But is that enough ? I claim that the answer is NO.

An RSS feed can be read in many places such as Google Reader, the browser, or in one of the many reader applications.  These are tools that make you just one of the crowd. In order to get your message right “in the face” of your reader you would be better off by receiving your message directly in the visitors inbox.

The simplest solution would be to enable the rss to email feature in Feedburner or FeedBlitz, but that is only good for users that actually click on your RSS link and know and see that there is an option to sign up via email.

So to solve this the correct path to getting visitors to sign-up via email is to add a signup form to your blog (in addition to the RSS link or icon).

Here is a simple example of a signup form and button (that actually works, so try it out!) :

And here is the HTML code example :

<form action=”http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify” method=”get”> <input name=”email” type=”text” value=”type your email here” /> <input type=”submit” value=”Send” /> <input name=”uri” type=”hidden” value=”bloginstall” /></form>

Be sure to change the URI value to your feed name.

Below you will see the outcome of our simple form, a direct insertion of the email into the feedburner email signup form.

Feedburner Signup Form

This is all great, but there is still one downside to this wonderful tip! This is all based on the usage of feedburner, that means that we have great statistics but no emails of the actual visitors. For some that is not a problem or a concearn, but what can you do when you want to sent your subscribers a notice, offer or update that is not a post on your wordpress site ?

Well, we will deal with that problem in the next email marketing post next week.