Author:  Mitch Keeler

Did you know that you could create yourself an instant newsletter and a new way for people to follow you around the web with just a few simple ingredients?

Now, gather your supplies:

• Lunarpages Hosting Account
• FeedBurner Account
• RSS Feed

I know many of Lunarpages customers are using FeedBurner to burn their blog’s feed, so that they can gain extra information from it such as subscriber and click-through numbers.  However, did you know you can offer your readers a way to subscribe by e-mail?  In turn, you would be creating an instant newsletter for people to follow.  Now here is what you need to do.

First, login to your FeedBurner account, and then click on the RSS feed that you want to create the “subscribe by e-mail” feature for. Now click on the tab labeled Publicize on the FeedBurner web site.  Now, down the left side of the page – you want to look for a link named, “Email Subscriptions” and click it. After you have activated the service at the bottom of the Email Subscriptions page, you can start to customize it some.

On the left-side menu you should have these options available:

• Subscription Management – Go here to grab your code for your subscription box or get a text link that people can click when they want to sign up to get e-mail updates from your RSS feed.
• Communication Preferences – Here you can change the from address, the confirmation e-mail subject and the confirmation e-mail body.
• Email Branding – On the Email Branding page, give your e-mail updates a title, a logo, and decide the font settings you want the updates to be displayed in.
• Delivery Options – Select your time zone here, and set a time for the e-mails to be delivered.

Now all you have to do is go to the Subscription Management page, grab the code you want to use (either a form or a text link), put it into your web page somewhere and then watch the followers come rolling in.

Here’s an extra secret.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the Subscription Management page, you can also find out how many of your subscribers are coming in via e-mail.

Hope this comes in handy for those of you who have RSS feeds to follow, and use FeedBurner to give them a few extra perks.