Google is powering up the Death Star again. FeedBurner and Google Reader are both in her sights. The bottom line is that neither service was making money for the search giant. Now blog readers need to start searching for another way to read RSS subscriptions, and businesses that manage blogs need to find an alternative to FeedBurner.
There are a bunch of options out there that are FeedBurner-like (Check out Feedblitz.)
But all change provides opportunity for a new direction. This change in the online landscape gives bloggers a chance to think about how they should move forward.
RSS subscribers are great. Those subscribers are signaling that they love your content and want to read it on a regular basis. One downside of RSS subscribers is the lack of control that bloggers have over communication. RSS subscribers simple receive your posts, there isn’t any other way to facilitate conversation.
Email subscribers on the other hand are a very different story. When someone subscribes to your email list, you can send them each blog you publish and other messages. This allows them to receive every blog post you publish, in addition to other “insider” offers and content pieces. Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income does a great job of creating additional content that only goes out to his email list subscribers.
Feedburner Alternatives: The Options
MailChimp
MailChimp offers a service called RSS-to-Email. Here you can have MailChimp automatically send an email with your blog links each time you publish something new. You can also have them send out a weekly digest if you blog more recently and don’t want to crowd people’s inbox.
MailChimp gives you control over the time of day that your emails are sent, too. This was a frustration that many people had with Feedburner, but with MailChimp you can pick when the email goes out to your readers!
MailChimp also shares how to export subscribers from Feedburner to MailChimp in this post.
Aweber
Aweber offers a similar service with their blog broadcast.
Recently, Impact Branding & Design switched to Aweber to handle their blog subscriptions. They use the space to add CTA’s to every email they send to their subscribers. Great work, Impact!
Hubspot
If you host your blog on Hubspot, they have an internal option that allows you to automatically email your subscribers with blog updates.
This is just another advantages of using a complete inbound marketing software package like Hubspot. (Want to learn more about Hubspot, check out this post!)