offers various WordPress Plugins to help you stay in touch with your readers including the The Viewfinder Mailing List, an easy-to-use email mailing list manager which sends out plain text emails to subscribers. It allows automatic subscription and unsubscription, with an optional validation email. You can contact fans of your blog with updates, special events, and recent activities.
Naatan NotifyMe WordPress Plugin offers mailing list functions to make and manage unlimited mailing lists in WordPress. You can design the form and customize the mailing parameters in many different ways. It also includes a “new blog post” notification and alert when you publish a new post.
Instinct’s WordPress Campaign Monitor is an email newsletter Plugin for email campaigns. It includes tracking of results and managing subscribers.
Subscribe MaxGal WordPress (English) allows you to email information to registered users on your blog. Supports different charset and HTML tags for your email letters.
Email Users WordPress Plugin allows you to email registered blog users, based upon their role and permissions. It adds a submenu under the Write Post panel for easy emailing. It does have some restrictions. Currently, emails are text only and the blog administrator needs to take care to not email everyone at one time, working within the email restrictions of the blog’s server. For those with multiple bloggers, this is a great way of staying in touch and sending out announcements.
MailList WordPress Plugin calls itself a “mailing list, mass mailing, and mailer plugin”. Unfortunately, support for the Plugin has stopped due to a variety of bugs. If you are interested in supporting this innovative WordPress Plugin, contact the author.
Email Alerts
Email alerts are often confused with email mailing lists. An Email Alert works automatically with little interaction from the blog owner after setup and configuration. Each time there is an updated post released or activity on the blog, an email is sent out to those on the subscription list advising them of the updated posts.
A word of caution for email alerts WordPress Plugins. These Plugins send out one email for every new post you publish on your blog. If you post more than a few times a week, and definitely if you post more than once a day, don’t use these Plugins. Choose an email mailing list or newsletter WordPress Plugin to send out a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly announcement of updates and new blog posts. Otherwise, you can quickly flood a reader with too many emails.
Subscribe2 WordPress Plugin is one of the most popular blog update notification Plugins. Originally developed by Skippy, it has found new life and compassionate folks to keep it going. The Plugin is very simple. A visitor subscribes and after confirming their subscription, they get an email whenever the blog is updated.
Advanced Mailer Using AJAX WordPress Plugin expands upon Scott Merrill’s Subscribe2 Plugin to create an advanced subscription management system for WordPress bloggers. Subscribe and unsubscribe events are handled automatically. Management of their subscriptions is easy, allowing them to add or delete specific categories to receive updated information and new post notifications from. It offers variable limits on the number of emails to be sent out at one time to avoid conflict with host server limits, and designed to accommodate translation and localization.
WordPress Email Notification Plugin and Yellow Swordfish Page Update Notification WordPress Plugin work the same way, creating automatic notification of subscribers when you update your blog.
Email Monitoring of Comments
Email monitoring of comments is the line of text with a checkbox you see on many WordPress blogs in the comments form. It invites the visitor to subscribe to the comments from this blog post. When a new comment is made on the post, an email is automatically sent out, reminding them of their participation and interest in the blog post.
While many people use this feature because they think it will encourage return visitors and increase traffic, the best use of the subscribe-to-comments WordPress Plugins is on sites hosting customer support and services. If a user is asking for help, support, or information, they will want to be notified of an answer if one is provided. It’s good customer service.
WARNING: When adding subscribe-to-comments WordPress Plugins, make sure the subscription checkbox is unchecked by default. This will prevent irritation for those who miss the box and then get an email from you, and have to figure out how to get off the list. To encourage use of this feature, make sure it is placed above the Submit button, preferably near the email form box.
Subscribe to Comments 2.1 adds a checkbox to your comment form for users to click and add their email to a list for email notification of further comments on that blog post. It features a simple security check and the ability for subscribed users to manage their subscriptions, and other customization, including “themeing” the manage subscriptions panel. For WordPress 2.1 users, there is a fix for the Subscribe To Comments Plugin, until an updated version is released.
WordPress Plugin: Subscribe to Comments Report and Stats works with Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin to display subscribers, the posts they are subscribed to, and other basic stats on the WordPress Administration Panels.
Filosofo Enroll Comments WordPress Plugin enables visitors to receive an email when someone comments on a post and manage their subscriptions with an Admin Panel. It includes AJAX for fast and easy application, and subscribers are listed in your WordPress Administration Panel Users list.
Newsletter Subscription WordPress Plugins
The popularity of emailed newsletters comes and goes. Currently, it’s popular again to email information about your blog’s activities, events, and “subscriber only” information.
A Newsletter Subscription Management Plugin sends out a newsletter, not just an email. The Plugins often provide customization for the look and design, as well as easy inclusion of blog information and content into the newsletter. Some of these Plugins manage their own subscription lists from the WordPress Administration Panels. Others require a separate mailing list management program or service.
Shift This WordPress Newsletter Plugin offers a newsletter management system from within the WordPress Administration Panels. It features opt-in and out subscriptions, subscribe and unsubscribe automatically, customizable newsletter templates, template tags for customization of the newsletter pages and promotional information, selecting and including information from your posts and recent posts, images, drafts, and so much more. It automatically sends out the email newsletters in batches of 100 with 30 second breaks to keep your server and email service from breaking down or locking up to prevent email spamming.
This is a powerful WordPress Plugin with a ton of features, so it doesn’t come free. It’s USD $20 with some great support to help you set up your newsletter on your WordPress blog.
PHPList Form Integration WordPress Plugin works with the PHPList open source newsletter management program integrated into your WordPress blog. It allows easy management of your newsletter subscriptions. PHPList Helper WordPress Plugin is another PHPList integrator Plugin.
Semiologic Newsletter Manager WordPress Plugin allows registration with a mailing list management service list ezmlm, Mailman, and/or Majordomo from within your WordPress blog. It includes a Widget for adding the Newsletter subscription information to your blog’s sidebar, and easy configuration. Newsletters are sent from the mailing list management program, not from within WordPress.
Feed Subscription WordPress Plugins
You can offer your readers subscriptions to your blog through your feeds. Your feeds include your full blog feed, comments only feed, and specific category feeds. Your feeds can be created and hosted through your WordPress blog, or through Feedburner or other feed hosting services which allow easier monitoring of your feed statistics.
Feed Subscriptions are similar to social bookmarking site submission links and icons. They are a list of the most popular web-based feed reading services for readers to click for fast adding of the blog to their feed reading list. The most common online feed reading services include Bloglines, Google Reader, My AOL, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Rojo, NewsBurst, FeedFeeds, Netvibes, and Feed Lounge.
WordPress Bookmarking Widgets offers a simple list of fifteen different web-based feed readers for inclusion in the visitor’s feed reader.
Other Feed/RSS Subscription WordPress Plugins include:
- Semiologic’s Subscribe Me WordPress Plugin
- Chicklet Creator WordPress Plugin for Feeds
- Subscription Feed Icons WordPress Plugin
- ak-subscribe WordPress Plugin
- TwisterMC - Feed Subscription Button Maker (create your own Feed Subscription List for WordPress)
- Top Rank Results - Feed Subscription Button Maker (create your own Feed Subscription List for WordPress)
If you move or change your blog’s URL or permalink structure, you still want your feed subscribers to track you down, right? Ryan Boren’s Feed Director WordPress Plugin will help you “redirect” your feeds to from the old location to the new without breaking stride. It’s up to you to inform your feed subscribers through your WordPress blog that you have a new location.
Feed subscription services, like Feedburner, have recently added some Widgets and technology to add “encouragements” to get readers to subscribe above and beyond offering them a link. The FeedBurner Awareness WordPress Plugin is one of these. It adds statistics of your Feedburner account to your blog’s sidebar, adding more emphasis to encourage them to sign up for your FeedBurner feed.
Feedburner WordPress Widget allows easy adding of the Feedburner subscription icon to your WordPress Theme sidebar. It includes the choice of different Feedburner icons, and the ability to show other blog services Feedburner hooks into, further expanding your feed subscription coverage.
Related Articles
- Social Bookmarking Submit Links on WordPress Blogs
- Comment Live Preview Placement
- You Got To Earn Your Reputation
- Genealogy Blog: Determining What Features I Want in My Blog
- Things I Want Gone from the Web in 2007
- Comments on Comments
- How NOT to Comment on Comments
- Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!
- Benefits and Uses of Website Feeds
What Subscription WordPress Plugins Are You Using?
Are you using any of these WordPress Subscription Plugins? How are they working for you? What do you like and not like about them?
Have I missed some of your favorites? What are you using to add subscription information to your WordPress blog?
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network 
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24 Comments
Great rundown! I’ve been looking for a good newsletter plugin. Thanks Lorelle!
Hi Lorelle
It might be worth pointing out that if you are using Feedburner then you should also make sure that your autodiscovery also points to Feedburner, otherwise your stats can become split.
It looks like you also had a nice boost today, though I bet a chunk of Google Reader users who use a bookmarklet are subscribed to your WP.com feed
Andy, are you peeking at my details again! Shame on you! I had such respect for you, but now…
Yep, that’s the Google effect at work.
Unfortunately, WordPress.com blogs are stuck with whatever comes with WordPress.com blogs and WordPress.com Themes. For the most part, they are not pointing to Feedburner, so our stats are split if we do it ourselves. Such is the nature of this beast.
But you are right about it for full version bloggers. Good point. Thanks.
I was peeking at lots of people’s details, though of course yours were special and I kept those private.
I found the most interesting stats were the B5 Media stats for niches that Jeremy posted.
It was striking the difference between Techcrunches massive gain, and the small gain for Mashable.
Great Work
Thanks!
I don’t understnd the comments about Feedburner, can someone please explain?
You have to be more specific about what you want to know. Feedburner is an optional way of having your feeds from your blog available to the public in addition to or as an alternate to your WordPress default feeds. Feedburner monitors your feed statistics and offers extra options not available with the default WordPress feeds.
It’s pretty good to have articles like this one,where somebody invests his valuable time in order to get a list of the best for email list, mailing list, build a list No doubt you’ve heard that list building is an absolute must,Resources to help internet marketers and online business people use eBay for list building and cash flow generation.
http://www.theessentialsoftrading.com/Blog
Hi,
I am only new to blogging and am trying to define my 3 blogs I have put up this week.I have been searching and asking questions for days about setting up contact forms in wordpress and don’t seem to be getting anywhere until now. Thankyou for this list. Now I know it is possible to do it simply I hope. For my new lists this would be great. If I use a newsletter plugin do I need to add a special page or is that done thru the plugin?
As I said this will be good for my new list I intend to do. But I already have a list that has subscribed to a free report thru a AR series and would like to be able to intergrate this subscription on one of my blogs. More than just a link to the signin page. Is there an easy way to do this.?
Thanks Again
Gail
yo i love this
Just what I needed.
Thanks! I have been searching for a basic newsletter plugin for some time.
Kudos!
hmm is there one that redirects the information to another email system such as aweber? I know VPM has a script that it does this, but I do not want to interrupt the comments ajax system, since the VPM script is a redirect
trying to use a mailing campaign for subscribers of comments
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about the ShiftThis WordPress Newsletter Plug-in. What I read on their site has been helpful, but hearing from someone who believes that this product could be helpful encourages me to go ahead and make that purchase.
I tried out the Shift This Newsletter Plugin and found it very difficult to use. I think it is an excellent idea and has some great potential but it is not ready for distribution. If you look on their support forums there are several issues/bugs that need to be worked out. I spent two weeks trying to get it up and running and couldn’t. Was able to get a few issues worked out through other users that had similar issues on the support forum. However the tech support is minimal and slow. I finally asked for a refund and was granted it within 5 minutes of my email. I must not have been the first to request a refund.
I hope that in the future the bugs and issues can be worked out or someone else can create a similar plug in because there are quite a few of us out there that would love to use it if it could work properly.
Hope this helps!
I’ve often thought that all these different types of plugins would be better as one. Finally I’ve managed it! I have Subscribe2 as my subscription system. Set it to automatically sign up new users of the site. Then, have a WordPress login/register box on the sidebar (I use the fantastic “AJAX Login” plugin with a bit of HTML tweaking). Users will register with the site, be automatically added as a subscriber for new updates, and you can use the simple Mail Subscribers link that Subscribe2 adds to the Write section of WP to do your newsletters. One signup, multiple functions!
nice post..
i just released a simple WP plugin that will allow visitors to subscribe / unsubscribe to an ezmlm mailing list - directly from a WordPress website - without having to manually send this email request from your email client software. it’s a free plugin, you can read more about it (as well as download it) here. anyway, i remembered reading this post a while back, and thought i’d come back and comment here once i finally got around to releasing my plugin.
keep up the good work!
You guys are awesome
Of course, these functions are the most effective methods keep in touch with your readers, to increase traffic and promote your business.
Lorelle, I keep doing google searches to improve my blog and your site consistently appears high up in google…and this is because your content is always clear, concise, and informative.
This morning’s google search was “automatically email updates plugin”. I searched for this because my mom said “how do I know when your site is updated? Do I have to go back to it each time?”
I especially liked your suggestions that…ïf you update your post too many times, people will be bombarded with emails. This is definitely a good thought. I think weekly updates will be better for me.
Again, thanks for all the information. It’s quite helpful and I will refer to it often.
Richard
@ Richard:
Thank you, and the answer to your mother’s question is “feeds” not email. Email subscriptions are one thing, but feeds are the answer to knowing when a site is updated. Teach her about feeds. She’ll have much more fun on the web and get faster access to interesting information.
Love it! Send me everything!
Thanks for this list. Your posts are so helpful!
I am looking for a way that users can subscribe to both new posts and updated posts/pages. Not just updates for one post, but whole categories or the site.
The Advanced Mailer Using AJAX WordPress Plugin sounds like it might be what I need, but it seems to be offline. I can’t find it… Anyone have suggestions?
@ Tzaddi:
I don’t understand what you are looking for. Do you want to notify “subscribers” by email or through their feed reader. See Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds for information on customizing feeds with WordPress, including by category. You can use FeedBlitz or Feedburner to email feed “updates” automatically to subscribers, too. See Integrating FeedBlitz Feed Email Service Into WordPress for how to do that. It’s really simple and requires no Plugin. It’s automatic. Does that answer your question?
Thanks Lorelle. Ideally I’d give people the option of RSS or email. I understand that you can use feedburner etc. for emailing the RSS feed, and how that works (more or less) on newly published content. The part I’m not clear on, is whether when you update a previously published post or page, can that be included in a ‘broadcast’ by email or RSS. Basically the content in question (rules, regulations) will be updated from time to time, and visitors will want to be notified when the rules/regs have been updated. If you have any tips they’re most appreciated
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