The major new feature in Jetpack 1.2 is email subscriptions. Since we want you to get the most out of Jetpack, we’re taking a few minutes to explain what it does and how it works.
How does it work?
Many visitors to blogs never return. But if you can get them to subscribe, Jetpack will let them know when there’s a new post, so they can return and give you more traffic. This is similar to what Feedburner and others services do.
The reason why we can offer this in the Jetpack plugin is because of WordPress.com. The WordPress.com servers handle the messy work of sending and managing all the emails for you. Your blog is still yours, but subscriptions are handled, by us, for free, on your behalf.
How to turn Subscriptions on
All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. Subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no special magic to activate.
Visitors can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on, so they can stay involved in the conversation.
Where will subscriptions appears on your blog?
The UI for Subscriptions can appear in two places. One is on by default, the other you have to active manually.
By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. It will look something like this, depending on the theme you are using.
You can also add subscriptions to your sidebar, which we strongly recommend.
To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.
What will your blog readers see?
When visitors choose to subscribe, and type in their email address, in a few minutes they’ll get a confirmation email that looks like something like this:
If they click Confirm, they’ll receive a notification of every future post by email (each containing a link to Manage Subscriptions, so they can unsubscribe at any time). If they ignore the confirmation email, nothing will happen.
If you don’t want to use Subscriptions, you can turn it off in two steps.
Go to your Dashboard, then Jetpack. Then click on the Learn More button for Subscriptions. You’ll see a Deactivate button. Click it to turn Subscriptions off.
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This feature doesn’t work for me. Our blog is on a subdomain (blog.domain.com) but when you subscribe via email, the link you are sent is domain.com/subs/blog — not very useful at all.
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Since last month the subcriptions no longer work! i always receive this message “There was an error when subscribing, please try again.” and people stop receiving the notifications by email!
thanks in advance!
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Please email us at support@jetpack.me and we’ll take a look.
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Any chance of an update allowing us to exclude certain categories from the Jetpack subscriptions emails? I love using Jetpack because it’s so easy and formats better in the email than feedburner or mailchimp… but some of my categories are just not suitable for emailing out to subscribers. I’m using Jetpack at the moment but I think I’m going to have to change unless this possibility is implemented soon… which would be a real shame, because as I said, it’s perfect otherwise. I can see that other users are in the same boat, too. I’d pay for this as an optional upgrade, even!
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I’ll pass this along to the development team; I can’t speak to when or if this will be implemented as part of the subscriptions module. Thanks for the feedback.
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Hi Tim, thanks for your reply! Would be great to see this implemented at some point in the future. I found a way of getting around this issue as a temporary fix, in case others are asking- I just write the blog post, deactivate the Jetpack plugin for a minute, post it, and then reactivate. It’s clumsy but it works! 🙂
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