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Nitty Gritty: Feedburner Day Two

by Megan

Thanks for joining me again for:

If you missed Day One, find it here!

Today we are going to talk about adding the “Follow by Email” widget to your blog, connecting it to your current feed, and exporting a list of your email subscribers.

To add the widget to your blog, just go to your layout and click on “add a gadget.”

A window will pop-up. Scroll down until you see “Follow by Email” and click on the blue box with the plus sign.

You will be shown this screen (below), where you’ve been assigned a feed address for your email subscribers. Here is where I made a mistake when I set mine up for the first time (I’ll explain below)! You already have a feed address, and you know what it is, from yesterday, right? Well, change the FeedBurner URL box to show your current, established feed address, and click “Save.”

Now, on your layout screen, move the box that says “Follow by Email” to wherever you want it to show up on your blog. View your blog, and you will see the widget with the form that allows visitors to enter their email address and become an email subscriber to your blog.

Now, about the mistake I made. As you can see, when you add this widget, Blogger wants to assign you a new feed address. I left it that way, and that is why I now have two feeds. Several people subscribed via email to the new feed that Blogger created, so I have my original feed address, plus another feed address with a handful of email subscribers. I have since gone back and edited my “Follow by Email” widget to point to my original feed address, so any new email subscribers will be added to my larger feed.

From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like there is a way to transfer the email subscribers from one feed to another, so the only option is to contact those subscribers, ask them to resubscribe to your other feed (or you can do it for them, just enter their email addresses into the widget on your blog, and they will have to confirm), and hope that most of them do it! When they have resubscribed, then you could delete your old feed. Of course there is nothing wrong with having two feeds for your blog, but I like to streamline everything!

And that brings me to our last topic of today, exporting your email subscribers, so that you can contact them directly if needed (i.e. to tell them to resubscribe to your other feed!).

Log into Feedburner, click on your feed, and click on the “Publicize” tab. Then, on the left sidebar, click on “Email Subscriptions.”

Scroll down and click on “View Subscriber Details” to expand the page, and then click on “Export: CSV.”

Your computer will prompt you to save the file, so save it where you want to keep the information, and then you’re done! It will be an excel spreadsheet file with the email addresses, date they subscribed, and whether or not they are active (meaning they are receiving the emails, as opposed to a delivery failure to that address).

So there you go! Now you know how to add the “Follow by Email” widget to your blog, point it to the correct feed address, and export your list of email subscribers. Tomorrow I will teach you how to customize the emails that get sent to your subscribers. See you then!

See my full list of Feedburner tips!

Sources:
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6 comments

still being [molly] June 19, 2012 - 4:11pm

this is a great detailed post! i actually just switched away from feedburner cause i was having so much trouble with it – so many errors and feed issues – i’d used feedburner for years! but for some reason can’t get it to work right anymore… i know so many people who love it and never have a problem. who knows what happened? lol

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Megan10e June 19, 2012 - 7:01pm

Oh no, really? What did you switch to? I didn’t even know I was using Feedburner until I started researching this stuff!

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