One of the questions some readers have is how to embed an email subscribe form inside of your post, like I do with mine at the end of all my posts. You know, the one that looks like this:
This is actually very simple and here are the steps on how you can setup your own “email subscribe” form in your own post. This works for blogger, wordpress or any other blogging platform as it is basic HTML tags and no custom PHP code.
Step 1 – Find your Feedburner Email Subscribe link.
Log into feedburner, click on your blog name and then click on the “Publicize Tab”
Click on “Email Subscriptions” to the left and “activate” email subscriptions if you don’t have it activated already.
To the right you will see the generic Google subscription form, you can use this but I found it to be too bulky and I wanted something more streamlined.
So instead, just copy your “Feedburner Mail URL” you can see it in the box below:
Step 2 – Edit your Single.php and input your form
You will want to either add your “subscribe via email” form inside your single.php (you could add it to your index.php but you will see the “subscribe via email many times on your homepage and this may be too redundant and annoy your readers so I suggest you only add it to your single.php (let your normal “Email subscribe” button or sidebar link handle your index.php visitors.
Edit your single.php and look for this line:
<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>
If you put the below code above this line, then your email subscribe will be before your post content (at the top of your post). If you put the below code below this line, then your email subscribe form will be below your post content. I see many bloggers do it both ways, I prefer to have it after my content so that if a reader enjoyed reading my content they can see the email subscribe right away rather than having to scroll back to the top of the post where they may have forgotten I had one. I have also seen many bloggers put them right at the top of their post as well so it is a matter of personal preference.
When you build your form you want to use the HTML code below, but make sure you replace the parts in RED with your custom Feedburner Email URL. The orange text you can customize your message right before the user inputs their email and clicks submit, and finally the light blue part has to be the value of your FeedBurner URI=
<center>
<form style=”background-color: #000000; border:8px solid #ccc;padding:0px;text-align:center;” action=”http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify” method=”post” target=”popupwindow” onsubmit=”window.open(‘http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DragonBlogger‘, ‘popupwindow’, ‘scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520’);return true”>If you enjoyed this post, Subscribe via Email:<p><input type=”text” style=”width:185px” value=”enter email address” onmousedown=”this.value = ”;” name=”email”/><input type=”hidden” value=”DragonBlogger” name=”uri”/><input type=”hidden” name=”loc” value=”en_US”/><input type=”submit” value=”Subscribe” /></p></form>
</center>
Summary:
It is pretty easy to add an email subscribe form in your post and I think it does help increase the number of people who subscribe to your blog. The whole key is to make subscribing as easy as possible and this is one option to help remind readers to become a follower of your blog.
If you enjoyed this article, drop me a comment and let me know if you enjoyed the code and will start using it or are already using it.