How to Subscribe to (almost) Any Blog by Email
You want to keep up with blogs, but you don't want to visit each and every single blog to see if there's something new. And you don't want to learn another yet another technology platform, because any learning curve is too steep and adds friction.
There is good news. You already know how to use email. What if you could get new blog posts delivered conveniently into your inbox? Yes, that is possible with almost any blog, including this one!
New Blog Posts in Your Email Inbox
To subscribe to any blog, go to blogtrottr.com and enter the URL of the blog and your email address. There's an option for how often you want the service to check the blog for you, from real-time, every few hours, or once a day. Then click the "Feed Me" button and you'll receive a confirmation email to verify your subscription. That's it. The blogtrottr.com service has a freemium pricing model, which means the free level comes ad-supported and different paid levels give you extra features with no ads.
Here's a great example. You can subscribe to this .BIBLE blog by entering http://get.bible/blog as the URL at blogtrottr.com, add your email, click the "Feed Me", and click on the link in the confirmation email.
Convenience of Blog Posts by Email
Now you don't have to visit a bunch of different websites to see if there's something new on their blogs. You can probably skim your email content faster than navigating websites with different designs and formats. You won't miss anything new on useful blogs. You don't have to learn new terms like RSS. You don't have to install extra software. You don't have to learn how to use another program. You can have everything in one place, that is, your email program.
Want to also mention this: a lot of people use Microsoft Outlook. Some versions, like Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016, have a function to subscribe to RSS feeds. This way you can have your blog posts in separate folders instead of being mixed in with your other emails.
Subscribe to Almost Any Blog
You may have noticed that the title of this blog post includes the word "almost." Technically, there are so many different blog formats. But not all of them have the underlying technology called "RSS feed" that makes a blog subscribeable. We wanted to be honest here. While you can subscribe to most blogs, you may come across 1 or 2 that you can't subscribe to. In those cases, contact the blog publisher and share this blog post with them. Refer them to the next section that has useful information for how to make a blog subscribeable by email.
There used to be other web services that would let people subscribe to blog RSS feeds by email. But many of them have disappeared into the sunset.
How Blog Publishers Can Reach More Readers
Blog authors and publishers can add the feature of subscribing to blog by email. There are instructions for Jetpack, WordPress.com blogs, and Drupal. If you use a different blogging platform, check the help section. If you can't find that feature, you could use this embed code from blogtrottr. FeedBurner can generate an adaptive RSS feed and also deliver new blog content to subscribers' emails. However, there hasn't been any news on their blog since 2012, so take that into consideration if you want to use it.
With some email marketing services, the subscriber's email goes into a database that's also used for your email newsletters, like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, FeedBolt for Infusionsoft, or Hubspot. There are dozens of other commercial and enterprise solutions for content marketing using the RSS technology; this article is just a starter list.
Not convinced yet? Jane Friedman elaborates more on why you should add email subscription service to your blog.
What if you don't want more emails?
While practically everyone online knows how to use email, there are other users that want to use more powerful apps to keep up with a hundred blogs or more. To do that, you can use one of these popular RSS readers: Feedly, Inoreader, or NewsBlur. Some are web-based, some have mobile apps, some are desktop apps, some are free and some are paid. Try a couple of them and see which one is most intuitive and easy to learn for you.
Fear of Missing Out
With so much information circulating digitally today, we all have to figure out how to filter out the signal from the noise, what's important from what's junk. There are also important information from different sources that you don't want to miss. This is where subscribing to blogs by email can be a useful time-saver for you. Add a comment if you've found other ways to help you manage news and information. We want to learn from you too.