Asking someone to “subscribe” to your blog used to mean signing them up on an email list. On a regular basis you would send out an email from that list with news about your site or blog encouraging them to return for a visit.

Today’s notion of subscribing to a blog goes way beyond an email newsletter.

When you ask someone to subscribe to your blog, you need to be specific. Blog subscriptions now consist of:

• Email announcements
• Email alerts of new posts or activity
• Email monitoring of comments on the blog
• Email monitoring of comments on a specific post
• Email newsletter subscriptions
• Submission to social bookmarking site submission services
• Full site feed
• Site comments feed
• Category feeds

With so many ways to “subscribe” to a blog, I’ll do my best to cover some of the most popular subscription methods for each of these types of communication. For information on social bookmarking site submission WordPress Plugins, see Social Bookmarking Submit Links on WordPress Blogs.

If you have a favorite WordPress Plugin for handling your various subscriptions, please let us know in the comments below.

Email Mailing Lists

Email mailing lists allow you to contact your subscribers and users with information about your blog, updates, recommendations, or a form of mini-newsletter. These WordPress Plugins work with your blog’s Users list or an email mailing list management program or service integrated into the WordPress Administration Panels.

Mailing List pour WordPress (French) (English translation) is one of the more popular mailing list management Plugins. It allows the blog administrator to send messages with attached files, if desired, to members of the list or other recipients. It allows includes automatic notification of blog updates.

Viewfinder offers various WordPress Plugins to help you stay in touch with your readers including the The Viewfinder Mailing List, an easy-to-use email mailing list manager which sends out plain text emails to subscribers. It allows automatic subscription and unsubscription, with an optional validation email. You can contact fans of your blog with updates, special events, and recent activities.

Naatan NotifyMe WordPress Plugin offers mailing list functions to make and manage unlimited mailing lists in WordPress. You can design the form and customize the mailing parameters in many different ways. It also includes a “new blog post” notification and alert when you publish a new post.

Instinct’s WordPress Campaign Monitor is an email newsletter Plugin for email campaigns. It includes tracking of results and managing subscribers.

Subscribe MaxGal WordPress (English) allows you to email information to registered users on your blog. Supports different charset and HTML tags for your email letters.

Email Users WordPress Plugin allows you to email registered blog users, based upon their role and permissions. It adds a submenu under the Write Post panel for easy emailing. It does have some restrictions. Currently, emails are text only and the blog administrator needs to take care to not email everyone at one time, working within the email restrictions of the blog’s server. For those with multiple bloggers, this is a great way of staying in touch and sending out announcements.

MailList WordPress Plugin calls itself a “mailing list, mass mailing, and mailer plugin”. Unfortunately, support for the Plugin has stopped due to a variety of bugs. If you are interested in supporting this innovative WordPress Plugin, contact the author.

Email Alerts

Email alerts are often confused with email mailing lists. An Email Alert works automatically with little interaction from the blog owner after setup and configuration. Each time there is an updated post released or activity on the blog, an email is sent out to those on the subscription list advising them of the updated posts.

A word of caution for email alerts WordPress Plugins. These Plugins send out one email for every new post you publish on your blog. If you post more than a few times a week, and definitely if you post more than once a day, don’t use these Plugins. Choose an email mailing list or newsletter WordPress Plugin to send out a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly announcement of updates and new blog posts. Otherwise, you can quickly flood a reader with too many emails.

Subscribe2 WordPress Plugin is one of the most popular blog update notification Plugins. Originally developed by Skippy, it has found new life and compassionate folks to keep it going. The Plugin is very simple. A visitor subscribes and after confirming their subscription, they get an email whenever the blog is updated.

Advanced Mailer Using AJAX WordPress Plugin expands upon Scott Merrill’s Subscribe2 Plugin to create an advanced subscription management system for WordPress bloggers. Subscribe and unsubscribe events are handled automatically. Management of their subscriptions is easy, allowing them to add or delete specific categories to receive updated information and new post notifications from. It offers variable limits on the number of emails to be sent out at one time to avoid conflict with host server limits, and designed to accommodate translation and localization.

WordPress Email Notification Plugin and Yellow Swordfish Page Update Notification WordPress Plugin work the same way, creating automatic notification of subscribers when you update your blog.

Email Monitoring of Comments

Email monitoring of comments is the line of text with a checkbox you see on many WordPress blogs in the comments form. It invites the visitor to subscribe to the comments from this blog post. When a new comment is made on the post, an email is automatically sent out, reminding them of their participation and interest in the blog post.

While many people use this feature because they think it will encourage return visitors and increase traffic, the best use of the subscribe-to-comments WordPress Plugins is on sites hosting customer support and services. If a user is asking for help, support, or information, they will want to be notified of an answer if one is provided. It’s good customer service.

WARNING: When adding subscribe-to-comments WordPress Plugins, make sure the subscription checkbox is unchecked by default. This will prevent irritation for those who miss the box and then get an email from you, and have to figure out how to get off the list. To encourage use of this feature, make sure it is placed above the Submit button, preferably near the email form box.