Stay in Touch with Your Blog Community with E-Mail Options

Offering e-mail delivery of some or all of your blog content to your readership can attract users who aren't comfortable with some of the fancier technologies, such as RSS. Try these three tactics with e-mail options for your blogs:

• Allow your readers send a blogpost to a friend that might also be interested.

• Let your users sign up for e-mail notifications when you post something new to your blog.

• Invite your readers sign up for an e-mail newsletter that supplements your blog or recaps recent blog posts of interest.

Many blog software programs have a built in "Tell a Friend" or "Email a Friend" functionality. If you turn on this feature, every blog post is accompanied by a small icon or linkthat, when clicked, lets your reader fill out the name and e-mail address of a friend and send an e-mail notification about your blog post to them. It's like free marketing.

Setting up your blog to enable users to sign up for e-mail notifications when a new blog entry is posted is an easy way to reach users who aren't up on newsreaders and RSS. Allowing them to sign up and also to remove themselves from your e-mail system puts them in control of the situation, too, which means you won't be contributing to the spamproblem. The FeedBurner site gives you the tools to set up an e-mail notification/subscription tool.