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Is it Time to Burn Feedburner? There are Alternatives

Posted By Guest Blogger 3rd of December 2014 General 0 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Steve Williams of feedburner-alternatives.com

To build up a readership it’s crucial to offer your visitors to subscribe to your blog, so they get updated every time you publish a new post. The two most important channels are email and RSS. Social media, despite the hype, is only second priority in terms of effectiveness.

Several services exist which help you to offer easy RSS & Email subscription options, ranging from RSS subscription facilitators (turning your RSS feed into a nice-to-look-at subscription screen which anyone can understand), RSS2Email as well as classic Email marketing services.

Feedburner: The top dog in decline

The – by far – most popular choice in the blogging community is (still) Feedburner. Feedburner offers solutions for both RSS and Email. And the best of it: it’s 100% free.

However, since Google bought Feedburner in 2007, it never got further developed. Several features got shut down, such as the monetization tool Adsense for feeds as well as the Feedburner API.

And it’s getting worse: more and more bloggers notice that Feedburner’s email delivery is not working reliably anymore. And as there has been no Google support to solve the issue many bloggers have given up on Feedburner.

However: which alternative services could take Feedburner’s spot?

The Feedburner alternatives

The essence of our research: there’s not one solution for all. It all depends on what your needs are.

Switching from FeedBurner Decision Tree Infographic

Credit to feedburner-alternatives.com

Feedburner is not working anymore, and it’s time to do the switch.

If you used Feedburner to handle your RSS feeds, Feedblitz (inexpensive) and Feedpress (slightly more expensive, but more features) are the way to go.

If you also used Feedburner to update your readers by email, then Feedblitz is the first choice which offers the most advanced solutions for both RSS and email (however, they charge quite a bit).

If you want to spice up your email newsletter a bit more, it may be worth to switch to the services which focus on those, i.e. either Mailchimp or Aweber. For the RSS-part you can then use Feedblitz or Feedpress.

Are you already using one of those alternatives? Let us know in the comments!

Steve Williams initiated www.feedburner-alternatives.com, reacting to the increasing frustration with Feedburner and the time-consuming process to find an alternative. Contact him on his page with suggestions on how to further improve the overview.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Didn’t even consider FeedBurner when I started Enwealthen 2 years ago since it’s been EOL’d.

    WordPress provides the RSS feed, and frankly I don’t care how many subscribers to my RSS feed I have, I only care how many of those visit the site. Google Analytics will tell me how many are from RSS, and that’s all I need to know.

    For mail, Mail Poet is a great free solution for managing mailing lists and automatically sending new posts to subscribers. I hear they’re launching a mail delivery tool, but I’ve been using Mandrill (MailChimp’s SMTP sending service) and am very pleased with it.

    RSS is nice, but email is where it’s at.

  2. I’m still using feedburner, not sure if I will switch or where to go. Anyone have recommendations and experience with a different rss burner?

  3. Thanks for bringing up the Feedburner issue. I use it for myself and clients, but know it’s stale ad could go by the wayside soon.

    If you use WordPress, a feed is automatically created for your site. Plugins like Jetpack for WordPress offers a widget you can drag into your sidebar to create a RSS feed subscribe button.

    The reason I decided to use Feedburner is that is integrates better with Mailchimp, and I use a plugin RSS Image Feed to force images to show up in my feed, as if you use the summary feed option with Feedburner, images won’t show.

  4. I’m using MailChimp without any issues on my blog for sending Newsletters. MailChimp is awsome and it send mails everytime on the exact time which you schedule in the campaign. You get weekly reports about your subscribers. I’m 100% satisfied with MailChimp.

    Though in the starting I thought to go with FeedBurner but avoided it due to no support or updates.

    Heard one of the main negative point about FeedBurner which is if a subscriber forget to confirm the subscription through the confirmation mail he/she will never receive that mail again and you won’t have any control over it to resend the confirmation mail to the subscribers.

    It’s time to move on to better alternatives for those who are using FeedBurner till now.

  5. Feedburner not only has email deliverability issues but also has issues with feeds getting updated on time. But as of now, there is not much option available for “burning the feed part” apart from Feedburner, isn’t?

    Having said that, your alternatives for sending emails are great. I’d opt for an email autoresponder like Aweber. They also have the RSS to email part. So I can send both newsletters and blog post announcements using an email autoresponder service!

    Thanks for the wonderful recommendations Steve!

  6. Thank you for this post. I’ve been concerned about my Feedburner account for several months as I’ve noticed the subscription numbers are getting more and more erratic. I started looking into alternatives a few months ago and thought about moving to Feedblitz as it seemed to be the closest service and offered an ebook to help you migrate (I’ve also used their email service for years so believe I can continue with a free ad-based service). You have given me the impetus to move the task back up my to do list.

  7. Thanks a lot Stacey!!!

    You have really provide very informative stuff over this fresh topic.

    Keep it up !!!

    Waiting up for more updates !!!!!

  8. I enjoyed this article and appreciate Steve taking the time to create this chart. So helpful for those trying to decide between services.

    I currently use Feedblitz for my blog’s RSS and email subscriptions and have been very happy with the service. Three things I wanted to mention:

    1. My subscription page is branded as shown here: https://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub&publisher=37005566&cids=1&sort=1

    2. If you wish, Feedblitz allows (and inserts) an ad in the email you send out. My experience with this so far has been positive with the ad completely off setting the cost of using a paid service.

    3. Feedblitz only charges you once per customer. This is very important because if a reader subscribes to your blog via RSS, via email AND subscribes to your newsletter, that reader only counts once for billing. Aweber and Mad Mimi charge you for each customer/reader on each list. So if a reader subscribes via email and also subscribes to your newsletter, they count twice for billing purposes. I verified that before going to Feedblitz. That can make a huge difference if you offer a newsletter in addition to RSS and email, as I do.

    Very glad I went with Feedblitz for my RSS and E-mail subscriptions. The only thing I’d like to see Feedblitz offer that they don’t currently offer, is a wide-range of templates/themes for newsletters but Phil was very helpful in putting together a template for me.

  9. I gave up on Feedburner for my feed some time ago. I simply use the standard WordPress feed.

    As for email updates, I had been using Feedblitz but they charge for every email subscriber you have and deliver a fairly dated looking email update. I switched to Mail Chimp which looks great, has excellent analytics and is free for up to 2000 subscribers.

  10. Thank you for including us.

    For ProBloggers interested in revenue, there’s a key feature not on this chart: Monetization.

    FeedBlitz is the only RSS and email alternative with an ad network (think of it a little like AdSense for email, if you see what I mean) that works in both RSS and email. If you have a larger list and mail / update often, FeedBlitz’s ad network may be able to more than defray our fees.

    Wishing everyone here in the ProBlogger community the very best for the holidays and New Year,

    Phil Hollows
    CEO
    FeedBlitz

  11. I switched to Feedblitz this past summer and was happy to say goodbye to unreliable Feedburner. Feedblitz beats Mailchimp, Mad Mimi and Aweber in my opinion because they only charge you once per subscriber.
    In other words, if a subscriber is on two lists (your email list for post updates and a list for your newsletter) Feedblitz only counts that subscriber once for billing purposes, where the other services count that subscriber twice since they are on two different lists.
    Also, Feedblitz will allow the insertion of an ad at the end of the email that goes out (or newsletter) and I’ve found the ad completely offsets the expense. Glad I went with Feedblitz!

  12. The problem with Feedblitz and Feedpress is that they cost money and most bloggers aren’t willing to pay for an RSS burner. I’m obviously biased but I wanted to mention Feedio (http://www.feedio.co) as a Feedburner alternative. Feedio is free and provides all the same functionality as Feedburner with some cool extras like being able to connect multiple sites to a single user which is great for bloggers that want to promote their personal brands and easily share all their posts with their email and RSS subscribers.

  13. I’ve noticed Feedburner has become increasingly unreliable over the years (had it since 2007). How does one migrate the 1000s of feed and email subscribers to a new service though? We too have a lot of unconfirmed subscriptions from Feedburner and wouldn’t like to lose those people (or their details, at least) in any transition.

    Ideas/advice appreciated.

  14. Thank you for this nice post. I’ve been involved regarding my Feedburner account for many months as I’ve detected the subscription numbers have gotten a lot of and a lot of erratic. I started trying into alternatives a number of months agone ANd thought of moving to Feedblitz because it perceived to be the nighest service and offered an ebook to assist you migrate (I’ve conjointly used their email service for years thus believe I will continue with a free ad-based service). you’ve got given Maine the impetus to maneuver the task keep a copy my to try and do list. – See a lot of at:

  15. Feedburner and MailChimp, AWeber is not the same. Why do you compare them?

  16. Roost Web Push. This is a great tool and for some good reasons…..

  17. Didn’t know there were Google-Feedburner alternatives, which is a good thing. The beauty of the internet is having opportunity across the board to use free tools to build a business on the web and consistently grow. Thanks for putting us onto this.

  18. Thanks for bringing up the Feedburner issue. I use it for myself and clients, but know it’s stale ad could go by the wayside soon.

  19. I just re-started up my blog after several years of being away. It was setup on Feedburner and I noticed when I started posting again that the email subscription was not working how I expected anymore so I decided to change.

    I have been using MailChimp to manage my customer list for another product I run for the last year or so and it was fairly trivial to import the email list from Feedburner into Mailchimp.

    So I’ve put back the default wordpress /feed/ link on the RSS icon for those who still consume via rss (I do but I think I’m in the minority these days!) and then put a Mailchimp signup form on the blog.

    One thing I didn’t like about Mailchimp though is that it’s automatic RSS-Email function wasn’t very flexible. It would only allow me to send ‘digest’ style posts to the list and they would all have the exact same subject line.

    So I decided not to use that and instead I will manually do a broadcast when I want to email readers about my latest blog posts. It’s a bit more work but I think it’s worth it for the better subject lines – hopefully it will increase open rates.

  20. When Google Reader went away is when I began looking for an alternative. I stumbled upon Bloglovin and have been using it ever since.

  21. Link is broken. Top one for feedurner-alternative.com

    Neil

  22. Vincent says: 02/04/2015 at 1:13 am

    I’ve actually been using FeedSnap (free) from http://feedsnap.com/ for a while now. Best thing is that it can import feed history and statistics from FeedBurner, so I didn’t lose any of that data when I switched.

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