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?!
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