Wordpress has become the content management system of choice for many people using the internet. Its customisable design, its ease of use, and its constant updating, makes it a very popular blogging tool.
One factor that can be used to full effect is its subscription options, as it is not just limited through providing blogs via RSS, and indeed, wordpress has many options when it comes to subscripting.
The RSS option, is probably the most obvious choice, as so many different kind of sites use it, and is especially popular amongst news agencies. Wordpress not only allows general subscriptions to all the blogs in a site, but can allow a user to choose blogs by categories, or even tags, to subscribe too.
There are two way to do this, one is by using permalinks, and this is the most straight forward, as all someone needs to do is to add add/feed at the end of a category URL to get its feed. If permalinks are not enabled, then the process is the same but &feed=rss2 needs to be added.
For example
Permalinks: http://www.yourblog.com/tag/sky/feed/
Default: http://www.yourblog.com/?cat=2&feed=rss2
The amazing thing about wordpress, is that anything can be turned into a feed, from comments, to searching, all by appending the feed indicator to the URL.
As wordpress subscription tips go, this one is a very useful one for readers of your blog.
Another tip and another feed tip at that, is that it is possible just to subscribe to specific entry comments, or all comments. This is handy if there is a discussion that you just want to follow, and do not want to read everything that is on the site. Similarly, you may want to read everything that is on the site, so the latter option is the one for you.
Wordpress also offers the option of updates via email. It is a preferred method of blog notification for many users, and good wordpress sites offer a weekly, or daily update using the medium. One of the reasons readers go for this option, is that there RSS feed reader could already be crowded with other blogs, and an extra one can end up getting lost.
An excellent wordpress subscription tip, is to create a subscription page where all the details of available subscriptions are shown. Here you can state that there are more options available than just a simple RSS feed, and that email on a daily and weekly basis is available, as well as subscription options of email notification if someone replies to a comment. Just make sure you have the subscribe to comments plug-in installed. This is also true of the newsletter option, where a subscription box is required for this purpose. You can also state that updates to the RSS feed can be narrowed down to categories or tags, and how to set it up. Another useful wordpress subscription tip here is to include all the links if you do not have too many categories. The subscription page also makes a blog look very professional, and this promotes a very positive image.
By ensuring that the options for subscriptions are clear, and nicely presented, will promote your blog favorably with your readership. If the blog is a very busy one, this will help your readers choose the blogs they want to read about more easily, and this is also an added bonus.
The subscription page is a big factor in making your blog more professional, and is worth taking the time and the effort over, to make it as good as it can be.
We hope these wordpress subscription tips, help you in making the options available very clear.
