Feedburner VS Aweber?
I was recently asked which service was better. Feedburner or Aweber.
I couldn’t answer that question. Feedburner is a news feed management provider. Aweber is an autoresponder. Both are used for different purposes. But, you can also use Aweber to broadcast your blogs RSS feed to subscribers.
The reader who asked the question was probably wondering which service was better to use on a blog so readers can subscribe to blog updates. I haven’t used Feedburner before, so I don’t know all its features.
Using Aweber’s blog broadcast feature has worked brilliantly for me. You simply enter your blogs feed into Aweber, customize an e-mail which is sent out regularly to subscribers, create a web form, and start advertising the benefits of blog updates to your readers. It’s no secret that I’m using a Blogcast. I created the Blogcast course so other blog owners could build lists of their own. The purpose of it is to get your readers back to your blog.
Recently, my friend James Brausch moved his blog to a new website. If most businesses did that, they would immediately lose most of their readership. They would also lose a number of their customers. James didn’t. He uses a Blogcast with Aweber. He was able to move his blog, and continue to send out e-mails to his list of readers (a main source of repeat traffic). A minor adjustment to the e-mail he sent out was made, and that was just about all there was to it.
Did you catch that last benefit? If you did, you now know that a Blogcast is portable.
So, you should certainly see the reason for a Blogcast.
It takes less than $20 per month for an account at Aweber, and 30 minutes of your time to get the Blog Broadcast working.
You can get the whole course here: http://www.blogcastcourse.com
- Aaron Brandon
Another option is FeedBlitz, which is an RSS to email service. Their basic service is free, but if you need more customization, they have paid options too. The downside is that their deliverability probably isn’t as good as Aweber’s.
Comment by Laura — January 21, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Feedburner is great, but it doesn’t play nicely with AWeber Blog Broadcasts. From Aweber’s FAQ:
“If FeedBurner makes any changes that cause their system to republish that feed, or to change the URLs for your feed items…
…the Blog Broadcast tool may identify those items as being new, and create and send new emails for them - even if that information was already sent before! ”
So it’s one or the other. People can still subscribe to the RSS feed if they want to, but they should be encouraged to sign up for your BlogCast as strongly as possible.
Comment by Derrick — January 22, 2008 at 8:45 am
Derrick,
The article you’re referring to in your comment was recently updated — I believe it was yesterday.
http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/293/Can+I+Use+FeedBurner+Feeds+to+Make+a+Blog+Broadcast
We had made this recommendation based on a single incident a long while back where Feedburner made changes to the formatting of the URL addresses in the published RSS feeds, causing messages to be re-broadcasted, since our Blog Broadcast feature naturally assumed this republished feed with new addresses also contained new content.
When I say “a while back”, I mean close to 2 years ago. Now, unless you make changes to the formatting of your feed (something uncommon and recommended against), there should be no potential for any issues.
The update to that article reflects our current position: Feedburner feeds can be used with AWeber’s Blog Broadcast feature.
Comment by Marc Kline — January 30, 2008 at 9:00 am
Thanks for the update, Marc!
I managed to send the last 10 posts to my tiny list twice in January, presumably by somehow accidentally changing the formatting of the RSS feeds (although I’ve no recollection of what I actually did!)
That’s why I have the Feedburner feed disabled on my blog at present.
In the light of what you say, maybe I’ll have a look at re-enabling the Feedburner feed, but broadcasting manually for a while…
Would it not be possible to add an option to only broadcast the most recent post, instead of the last 10 or whatever?
Comment by Derrick — January 31, 2008 at 3:47 pm