Create a Free Email Newsletter Service using WordPress
As you see now, more and more bloggers are adding weekly email newsletter service on their blog. A lot of their audience subscribe to the weekly newsletter because it summarizes the week worth of activities on the blog, and it has exclusive tips just for the subscribers. There are many email newsletter solutions like Aweber, one of the most recommended one, but they all charge money. The solution we are going to mention in here by no means can compare to the features provided by the premium service like Aweber, and it must not be considered as the better system. Our solution is rather to give bloggers an affordable and functional method to create newsletter by using the open source software that we all love, WordPress.
In this tutorial, we will be using WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to create a simple Email Newsletter Service for your WordPress blog. You can track the performance of your newsletter by checking how many subscribers you have, how many clicks each link gets and much more.
Note: The codes referenced in this article will vary across themes because each designer has their own style of coding. So look for something similar or along the line of that code. This is by no means an advanced tutorial, but HTML and CSS Knowledge is recommended.
Step 1 – Add a New Category
In the first step of this tutorial, you will need to create a new category for your posts in WordPress. You can create a new category by visiting Posts > Categories Tab in your WordPress admin panel. You can name the category anything you like. For the sake of example, we will call it Email Newsletter.
One of the things that you need to make sure that you do is to note the category ID of this new category that you created. It will be very crucial that you know this ID. Through out this tutorial, we will be using the parameter [Replace with your Category Id] and where ever you see this tag, you must replace it with the category ID of this new category.
Here is you can find the category ID. Simply go to Posts > Categories. Bring your mouse over the category that you created and look at the status bar.
So for example, the category ID of the category we created will be 10. Make sure that you replace each code that looks like this [Replace with your Category Id] with your category ID.
Step 2 – Excluding Category From the List
Usually blogs have a list of categories in their sidebar, header, archive pages, footer and other places depending on the design. What our goal is in step 2 is to exclude our Email Newsletter category from all these category lists. In other words, we are hiding our category, so it is not shown to normal viewers of the site because the material in this category is only for Newsletter Subscribers. You will need to look in your template and see where the category list is located most commonly sidebar.php. Locate the similar code:
<?php wp_list_categories('&title_li=<h2>Categories</h2>'); ?>
and Replace it with the one below:
<?php wp_list_categories('exclude=[Replace with your Category Id]&title_li=<h2>Categories</h2>'); ?>
Make sure you insert your category ID in this code. Some themes have the above code in other files as mentioned, so you must check where your categories are being displayed and replace it to the above one.
Now no user can see your category from the list, but there is a lot more that we have to do.
Step 3 – Exclude the Posts from Our Email Newsletter Category
All of the posts from Email Newsletter category is still visible to all site users. They can see it in RSS, Search pages, Homepage, and Archives. Instead of individually adding the code to each file, we will use the plugin called Advanced Category Excluder (ACE) which will make the job a lot faster and a lot easier for new WordPress users.
When you are in the settings of ACE plugin, make sure you check your Newsletter category in all the boxes except for Single Posts.
The only code that you might have to change is in your template is in yoursingle.php and that is only if you have navigation like the default WordPress theme does where it lets the user go to Next post and Previous post. If your theme do have that then look in your single.php file for a code related to navigatoin and replace it with the one below:
<div class="navigation"><div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('« %link', '%title', FALSE, '10') ?></div><div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('» %link', '%title', FALSE, '10') ?></div></div>
Step 4 – Create a New Feed in FeedBurner
Your secret category has a feed of its own. If you are using the SEO Friendly URL Structure like we suggested, then your feed URL will look like:
http://www.yoursitename.com/category/category-slug/feed/
If you are using the default URL structure, your feed URL will look like:
http://www.yoursitename.com/?feed=rss2&cat=[Replace with your Category Id]
Once you have your URL, you must create a new feed (burn) in FeedBurner. If you do not have an account already, create an account and then enter your feed URL in a field that looks like the one below:
Enter your URL and click Next. You will see a screen like one below:
Enter the details and click Next and Your Feed is now setup. Now it is time to jump onto our next step where we will setup an email service.
Step 5 – Enabling Email Newsletter
Once you have your Feed setup, you will need to click on the Publicize tab and then click on the Email Subscription Tab in order to activate it. Like the screenshot below:
Once you have activated the service, you will see a code that you can copy and paste in your theme file in order to display a form for users to insert their email and subscribe.
You may customize the styling of the form to fit your needs. Place it where ever you like on your site, but it is wise to put it some where notable where people will actually see it and subscribe to it.
Step 6 – Must Have Full Text Feeds
Before you actually send out the newsletter, there is one WordPress setting that you must change in order to keep your readers happy. You must allow Full Text in your RSS Feeds, so your readers do not see an excerpt instead they see the whole article. That is the point of having a newsletter. To change this setting, you will need to go to Settings > Reading in your WP-Admin Panel and click on Full Text instead of Summary.
Step 7 – Sending Newsletter
Now we are at the final step of this tutorial. To send a newsletter all you need to do is publish a post into your secret category. The way we have it setup, your WordPress blog will then report to FeedBurner that a new post is posted, and an email will be dispatched to all of your users at a delivery time of your choice. It will not be sent out instantly, so it gives you a chance to edit your entry before it goes out. To control what time the article is dispatched you can go into your FeedBurner admin area > Publicize Tab > Email Subscription > Delivery Options
One of the ways if you want to send the Newsletter instantly is to change the delivery option after each post considering you are only making them weekly.
Conclusion
This method is no where near the capabilities that premium services like Aweber are capable of, but this is a functional method that can be used. Our method is affordable, and it gets the job done. But you must remember that a user can always choose to unsubscribe to your newsletter via email and subscribe via RSS once they know what is the URL to the feed is. There are other ways such as creating a whole new subdomain blog just for Email Newsletter which some users prefer. We recommend that you try this on a test account and then implement on your site if you like it.
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wow…cool tutorial, i’ll implement this technique in my blog soon. Thanks ^^
Sounds good…Will have to try this out.
Thanks! This is great and I will def use it!
This looks really good. I will try it on a couple of my blogs.
Thanks!
Hi,
Followed you over from the PB forum. Great tutorial! My main concern or question is:
Is there any way to do this without resorting to using the ACE plugin?
Let me know, as I once used the ACE plugin and nearly destroyed a blog of mine. It’s very confusing a plugin.
Missy
There is a way to do it without the ACE plugin, but that also has downsides in terms of pagination and such. This is by far the most efficient way to do this. We suggest that you install ACE Plugin and follow the settings exactly how we have it. Try it on a test blog first, and then imply it on your real blog if you are comfortable with it.
Great tutorial.
A good idea for a following post would be to show how to get insights about the newsletters performance.
If you really want to make professional Newsletter Marketing then this solution is nothing worth. You have no control over the subscribers as well as you have no idea if somebody will read your newsletter. I think its better to check the Mailchimp Service which is for up to 500 Subscribers free. With Mailchimp you can even use a WordPress Page as source for the newsletter as well as i have implemented a subscribe to Newsletter Checkbox in the comments area.
But, have fun with this feedburner e-mail newsletter.
Like we said by no means this solution can compare up to the features offered by professional services like Aweber and Mailchimp. But this is just one functional method for new bloggers who want to try out things.
We have been doing something similar except we haven’t hid the category, as our blog postings really are the newsletter for us. For an example please see http://blogs.elca.org/faithlens/ Thanks for sharing your technique.
Thanks for the info. Very clear tutorial. I’ll have to try it.
Thanks, This is a great tutorial to use feedburner with WordPress,
Simple and thorough! Great job on covering all the cracks one might forget about.
Thanks for this, going to try it now.
Thanks for this! I use a paid service for my main site, however I have a few other projects that will have smaller newsletters and I was thinking of trying something like this. Having this as a resource will be helpful.
Lakita
(From PB.com)
for me, the only problem with feedburner as a newsletter is it doesn’t allow importing email addresses.
wow, this is an amazing and a very useful tutorial.
thanks
very useful indeed. i’m liking this site a lot.
Well Written Tutorial! Thank you very much.. have learned soo much from this, I would prefer this over Mailchimp.
Why? You can’t do real email marketing with this, the author says that himself… Just because it’s “free” ?
You cannot do real email marketing with this not because it is free, but because it does not offer a lot of the features you would really need in the future if you got serious into email marketing. You cannot send out welcome email to subscribers with this, you cannot send out emails when you want to without hassling with the settings every time. There are a lot more that you cannot do, but if you were using Aweber, you can.
does this work
It would’ve been great if you showed what the newsletter would appear as in the recipients inbox. AFAIK, Feedburner doesn’t allow you to customize the template sent to the recipient.
It looks just like Feedburner emails look like. If you don’t know how that does, then it is best that you research that first.
So I have tried to do this for a couple days now, NO E-MAILS!!! The feed is getting to feedburner (shows up) but they are not sending any e-mails. I have tried 2 separate Google accounts all sorts of different settings, etc. Notta! ANY, and I do mean ANY help you could give me it would be MUCH appreciated! THANK YOU!
We can’t tell you anything until you tell us more details. Which feed, which site etc. Do not comment here instead use the contact form for further assistance.
Excellent! Only missing select via blog-by-mail the category of post. It would be perfect!
Fantastic. I’m going to use this to create my own email newsletters on my other blogs. Thank you very much.
Really brilliant tip.But in this method we have very little control over handling newsletters like handling bounced newsletters, replying mails, advanced tracking and much more.
But this will be great news for beginners who are seeking ideal and promising platform for delivering newsletters at free of cost
This one’s a first class tutorial, you are one genius still living today lol. It was long to read but it’s worth it. I hope I can make it work. Can you also manually add emails in there?
Yes through the form, but those emails must be verified.
Thanks, This is a great tutorial !
Great tutorial. For newsletters I currently use http://www.ymlp.com, which is free for mailings of up to 1000 a month. In future I will definitely consider using this as an alternative, though.
That’s ingenius! Screw Aweber and spending money! Problem with this method though is that you still don’t have access to readers’ email addresses.
Yes you do, you can see the emails by simply going to your feedburner account and click on View details about subscribers and it will show the breakdown. In this case it will be just email subscribers and you click on that and it will list all emails.
Excellent tutorial though I haven’t got need for an email newsletter service @ the moment. Would make a great addition to my blog posts of the week this Friday.
@Lucas: It appears that Feedburner sometimes fails to send out emails. My last blog post is yet to be delivered to my inbox and I wonder why.
Hey!
Pretty cool way to do this, newsletter thing!
thats really a great stuff. thankz a lot. will use this in our corporate blog, which will be launched soon.
Great information, thanks!
It feels better to learn the trick. Thanx for sharing.
Is it typical for the newsletters to go straight into spam? I find it that if providers like Google and Yahoo don’t recognize or trust the source (like they would with Aweber), then they’ll place the newsletters directly into Spam.
It depends on the information in the newsletter as well. Sometimes Aweber newsletter from some providrers go into SPAM.
Thanks, I decided to try it out on my email address. I just completed the tutorial and I wanted to know how I can edit the way the subscription box appears on my website. Are there other choices to choose from?
Editing the look of the email box is simply HTML and CSS. You would have to have good knowledge of both of those languages in order to do that.
Sounds good…Thanks!!
very helpful indeed..but i am having problem. My post is not sent as an email newsletter to the subscribers though the post is available in the feedburner which means the feed has been burnt successfully but no email to the subscribers….plz help
Feedburner does not send out an email instantly. It delivers once every 24 hours on the time that you have it set as.
not even after 24 hours the email is sent out. I am assuming that any new post i write in the email newsletter category will be sent as an email to the subscribers.
There must be a setup error Humaira because feedburner sends out an email once a day.
Thanks for this article. I think I’ll try it for my new page.
Excellent tutorial. Thank you for sharing.
Hi in some web site I see that they are giving their Free Product only if i put my email address there. This is a Great trick to build up list for further use. Most of them use aweber service which i can’t. Can i do it with FREE service like mailchimp or Feebburner ??
Mailchimp is only free for the first 500 subscribers… afterwords its not.
Hello there.
I am looking for a newsletter to put in my wordpress.
I was wondering what controls you have over this.
1. I have a list of emails on my hand. Can I manually subscribe them by myself?
2. Does it send out welcome message once someone subscribes?
3. Does it give the choice for ppl to unsubscribe easily?
4. Any limits on how many emails at once?
Thank you! Great tutorial!
There is no easy way of manually adding emails to FeedBurner. It does not send a welcome message. People can subscribe easily with a link in their footer. No limit to how many emails.