I wasn’t 100% of the legalities of this as they are not yet confirmed ‘double opt-in’.

Another great plug-in I have just discovered is the “What Would Seth Godin Do”

It uses cookies to see if a user has been to the blog before or not and places an appropriate message after your blog post title.

If the user is new to the blog the message notifies them of the RSS subscription to keep them updated, but if they’ve been to the blog a certain number of times it simply welcomes them back.

Check it out on my blog if you think it might be useful.

Cheers
Nathan

Great article since I have been contemplating doing just this for a while. My question is how to these people confirm their subscription if they want to (assuming they may have already deleted that confirmation email)?
Thank you for any and all feedback!

I understand people’s reservations about emailing the unverified potential subscribers. That is the point of having the double opt-in system — to protect people whose email addresses might have been used without their permission.

But then again, if this experiment yields a high proportion of subscribers, then there’s reason to question the “spamminess” of a polite follow-up mail.

Most verified opt in emails will state “If you do not want to subscribe, simply ignore this message.”

So, Isn’t what you did really spam?

I use Constant Contact and they will terminate your account if you contact someone who has not verified their email subscription.

Perhaps Feedburner is different but I think people should be very wary of emailing people who haven’t completed the double opt in.

Feed readers are loyal readers of your blog and are much more likely to read your new content than non-feed readers. Most likely, your content frequently contains links to other posts you’ve made – links which open a new window that arrives at a particular post page on your blog. You’re delivering a loyal reader to specific page on your blog who’s primary dealing with that blog is through RSS. Thus the design is a ‘novelty’ to them and their ad blindness levels are low. If you’re using Adsense for content the ads are also targetted to the topic which has interested them enough to click through the link…

I could go on about the advantages of full feeds, but that’s an article in itself. Safe to say, my opinion is that they’re pretty great!

I also have experienced this kind of Feedburners’ trap, some of my subscribers have to do it again nevertheless they do say that they had already done it before.
So, it was a great tip anyway.

Bye

Paulo Sidney

I think you can still see the email address of those that haven’t verified, so just send them a personal email to remind them.

*sighs*

Pathetic… I know. Simply pathetic.

- Trew Life

I agree, the feedburner email tool is wonderful and I’ve been using the Feedblitz option for my one blog for over a year with great success. The other blog that I started earlier this year though has been a bit of a different experiance. I chose to go with Feedburner’s own email subscription option, but there is one major drawback to it, no way to manually activate accounts. I’ve got a few unverified people who either didn’t get the email because of spam filters or forgot that it is a double opt in. With Feedblitz, I can manually activate these accounts, with Feedburner, my only option is to delete. What’s worse, I have no option to resend the confirmation email to them.

I’ve questioned them on this in their support forums and never get a solid answer, your suggestions? Should I just email the people directly or hang on and hope Feedburner will address this?