Allowing viewers to follow your ExploreMA Blog with email

This is a revised version of this post.

The Market America ExploreMA mini-web sites (like this one), allow you to insert a Google Blogspot Blog into the site.   Several of us are still working to figure out the best ways to actually use and publicize these Blogs.  I talked to tech support (actually "live chatted") and they said that right now the Archive and About Me are the only features being exported.

One thing that is apparent early on is that many of the features that are available to a stand-alone Blogspot blog are not available when the blog is inserted into an ExploreMA mini-site.  You cannot allow viewers to search your blog or follow you by email etc.   You can add this feature to your blog, but it doesn't show inside the mini-site.

There is an alternative.

Google purchased a following service called Feedburner.

1.  Login - If you have a Gmail account, you can send your browser to http://feedburner.google.com.  There is a login area in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  You use the same login that you do with you Gmail account.
2. Click on your Blog - you should see a link to you Blogspot blog near the top of the page in large blue letters.   Click on it.
3. Now you have a set of tabs - click on PUBLICIZE
4. There will be a set of links down the left side.   Find "Emails Subscription" link and click on it.
5. Scroll down the page and you will find some code that you can cut and paste.  Use the second set of code (the short one).  This code is specific to your blog.   You can include it at the bottom of each of your posts and people will be able to sign up and follow your blog via email.

Here is what mine looks like.

<a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=HaleAndRobynsMaBlog&amp;loc=en_US">Subscribe to Hale and Robyn's MA Blog by Email</a>

If I paste this directly,  I need to click on the Edit HTML link when creating this post in order to turn this code in to convert the < and > signs into their actually values - the pasting function converted them to the HTML equivalents which are things like "&lt;:  I can also click on the "LINK" link and insert it that way.  If I use that method, I need to put the "Subscribe...Email" on the "what people see line" and the "http://...._en_US" on the URL line.

Another way to get this link on ALL of your posts if to go into the blog editor, click on the SETTINGS tab and then of the FORMATTING link.    At the bottom of the screen (after you scroll down) there is a box called "Post Template"   You can paste the link you got from Feedburner into this box and the link will appear automatically every time you create a new post.   You will have to put your post above the automatic line if you want it at the bottom of your post, but it is already there and it is correctly formatted.

There is a catch to this.  The automatic link does not sent you to your mini-web site.  It sends you to the stand-alone blog page.  This page can include the missing features I mentioned above.  On the other hand, it is not part of your mini-recruiting web site so it sort of defeats the purpose of the blog.

Again, there is a way to get around this.   Place links back to your mini-site in your profile and in the header text for your Blogger page.  You won't see either of these when the blog is shown in the mini-site.  Here is an example:

This shows my blog as it appears in the mini-site.

You can see that there is a blog post and a way to view previous posts on the right.  The top of the screen is the main menu for the mini-web site.

Now - here is the same blog when viewed as a stand-alone blog.  This is what the automatic feedburner link placed in Twitter points to.

Note that the banner image and the menu options from the mini-site are gone.  I drew three red arrows to on the page to show where I put links so a reader could be sent to the mini-site.   These are "call to action" links and they are critical.  Without them the reader is lost.  They can read your post, but they can't do anything.   The bottom arrow points to the link I inserted using feedburner to invite people receive an email every time I add a new post.

Last but not least.   Here is a shot of the "Design Page" in Blogger.

The read arrows point to "widgets" that I added by clicking on the "add a widget" link.  I also dragged and dropped them to put them in the order I wanted.

To include the link back to your mini-site you are going to have to put a little HTML code into your text.   Here is the text from my profile.

I have several degrees and have found that running a home based business is MUCH more satisfying than working a job. See more about what I do at <a href="http://make-money-with.us"> http://make-money-with.us </a>

Note that you will replace the "make-money-with.us" with the URL for your own mini-site.

I certainly hope that you find this useful.

Subscribe to Hale and Robyn's MA Blog by Email;

Hale