Audee from Graphic Identity design blog submitted this guest post stressing on why should you work to increase your email subscribers and particularly why should you use Feedburner Email Subscription for this purpose.
Working on your email subscriptions (especially using Feedburner) is quite important in more ways than one. Here’s, why:
1. Stability of the subscriber numbers
FeedBurner counts an email subscriber for as long as they can send them emails. Unlike a RSS reader, if your email subscribers haven’t read your feed sent by email for several days, it is still counted. The count stops only when any subscriber choose to opt-out of the email subscription.
2. Estimating the REAL popularity of your blog
If someone chooses to subscribe to your blog by email, it simply means that they are actually quite interested in the content that you offer at your blog. It means that someone found your content worthy of finding place in their inbox.
Because email subscribers are that important part of your readership that will actually stick to your blog, the number of email subscriptions will tell you how many people actually “follow” you and how popular your blog really is.
3. Practical Consideration
Besides email subscription, FeedBurner offers their subscribers to keep track of syndicated online content within an RSS aggregator or reader (e.g. My Yahoo! FeedDemon, etc.)
Some people (including Abhinav) think that following blog feeds using a reader can become quite impractical when you subscribe to many blogs and can’t find time to read each and every new post. This can become quite irritating when you have to mark all of these blogs as read to stop seeing the unread-flashes everywhere, all the time.
With email subscription capability, subscribers receive the latest posts from their favorite blogs right in their inbox, similar to an e-newsletter. Plus, one can read the updates anytime they like to.
4. Focusing on the content, primarily
A blog might have a heavy design that might take ages to load for people who don’t have access to hi-speed internet and can especially be a painful experience for mobile (GPRS) users as well. Email subscription delivers just the content of a blog-post, thus letting your subscribers focus on your content with minimal distraction.
5. Full management control of your blog subscribers
If you’re using FeedBurner for managing the subscribers to your blog, you probably know how easy it is to manage your email subscribers list. It is easy to activate, deactivate or delete individual email addresses (in case you find that the subscriber is violating any terms of use).
FeedBurner allows you to export your list in Excel or CSV format. You can export these addresses and move from FeedBurner to another service at any time. You will also receive an optional email when people decide to unsubscribe from your updates.
6. Easy social bookmarking and sharing with FeedBurner FeedFlare
This feature available with FeedBurner allows you to add links to social bookmarking sites in the footer of each of your blog updates sent to the subscribers using FeedBurner Email service. This allows your email subscribers to submit your blog posts to their favorite social blogging networks with great ease and convenience. This is a great blog-promotion strategy that will help you market your content. There’s no use of writing great content if people don’t get to know that it exists! Right?
If you liked this post, and learned something from it… You may also like to read How to customize your Feedburner Email Subscription Form.
What next?!
Subscribe to Inspirit Blog’s RSS via Email.
I’d like to add an additional benefit of feedburner, which is integration with Aweber. Aweber is probably the biggest autoresponder on the internet, and having easy integration with your rss subscription is very powerful.
I haven’t given a shot to Aweber yet, but have heard a lot about its ‘goodness.’ I would be trying it out, as soon as I find some time for it.
I don’t subscribe to blogs by email anymore because going through my emails each day would take too long and I prefer to read blogs in my own time. I guess if you want people to subscribe by email you must give them a good incentive (freebies come to mind). That said, I think I’ll grab your blog’s RSS for now.
Internet Junkies last blog post..So Much to Do, So Little Time!
For keeping my email inbox clean and saving myself from bothering about going through large number of emails each day… I use folders, labels and filters to manage the emails I receive. Those from FeedBurner go into a separate space altogether, so that I can read them later in my own time. The significant mails that I should go through daily still arrive in the parent inbox, so I don’t miss out on anyone of those. 🙂
Internet Junkie,
Attracting more subscriber with freebies is a great idea 😉 as that is also one of my strategies to increase my email subscribers.
Another thing I know is to run a contest, that obligate the participant to subscribe by email.
Or….., just write a good quality of article in sequels. Part 1, part 2 and so on. 😀 The couriousity might lead people to subscribe by email if they like it.
A u d e es last blog post..The First PSDTUTS Contest!
I will be doing a blog post about this too, very soon… Stay Tuned 😉
@Caribbean Web
@ShankerBakshi : Thanks for your words of appreciation. I am glad I can help you people some way 🙂
Keep visiting,
Cheers…
I’m sorry Abhinav, because looks like I got left behind on responding the comments. First of all, I want to thank you for the chance to do the blog guest post and of course for the help in grammar edits :p.
@Will,
When you log in to your account and checking the Subscriber Details, next to email address list of your subsrciber, you will see the three columns: Start Date, Status and Action. The Action Column containing buttons to manage hour subscriber. Just for a quick illustration: I think this feature can be useful, when some people just subscribed but they never or simply forgot to verify it. We can somehow remind the subscriber by sending an email notification. If somehow they lost the verification link email, we can ask the subscriber to RE-SUBSCRIBE after we reset their previous subscription request by deleting it.
Thank you for the comment btw 😉
A u d e es last blog post..The First PSDTUTS Contest!
Yeah i think freebies is the best way in getting more subscribers…however your article answered alot of the questions, thankyou…
Timon Weller of Make Money Online ramblingss last blog post..Blogger Vs WordPress, Which one is Better?
Email updates do include images in them, so only theme load up time should be considered for dialup users.
Ashfames last blog post..Zoho : Quick & Easy Online Invoicing
Number 4 is a great point about content. I am sure alot of people still use dial up and do not like to wait for some sites with alot of content or images to load. I know some ads slow speed down on a few sites i read and i like the idea of reading post not waiting for the ads to load.
I found it quite useful to check the feedburner email subscriber list for guys that have signed up for email subscription but not verified their accounts.. I found you don’t have to delete the user and ask them to reregister. You can take the unverified user’s email address and enter it yourself in the feedburner email subsscription form – it will notify you that that email address is already a subscriber and will send a ‘reminder’ email to the person to verify. I make it a point only to do this once for any email address if he/she hasn’t verified for a week, then I assume the person either doesn’t want to sign up or the email address is a dud.. it’s helped a lot with converting unverified subscribers to verified ones.
Wonkie cartoonss latest published blog-post ………. Free cartoons by email – win an iPod promotion!
Excellent Post…Very Informative…Thanks…
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Does anyone even make use of feedflare? By anyone, I mean visitors. Do they even bother using it, or do they just ignore it? I haven’t tried it out myself, so I’m not really sure its worth having up. Anyone have any results to share about it?
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