Online Marketing Blog

For years, the only way to get a good understanding of how many people are reading and interacting with your blog feed was to run your feed though FeedBurner.  Now, FeedBlitz has a service to compete.

FeedBlitz RSS claims to offer better branding, more social media integration by integrating Twitter and other social networks, a mobile optimized version of your feed, better SEO, filtering, and additional feed stats.  I was hoping for some screenshots on FeedBlitz’s site, but they don’t currently offer any.

Unlike FeedBurner that is free, FeedBlitz RSS is paid.  The price minimum is $1.49 per month and goes up from there based on the number unique active email subscribers in your account.  This is where it gets a little confusing.

RSS to Email service FeedBlitz has launched version 2.0 of the service. Lots of upgrades. via Blogger Design.

Google launches a new multivariate testing tool, Google Website Optimizer and is looking for beta testers.

Yahoo launches the new version of their sponsored search program, Panama.

Here’s a new e-book on social media (pdf) from spannerworks. This is a great companion book to the PR 2.0 Essentials (pdf) document from SHIFT.

Brian Solis publishes the next installment in his series about blogger relations: “Reaching The Blogosphere Part 4 – Writing and Distributing the News“.

Rohit’s “Dark Side of Social Media and How to Avoid It” offers sage advice on how NOT to market with social media.

Feedblitz, one of the most popular feed to email services got quite a make over today as Feedblitz 2 launched.

Along with the new look and feel comes a wealth of new features including an upgraded API, monetization, publishing, tags, stats, subscribe to comments, diagnostics, speed and more.

I haven’t had much time to play with the new Feedblitz, but it’s looking quite nice. If you’ve dug around, share your thoughts on the upgraded service.

[tags]feedblitz, email, feed, rss[/tags]

I received a comment yesterday on how Feedblitz emails had stopped arriving for one user.  I’m not sure what blog he’s subscribed (the issue wasn’t with this one) but there could be a handful of reasons why the email notifications are not arriving.  However, today I noticed that my Feedblitz alerts, that I had previously setup for a few blogs, were now showing up in my Gmail spam box.  I’m not sure what triggered the email to be marked as spam, however Gmail didn’t like it.

If you are subscribed to a blog via Feedblitz, and the emails stop coming, check your spam box and make sure they aren’t just getting filtered out.

[tags]feedblitz, spam, gmail[/tags]

I’ve just added Feedblitz’ subscribe via email as an option on this blog. (under categories on the right)

If you think about it, subscribe via email is something every blog should have as not everyone knows what a feed is or how it all works. For every one person that knows about feeds, there are probably 10 that have no idea. However, almost everyone knows what emails is. So having a subscribe via email is an option all blogs should have.

There are quite a few services out there and one seems to be just as good as the other. I like Feedblitz as it allows me to see who’s subscribed to my blog and I can export the emails too. For an additional cost, I can also design the email templates. Other feed to email services include R|Mail, RSSFwd & Yahoo Alerts.

Spotlight on Blog Marketing Interview with Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz

And now for something completely different. Since so much of what’s covered here on Online Marketing Blog deals with the marketing of blogs, I thought adding some interviews with people involved with blog marketing would be of interest to our fast growing audience of readers.

Today’s interview is with Phil Hollows, Founder and CEO of the popular RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. With an active circulation of 682,330 and 53,955 active feeds, FeedBlitz is likely the most popular RSS to email service available. I had a chance to preview some features of FeedBlitz a while back and have been using it personally and with our PR and blog consulting clients ever since. Recently Phil took FeedBlitz on as a full time gig, has secured investor financing and is hiring. What better time than now to check in with Phil for a peek behind the FeedBlitz curtain.

Phil over at FeedBlitz tells me they have now added weekly scheduling options:

“FeedBlitz has now added weekly email options to simplify weekly newsletter production from blogs and other RSS feed sources. Available as a “Turbo” upgrade, you select the day of the week you want your newsletter to be released. In the wee small hours FeedBlitz collects your posts from the previous seven days and mails them out to your subscribers, automatically.”

This is a good feature since a lot of blog readers don’t want daily updates and blog owners can use this feature to present their week’s blog postings as an email news letter.