I believe Darren now uses Aweber.

I have been meaning to state my experience using Zookoda on this post for a while, this would be a good time to do so. I have been using Zookoda Since Sep 2007 and after reading this post I too had been seriously considering changing my service. I searched and found nothing that matched the ease of Zookoda. My experience had not been that bad so I stuck on.

Overall I’m glad I did so. I have about 3000 odd Email subscribers to my blog and ever week or so I do meet friends and other contacts who mention to me that they indeed do receive my blog regularly and enjoy reading it. These friends who I added ages ago and have totally forgotten about them.

I am not 100% sure if my email delivery is to each and every recepient. But till date I have been having more good experiences with Zookoda than negative ones.

This is a completely independent review. I’m not affliated with Zookoda in anyway whatsover other than being yet another happy customer.

Warm wishes :-)
Arif

Question: Recently I’ve begun looking around for a solution that will allow my organization to;
1. send out a quarterly newsletter and manage a sender list
2. link the articles in this newsletter to my current website
3. categorize the articles on the site effectively, through the use of an archive system

From my understanding so far, it seems like I need two tools to make this happen;
1. An application to send out emails, i.e. AWeber
2. A blog system on my site to organize articles, i.e. Wordpress

The question I’m asking is whether what I’ve said is correct, and what applications would you recommend.

Thanks,
Free

I’m also dumping Zookoda. I have wrestled with my newsletters for over 6 months with various issues (dissapearing and unsent broadcasts, etc) We, like you, were furious and embarrassed for recommending this solution at http://www.profesorblog.com .

We filled out about 20 support emails that went unanswered. Then, I directly contacted IZEA management. We attempted to talk to a tech support person, but we were told no one was there to help us. Amazing …

Although I understand the need to generate revenue, I think that some online products should be free for their intrinsic characteristics. Blog to Newsletter services should be free (don’t be surprised when Google releases something like this), so I’ll keep looking for something to replace Zookoda.

Thanks for this post (even thoug you beat me to it!: I was about to write the same…).

My company Blue Sky Factory, Inc offers several email services for both publishers and readers.

First, Publicaster (http://www.publicaster.com) is our leading web based email marketing platform. In the next 2 months we will be releasing a very price friendly version of our platform that will be suited perfectly for both small and large list publishers.

Secondly, we also run RSSFWD (http://www.rssfwd.com). A leading RSS to email solution that we acquired earlier in 2007. This is primarily a reader focused app, giving your readers complete control over how and when they receive your content.

Finally, we just also acquired Blogarithm (http://www.blogarithm.com). Much like RSSFWD, Blogarithm gives users a daily digest from multiple publishers, so they can subscribe to as many publications as they want and get a daily digest of the content changes.

We will be combining the Blogarithm and RSSFWD services over the next few months and adding a ton of publisher features. Stay tuned. Thanks!

Greg Cangialosi
http://www.blueskyfactory.com
http://www.publicaster.com
http://www.rssfwd.com
http://www.blogarithm.com

I welcome you to do a free trial and see if you like our service. Thanks.

Neil

Just a heads up about zookoda. It seems they’ve had server problems sending out over 6 million emails which has caused server overload and problems for you. They talk about it at their blog

http://zooblog.zookoda.com/

I’m still going to look at the other two services though – despite only a small list of 300!

Re: all the posts about Constant Contact: I use it (4+ years) and love it for monthly newsletters for corporate sites, e-retail special offers, etc; but it lacks the automation I am looking for to send out daily or semi-weekly emails with my blog posts (I want to set and forget — I don’t want to copy and paste my blog posts into ConstantContact and set-up an email campaign multiple times a week).

Re: all the posts about developing something yourself (or outsourcing such) are just not practical given the way ISPs try to block spam – You need to go through a professional service or you risk getting blacklisted like a spammer even if you are not one.

Feedburner looked like the best alternative to Zookoda for me; especially since I used Blogger for my blog and they are both owned by Google (I don’t think their evil yet, but are quickly gaining the capacity to be as evil as they want to be). However, the ability to import my 100’s of blog subscribers (collected via ConstantContact) into Feedburner is a show stopper (they say they’re working on it).

After reading this post and comments (thank you all) I’m going to either:
1) evaluate Feedblitz and Aweber and see who provides the most for free – keeping in mind that you get what you pay for, or

2) just wait out Feedburner to upgrade their capabilities to import existing lists,

3) OR wait/check and see if ConstantContact is adding the RSS-distribution-automation thingie I’m looking for.

A perfectly fine web service gets bought out by a bigger company, and all of a sudden everything goes to hell.

I tried zookoda on your rec a few months back, but quickly realized their delivery issues would drive me crazy.

Best of Luck.

You can send a custom newsletter, or have FeedBlitz automatically send an email on the day of the month you choose, or weekly, daily, etc. They also continue to develop and innovate.

Their pricing is nearly too amazing to be real. Check them out.

We are also dumping Zookoda. We have wrestled with one of our client’s newsletters for over a month with various issues, and finally the last 2 broadcasts failed. We, like you, were furious and embarrassed for recommending this solution.

We have also filled out support emails that went unanswered. Then, we went to BlogWorld last month, and saw that IZEA had a booth. We attempted to talk to a tech support person, but we were told no one was there to help us. Amazing …

Today that newsletter is going on on the FeedBlitz platform. While they’ve had growing pains (and one of our clients was effected by it), they’ve worked through many of their issues and have come back strong.

Thanks for this post (even tho you beat us to it!).

That is something we’ll be adding, yes :)

As our developers are working on a lot of enhancements, I can’t suggest a date when date-triggered blog broadcasts will be available, but it’s definitely a need that we’ll be filling.