follow.it Blog
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New Technology: Out-of-the-box Newsletter for Websites

From today, offering a newsletter has never been easier!

Simply place the link https://follow.it/now or this subscription form code on a website. That’s it!

Visitors can now subscribe and receive notifications about new posts via email, RSS, Telegram etc. (see an example).

Hold on, let me get this…

The surprising thing about this is that webmasters don’t have to sign up anywhere to enable such a feature.

Previously, web admins had to:

  1. Do research which newsletter service provider to use
  2. Sign up there and understand how it works
  3. Copy the subscription form code and paste it on the site
  4. Style it so that it matches the theme’s layout

All that is not needed anymore. Web admins can just give an icon (or text) the above mentioned link, and it all works out of the box.

And sometimes they don’t even have to do that – as they already find it on their theme (see below).

Cool! How does it work?

Here’s what happens under the hood:

  1. Visitor of a website clicks on https://follow.it/now (https://click-to-follow.me also works; web admins: make sure the link doesn’t have a “noreferrer” attribute!)
  2. The browser sends the request to follow.it, along with the information on which website the user clicked on (“http referer“)
  3. follow.it checks if there is already a feed for this website in the system. If not, a new feed gets set up
  4. Users gets directed to a lean follow page where they can enter their email and subscribe

This doesn’t only work for links, but also for subscription forms. Either use this subscription form code, or any existing form by giving it the action https://api.follow.it/subscribe (the name of email field in subscription form has to be “email”). If you need help with the implementation just reach out to us.

We’re very happy that we managed to get patent protection in the United States for this technology.

How do publishers get access to the emails?

Placing the link or the subscription form code is sufficient to make the service work, however to reap to all benefits, publishers can claim their feeds in a few simple steps.

Once claimed, publishers can see the emails which signed up, fancy statistics, and configure their feeds in many ways.

Affiliate program for theme creators & developers

Based on this technology we launched an affiliate program for theme creators (or anybody else involved in the website creation process).

Watch the video to learn more:

Have a look at the complete explanation of the affiliate program.

Sounds fancy. What shall I do next?

If you’re a theme creator, sign up to our affiliate program (duh)! Same if you’re a developer, agency, page builder or are involved in the creation of websites in any way.

Also, if you know any theme creators or people for whom the above is useful, please share! 🙂


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