This post answers the question, "How do you talk people through the subscription idea?"
Sometimes people only want to hear how to subscribe to my blog via email.
They are comfortable with that.
If I can get them beyond that, I ask them if they have their own personal My Yahoo! page, and tell them that they can click the Add To My Yahooo! button, if it's on a weblog, and the new entries will end up on their My Yahoo! page.
That's an example of why those ever expanding universe of 'add to my yahoo' and 'sub with bloglines' buttons work for users.
If they aren't half asleep at this point, I might try to explain the XML button and how to copy and paste the link it into an aggregator like bloglines.
I'll then explain that "bloglines is a web site that keeps track of new posts to weblogs. So instead of having to go to a website to see it there's a new post all the time, you just go to bloglines and it displays new posts from any website you tell it to keep track of."
It's really best if I can get on their computer and show them. How else am I going to explain adding a 'sub with bloglines' bookmarklet?
I guess I could send them here to figure it out: http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub