email subscription box

Some time back, I implemented a link in the sidebar that let you subscribe by email to Beyond the Rhetoric. I figured that a good chunk of visitors didn’t use RSS feed aggregators, but they would all have an email address. By providing this additional option, BTR could reach a wider audience and everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, that link hasn’t worked very well for me and it has only resulted in a very small handful of new subscriptions.

So, I’ve decided to step it up a little more. As you can see in the screenshot above, the email subscription form is now on the site itself, rather than being just a link to the Feedburner page. In this way, you can type in your email address here, hit the enter button, and you’ll be sent to the anti-spam page where you have to enter a Captcha code. From here, a message will be sent to your email address. Click on the confirmation link and then you’re styling.

You may also notice the implementation of the MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad plug-in. Among the ad rotation is a link for subscribing to Beyond the Rhetoric. This is the regular RSS feed, so you’ll need some sort of aggregator like Google Reader for that.