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Current ArticlesThis feed's current articles are shown below. Subscribe for updates to all the content available in this feed, or click through here to see the original article.  Metrics matter - it's rule #1 for marketing programs. If you can't measure the success of a program (whatever success means to you) then you have no idea how well it's working and whether you should invest in it, tune it, or kill it. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Simple, really.
So online marketers invest a lot of time setting up measurement systems for their online programs, such as Google Analytics for web sites and open / click through tracking for email marketing programs. It's even possible to get stats-addicted,...
Read the whole entry »  If you were affected by the ho-hum availability of the FeedBlitz RSS service recently (we're A-OK now, by the way), here's why: Traffic jumped by a factor of 17 over this time last week and it took us too long to get to grips with it, for which I apologize. I hope this post will help explain why that happened, what we did and didn't do, and what we have learned from the experience.
Chronology
Late last Friday (September 25th) we noticed that incoming traffic had - very suddenly - started to clog the RSS service. We dug around a...
Read the whole entry »  This has been bugging me the last few days as we've quietly extended support for commenting within FeedBlitz (FYI comment links now appear for Blogger blogs whereas they didn't before, for example, and new comment icons appear in FeedBlitz RSS feeds where appropriate).
But it kept on striking me as odd - why do feeds force subscribers to subscribe to something else (a site comments feed or an individual post's comment feed), or to visit an alternative page or site to see the current conversation? Why aren't the latest comments, you know,...
Read the whole entry »  We'll be running some maintenance on FeedBlitz late Saturday evening, US Eastern. We aim to keep any disruption to a minimum during the process.
 Accessibility
 2009-09-25 01:56 UTC by Phil Hollows
  FeedBlitz has added an audio version of the visual CAPTCHA (which has also been slightly updated) used on all FeedBlitz subscription forms. The API has also been extended to add a new audio tag to the captcha XML.
 FeedBlitz has long had a very easy way for marketers to enable dynamic user-defined newsletters using the tracking API call:
http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Track=<user-defined-url>&publisher=<publisher-id>
where you substitute in the appropriate values (your <publisher-ID> is your subscriber ID, visible at My Account / My Profile). It's great for users who use search, for example, which generates an RSS feed under the covers from which you can then generate a nifty, personalized email newsletter.
When the...
Read the whole entry »  Since its inception, FeedBlitz has been automatically converting single RSS feeds into formatted, indexed, tracked email marketing newsletters. There are services - such as FeedBlitz's RSS service and Yahoo Pipes - that allow multiple feeds to be merged, blended and spliced into one, so it's also easy to munge multiple feeds into a single newsletter. But the problem with splicing is that it merges and mixes all the source feeds into one unified feed. While that's fine for many applications, what if you want to have a single newsletter,...
Read the whole entry »  The FeedBlitz delivery metrics report now includes percentages as well as raw numbers for your opens, forwards, bounces, unsubscribes etc. The changes are part of a general effort to give publishers greater insight into their newsletters' performance.
The latest changes also allow you click a given schedule class to easily differentiate between overnight mailings and those sent to Twitter and IM subscribers which show up as "Express." Don't forget that, as you view the report, you can click on the chart's graphic elements to drill down...
Read the whole entry »  Overnight issues have delayed mailings; we're picking up the pace now. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Update - we backfilled completely by the afternoon; services were fully functional early morning. We're reviewing what happened overnight to increase the service's robustness to the class of failure that occurred.
Read the whole entry »  All RSS feeds can now have category feeds automatically, courtesy the FeedBlitz RSS service. Simply add /tag/ and then the category to any FeedBlitz RSS feed and the filter is applied.
So here is the main FeedBlitz News feed: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz And here is every post tagged "features": http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/tag/features And here is every post NOT tagged "features": http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/not/featuresEasy! You can separate multiple tags with commas, like this:
Read the whole entry »  The RSS Headline Widget at RSS / Promote has been boosted again - it now lets you pick the number of posts (from 1 to 5) to have in the widget, and whether you want article copy to be plain text (which is better for sidebar use) or full HTML (better for full page widgets).
 When feeds get large (> 512kb), the FeedBlitz RSS service intelligently truncates your feed so that your subscribers keep getting updates, as opposed to simply not serving your feed at all, which is what happens with you-know-who.
Today we've spruced up the feature so that, if FeedBlitz truncates your feed, we'll add an extra "virtual post" to the end which shows the titles of all the entries that didn't make the cut. This kicks in automatically once your FeedBlitz feed grows to be over 512k.
Controlling Feed Size
We've also...
Read the whole entry »  New video tutorial posted on how you can automate your email (and social media) marketing in just three steps and three minutes. It's our first, so be gentle :-)
Click the link here if you can't see the player below:
 When FeedBlitz improved our Twitter integration last year the subscription form was simplified to only include the direct message version of the integration. The publisher version was promised back "shortly" and now that commitment has been fulfilled, but I will confess that 11 months is a longer "shortly" than we had in mind at the time.
Anyway, it seems to be Twitter week here at FeedBlitz, and so I'm happy to say that the wait
is over and newsletter publishers can enable (and disable) automatic reblogging of their updates to their...
Read the whole entry »  Twitter's RSS feeds aren't very exciting. And for real-time messaging, not so useful. As a result, Twitter's RSS feeds have been somewhat neglected by the community at large, and that represents an opportunity that's going begging.
Twitter's RSS feeds can be much more useful when you make them a little smarter and work them harder as an adjunct to your blog and social media marketing strategy. And it doesn't take much effort to set up, and next to none once you're up and running.
Firstly, let's take your basic Twitter feed for your...
Read the whole entry »  The headline widgets (a.k.a. "BuzzBoost" in that other RSS service) for RSS and email newsletter publishers that allow you to place your most recent headlines in your blog's sidebar have been extended by popular demand to include article contents as well as headlines. The default is headlines only, but you can decide to include a variable amount of post content as well if you wish.
The no-longer accurately named headline widget for our email newsletter publishers is at Newsletters - Forms - Headline Widget.
RSS publishers using our...
Read the whole entry »  We've upgraded some of the FeedBlitz autoresponder features this week; seems like there's a lot of interest in this area of our automated email marketing services all of a sudden. We're not done with the work here, but the changes to date are worth noting if you're an autoresponder fan.
1. You can now subscribe directly to an Autoresponder
Before, FeedBlitz autoresponders were designed to start only when a subscriber activated a "parent" newsletter subscription. That restriction has been lifted, so now you can use the autoresponder...
Read the whole entry »  All done, missed schedules caught up and all should now be running normally! Thanks for everyone's patience while we completed this important update.
 Advanced warning - we'll be doing some extended work in FeedBlitz's innards on Saturday evening. During that time the service may be unavailable or "read only." Please plan to have any imports and other work on your account done by the time Saturday evening rolls around. For updates on the maintenance please follow @phollows on Twitter.
Read the whole entry »  FeedBlitz offers direct emails to subscribers as well as RSS to mail; this is the newsflash feature (at Newsletters - Mailings - Newsflash Email Blast). You can use it to send non-blog emails to a list (or a segment of a list, defined by email addresses or custom fields).
FeedBlitz has added a new step to Newsflash creation that enabling marketers to jump-start their next missive by basing it on one that was previously sent; it's a great time saver if you want to re-use some carefully crafted HTML mail or a nicely turned phrase.
Read the whole entry »  A new version (0.91) of the FeedBlitz WP plugin has been posted at http://assets.feedblitz.com/feedblitzmembermail.zip to resolve conflicts at sites who also have the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin installed. You should now be able to use both at the same time!
Read the whole entry » "Garbled" mail...
2009-06-12 20:54 UTC by Phil Hollows Hi All:
We've had a few instances today (Friday June 12) where the occasional recipient received a "garbled" message. It seems to be pretty rare and somewhat random but nonetheless it's not OK and so a dial that was recently tweaked and which appears to have provoked the problem is being duly untweaked ASAP. Everything will all be sorted in time for the overnight runs tonight (Friday). Apologies to those affected.
Thanks
Phil
Read the whole entry »  I'm pleased to announce a public beta of FeedBlitz's very first WordPress plugin!
 The FeedBlitz "Member Mail" plugin enables hosted WordPress blogs to integrate email newsletter signup with the user registration screen. With the plugin activated, the visitor selects a "subscribe me" checkbox when they register for an account on your site (see the example on the left). As well as registering the user, enabling the FeedBlitz checkbox seamlessly starts FeedBlitz's mandatory dual opt-in email subscription process.
You get the benefit of...
Read the whole entry »  Several users recently reported issues with Outlook opening our emails and Outlook "hanging" waiting for images to be downloaded. This issue not only affected FeedBlitz but also FeedBurner and presumably anyone else trying to send email based on certain RSS feeds. It was something of a mystery to us since we hadn't changed anything that might have caused the problem.
The culprit, as found by Google Groups user Kevinbuckleywfb in this thread http://groups.google.com/group/publicity-tools/browse_thread/thread/33377c0ce50bc038?pli=1 was a...
Read the whole entry »  It's been a while since I've posted here - we've been busy with the new RSS service launched in late March. Execution is key and for the last couple of months we've been tweaking the dials and making small incremental improvements as we've gone along to keep things going smoothly as we've grown. Time, then, for a quick highlight reel for FeedBlitz, the rapidly growing FeedBurner alternative.
From a standing start we now are already hosting nearly 2,500 active feeds. Reporting is faster with:- Deeper drill-down into reach and...
Read the whole entry »
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