List building. It’s what it’s all about, right? Soooo many ways to do that. And many of us use (or try to use) RSS Feeds to get people interested in what we write.
The problem with RSS Feeds is that you do not know who is subscribing and who is leaving, so you cannot really get a handle on who is who in the zoo. So we resort to other methods, like ezines, and emails etc.
After I wrote the article on RSS Feeds Explained I went back (after I finally got some sleep) and with java, the drink, in hand I dug a little deeper into Feedburner. I know that you can gather all of your blog feeds and run them through Feedburner. I know that you can opt-in to have Feedburner offer to send the feed by email.
What I didn’t know was:
- the extent to which you can brand your email feed.
- you can choose what time of day to send the email.
- when people enter their email addresses Google keeps that information (duh!)
- we have access to that information – namely email addresses.
- you can download those on that list into an Excel file.
- further, Google will notify you when someone leaves the email feed. I guess so you can send them a nice note.
- And finally – they have code you can embed very easily into your web page or blog and it creates a minimal sized form for people to put their email address into so they can get updates. Like the one on the right side of this page.
Knowing the above, then, would you still offer RSS Feeds the old fashioned way? Or offer only the email signup?
Bart
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