I read a Performancing.com post last evening titled "Are You Missing Subscribers By Not Using EMail?" and realized he was spot-on. "Only a tiny percentage of web users even know what RSS is and even fewer of that group actually use a feed reader." That's a fact, Jack.
I've seen email subscriptions mentioned elsewhere recently, but the "Missing Subscribers" post forced me to action. I looked around at what most other bloggers were using for email subscriptions and as the "Missing Subscribers" post advised, I went with FeedBlitz.
I really like what FeedBlitz offers: It's free, generates a daily email for all new posts (in HTML or Text, based on subscriber's preference), delivers the posts in full text and including any post graphics. It also provides easy unsubscription from a feed. I made sure of the last point since I didn't want any email subscribers to not have an easy way to unsubscribe. It was easy to add to CSBlogs as well, which I'll post on yet this morning. My new Feedblitz gizmo is below.
Interesting story. I was testing my CSBlogs FeedBlitz control and noticed it was taking the subscriber to a FeedBlitz page with a simple one-field confirmation form with the subscriber's email address. That's what it was supposed to do, but the user's email field was blank, requiring the subscriber to re-enter the address. This was an unnecessary user annoyance that didn't make a good first impression of either my blog or of FeedBlitz. So I emailed FeedBlitz about it around 1:00 AM last night and this morning at 7:00 AM there was an email from Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz telling me that it was fixed. Only about 10 minutes passed from the time I sent the email until Phil sent the email back with the fix. Boffo, Baby!
Technorati Tags: FeedBlitz, RSS