Some of them include:

These are the icons that are commonly misunderstood:

#1 Email @ Sign

This can mean 2 different things. It can EITHER be a link to a contact (and I mean email) form OR it can be a link to the feed providing the option of email delivery. (I’ll explain in a moment.)

#2 Envelope Symbol

This can mean the same thing as the above.

Lately I’ve seen both symbols put together or an @ sign on a RSS sign (#3 image above). This can mean one of THREE options! Keep reading.

#3 RSS Symbol

Ironically, this is the easy one. This always means one thing – it is a feed link.

It will link to the site’s feed which is an easy-for-machines-to-digest version of the content. To our eyes, the RSS feed will look like jumbled English. That is why we usually use a “feed reader”. My favorite is Google Reader. Lots of users prefer their email client’s built-in reader, Bloglines or Newzcrawler, although there are literally 100′s of them.

Since most people don’t know how to use a feed reader, most of us offer our readers an easier way – Feedburner. Feedburner is a feed-gatherer (my word). It grabs our feed, and delivers it to our reader’s feedreader. So the flame symbol to the left is actually Feedburner’s logo. It is so popular that the icon is nearly always recognized.

Feed Via Email

Feedburner (and several other good feed ‘gatherers’) deliver the feeds to the reader’s email instead of a feedreader! This is perfect for those readers who want to stay up to date with you, but have no idea what a feedreader is, or couldn’t be bothered with one. What we serve them, is a feed delivered via email and is completely separate from a contact icon, or a newsletter.

Newsletters

So, to make matters interesting, we throw in the ‘newsletter’. These are intended to be different from feed emails. From a marketing standpoint, newsletters can serve an entirely different purpose. A newsletter can be the contact you have with those who do NOT follow your regular posts. And to be honest, given my time constraints, newsletters are where I often gather most of my information. My feed reader is so full of posts that its stopped counting.

Further Discussion

Now that you know what they all are, what do you prefer? And what do you offer on your site? Also, which feed ‘gatherer’ do you use, if any? Do you read blogs in a feed reader?

As a sidenote, I skipped all these services, and went with an open-source newsletter service.  After this table, is an explanation of our current newsletter set up.

These are simply the top newsletter services, with their limitations and listed prices:

Up until October this blog was open to user registrations.  Within our site alone, a user could potentially have three passwords to remember.   To streamline things, I have disabled registration on this blog – comments are still open but for our purposes I see no need for registration at all.  This left us with two newsletter sign ups – the Members Site, and the DSWP site.  Both native software packages have poorly formed options for sending out newsletters.  So I started looking at commercial services to speed up the process.

Obviously in a start-up, cost is a big factor, so that ruled out the commercial options.  The options remaining were yet MORE programs – albeit free ones.  A quick look around the hosting forums turned up a favorite – by a landslide actually – phplist.  And well, it is time consuming to review various software packages and the learning curve that comes with each.  So I searched the WordPress plugin repository to see if there was a little helper plugin available.  And, voila!  We have our solution: a mix of phplist (free) plus a WordPress plugin (also free).

Features:

• one registration form – for the member site and/or newsletter
• accessible signups for Members & Non-members
• a good program to edit and send newsletters (our configuration requires html knowledge)
• a WordPress plugin to make it all easier
• FREE
• all the data is export-able in csv format

1) requires a monthly sync between all the signups

2) does NOT use the tables in the Members Site (not quite that integrated)

3) newsletter admin panel is not pretty to look at (and I actually do consider that a big draw-back)

All in all, I’m one happy geek-girl.