There are several choices to make regarding the decision on how to send newsletters to subscribers.

Do you want to:

• have a newsletter that is completely separate from your blog? or
  

  A Copy of Each Post can be Emailed to Subscribers through Feedburner

• email your blog posts to subscribers instead of creating a separate newsletter? or
• have your readers subscribe to your posts through an RSS reader?

And then there is the question of how to publish your subscription-based information:

• do you hire an emarketing company, like Constant Contact, http://www.constantcontact.com or FeedBlitz, http://www.feedblitz.com?
• or do you use a free service, like FeedBurner, http://www.feedburner.com?

After spending several days exploring where newsletters I received were being published from, I finally decided on using Feedburner for these blogs.

Feedburner is part of Google’s ever increasing family of services which, for me, helped keep things nice and simple.

The process of adding Feedburner to your blog is relatively easy. The theme I used has widgets, including one named “Text”. This widget is a blank widget, and lets you add code to your blog. I used the Text widget to add, not only the Feedburner coding, but also the coding for books available for sale on the blog through the Amazon.com affiliate program.

So, to add the email subscribe form, go to FeedBurner, http://www.feedburner.com, type in your blogs URL in the box that asks you to ‘Claim Your Feed’. This takes you to you feeds main page. Click on the “Publicize” tag, and then on the “Email Subscriptions” link on the left-hand side of the page, which will open up a drop-down menu. In this menu, you click on the “Subscription Management” link to open up a page that has a couple of windows with HTML coding in them. Simply cut and paste the coding that you find in the first window on the page into the text box of your blog’s “Text” widget. Add a title to your “Text” widget, then save the widget.

These Text widgets are great. You can move them and place them wherever you want to in the right-hand column of your blog.

Some finesses that you can make to your email feed through Feedburner include:

• in the “Email Subscriptions” drop-doen menu, there is a link called “Email Branding”.  There is a Hot Tip on the page stating that if you insert the code ${latestItemTitle} into the box at the top on the page, where it says ‘Email Subject/Title’, the title of your subscription email will be the title of your post. Otherwise, the title of each subscription email will be the title of your blog and will be the same for every subscription email.
• the “Email Branding” page also allows you to change the Font and font size of both your subscription email’s title, and body text and the color of the text. A window on this page provides you with a preview of what your subscription email will look like with these changes.
• the ‘”Chicklet Chooser” link in the left-hand column lets you select which custom RSS feeds subscribers can access your posts through.
• the “Monetize” tab at the top of the page lets you connect directly to Google Adwords.

Once you have your feeds set up, there are other things you can do through Feedburner to customize the way people subscribe to your blog.

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So now you should have a fairly sophisticated blog up and running, one that is SEO optimized, includes great content, and can be subscribed to.

However, in order to develop a truly Nomadic, Location Independent Enterprise, other technologies and technological skills will need to be drawn on. These will be explored in future posts.

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