Add ‘MailChimp’ eMail Marketing to your WordPress Blog

Have you ever wanted to allow people to sign up for newsletter and email updates on your WordPress blog? It can be done very quickly and easily by adding the MailChimp plugin to your WordPress blog. The MailChimp plugin adds an email list subscription form to your WordPress blog and after subscribers submit their name and email address they are added to your subscriber’s list. Best of all, a Free account allows you to have up to 1,000 subscribers at no cost. Here are the steps to follow to get MailChimp up and running on your WordPress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress control panel.

2. Select ‘Plugins’.

3. Click on ‘Add New’ (beside ‘Plugin’s)

4. Type “MailChimp” into the search box and click on ‘Search Plugin’s’.

5. Install ‘MailChimp List Subscribe Form’ by clicking on ‘Install Now’.

6. In a new browser window, set up a MailChimp account at http://www.mailchimp.com. You will need to create a new ‘List’ that your subscribers will sign up to.

7. Ensure you are logged in to the newly created MailChimp account, and then select ‘API Keys and Info’ from the ‘Account’ dropdown at the top left of the screen.

8. Select and copy the API key.

9. On your WordPress control panel, click on ‘MailChimp Setup’ under ‘Settings’.

10. Paste the API key into the API textbox and click on ‘Save and Check’. You should get the following message returned: “Success! We were able to verify your API Key! Let’s continue, shall we?”

11. Ensure the list you created in step 6 is selected under ‘Your Lists’. If necessary, click on ‘Update List’.

12. Find the header content textbox. In here you will put the text that will be displayed beside the subscription form. You would generally put a call to action here. For example, I put “sign up to the Abipo community.”

13. If you don’t want a “powered by MailChimp” message to appear underneath your form, uncheck the ‘Monkey Rewards’ checkbox.

14. Click on Update Subscribe Form Settings.

15. On your WordPress control panel, click on ‘Widgets’ under ‘Appearance’.

16. Drag the ‘MailChimp’ widget from the ‘Available Widgets’ section to the location of your choice. For example, I put my MailChimp widget in the sidebar.

17. You should now have a fully working solution. Go to your blog home page and subscribe to your own list so that you can test everything out. You can see how the form should look at http://www.abipo.com/blog.