FeedBlitz: Import your Bloglet email subscribers for more control
To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.
Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.
So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:
I think “control over their subscriber base” is an illusion. RSS is a hit because I don’t have to give my email address to the blogger to get updates on his site. Nor can somebody subscribe me without my permission. This is total lack of control. RSS to email services that re-introduce that control, will inevitably be dominated by SPAMmers.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — 24/8/2023 @ 2:16 am
But we can’t ignore that a lot of people are more comfortable with receiving email updates than RSS updates. So for now email subscriptions will be here.
Comment by Tim — 24/8/2023 @ 6:03 pm
Hi Tim:
Thank you for the post. Both commenters make valid points. “Control over the subscriber base” is not an illusion; FeedBlitz give publishers contrl over their email subscribers. You can always choose to register anonymously, hiding your identity from the publisher, or just use an aggregator. Readers choose to use FeedBlitz to get the content they want by mail. It’s a choice that Bloglet was failing to serve, as it was failing to serve publishers. FeedBlitz succeeds, ot only because it understands the needs of publishers for subscriber management, it also provides metrics to services like FeedBurner to give publishers greater insights as to how their feeds are being consumed.
I think RSS is a hit not because you don’t share your identity (that’s true of using a web browser). It’s a hit because it automates and formalizes a previously manual and tedious process - finding what’s new on your favorite sites. It’s growing rapidly beyond this initial driver, but that’s it’s core raison d’etre.
FeedBlitz also protects against spammers. You can’t be subscribed against your will because you don’t get an email from FeedBlitz until you’ve confirmed your registration (this is also true of Bloglet, FWIW. It’s just that Bloglet really doesn’t do RSS, is broken, etc.).
TIm’s comment really is the point behind FeedBlitz. People are comfortable with email. There are many reasons why this should be so, and for now those reasons are immaterial. They just are. FeedBlitz was created to enable providers to reach this audience.
We may all be bought into “web 2.0″ but there are many who don’t. They are the vast majority of Internet users, 90% or greater according to studies. Why should a publisher choose to ignore 90% of their potential market?
Ultimately, the market will decide how well FeedBlitz works. I invite you all to track the FeedBlitz blog - evidence so far is that FeedBlitz is filling a huge need.
Thanks, Tim, for the post!
Phil
Comment by Phil Hollows — 25/8/2023 @ 7:12 am
Yay! I can’t wait to try this out. I’ve got a small handful of readers that either visit the blog or have signed up for the RSS feed, but the overwhelming majority want to get an email. Thanks for the tip!
Comment by Steven Hupp — 25/8/2023 @ 10:08 am
Tim, you can have email updates with RSS without the control aspect. It’s called R|mail, sometimes known as Randy (that’s me) mail, sometimes known as RSS mail.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — 27/8/2023 @ 5:26 am
Yup, Rmail is a free RSS-to-email service I recommend. It’s very simple and it works and it is ad-free.
Comment by Tim — 27/8/2023 @ 4:22 pm
I’d simply suggest to readers to try feedblitz and rmail and to choose whichever they prefer - both are free to both readers and bloggers. FeedBlitz is more focused in enabling content providers - bloggers - to reach and understand their email audience, which is why metrics and reporting are important, and to enable readers to take a publisher provided service and extend it to other feed sources.
Comment by Phil — 31/8/2023 @ 10:54 am