Da Blogmother

Setting Up A FeedBlitz Newsletter

Feedblitz turns your blog into an email newsletter, by grabbing each blog post and sending it out to your subscriber list as an email.

Everyone following my foray into FeedBlitz, here are the basic steps in setting up a new newsletter:

After creating your account, go to My Account, My Dashboard

Under Newsletter Center, click Set up a newsletter

Under Article creation, select Automatically, from an RSS feed or blog.

Enter the URL or your Bog.  (Yes FeedBlitz works with Active Rain -- the URL of your Active Rain Blog looks something like this http://activerain.com/blogs/cheryljns  )

Most blogs automatically generate RSS feeds.  FeedBlitz will ask whether you want to use the Atom, RSS1 or RSS2 feed to create your newsletter.  Click on the View (binoculars) icon to see a sample of each feed.  Click on the words "Atom" or "RSS" to select that version of the feed.

Here is what the sample subscription looks like for my NELA Live blog with the ATOM feed.  (By the way, my RSS feed looks the same.)

FeedBlitz will then walk you through about 10 different set-up screens.  FeedBlitz will work just fine even if you leave all of these blank, or just accept the defaults.  One setting that was important for me:  I choose Express Delivery... The email is sent out as soon as I publish the blog post:

When the set-up is complete, FeedBlitz will take you to the Summary page.  Click Add subscription forms to your site to grab the HTML to copy and paste into your blog.

Drag over the HTML code to select it.  Hit Edit -> Copy.  Now you are ready to Paste the code into your blog or website.  The finished Widget (with a tiny bit of tweaking) looks like this:

The email newsletter received by your subscribers looks like this:

Testing FeedBlitz

A great thing about Active Rain is that I can use it as a testing ground for features I am considering for "outside blogs".

Case in point:  FeedBlitz.  You'll notice I installed the FeedBlitz subscription widget in the right column column of my Active Rain Blog.  Readers wanting to subscribe to the blog by email can just enter their email address and click "subscribe me".

And since I always test things things all the way through ....

After clicking on "subscribe me" a reader will be taken to the verification page, like this:

Followed by an instruction/disclaimer page like this:

And they are sent a activation email, that they must respond to in order to activate the subscription, like this:

OK.  I think most of my outside blog readers can handle this.  Now to get the other blogs set up on the FeedBlitz "Newsletter" program.

I'll post my info on how to do ~that~ later.