FeedBlitz News (+features, -rss)

Shopping Cart Integration / Email Parser Policy Change

2012-01-13T15:24:00.001-05:00

The FeedBlitz email parser integration that enables subscribers to be automatically added to one of your lists has been modified since we launched it. If the list you are adding to is an autoresponder, FeedBlitz will add the subscriber and activate the autoresponder automatically. It doesn't feel right to make them go through dual opt in in this case just so you can say "thank you."

If the list the parser is attached to is a standard mailing list (newsletter, blog powered or otherwise), dual opt-in will still be required.

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Adding Google+ to FeedBlitz Feeds and Emails

2011-12-30T07:43:00.003-05:00

Following yesterday's announcement of our Pinterest integrations, today it is Google+'s turn. Google+ has been added to FeedBlitz in two key areas to enable end-user sharing of your posts and links to their G+ circles:

As a new social media feed "flare" added to FeedBlitz RSS feeds (enabled at RSS - Social Media), enabling RSS and email subscribers to share the post with their circles on Google+
As an additional sharing option when an email subscription is activated, added to the screen blogged about here, so that new, enthusiastic subscribers can invite their circles to join your list.

If you use FeedBlitz's email services you'll need to set up a FeedBlitzed version of your site's regular RSS feed if you haven't already done so, enable the G+ social media flare, and then make your list's article source your new FeedBlitz feed. Easy!

So now your readership can share with pins, circles, tweets and links. Whatever next?!

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Pinterest for Feeds and Emails

2011-12-29T14:41:00.004-05:00

I'm happy to announce that FeedBlitz has added comprehensive support for Pinterest - the increasingly popular social pinboard service - to FeedBlitz's RSS (and by extension, blog to email) subscription services.

What we've enabled is:

The ability to splice your pins into your FeedBlitz version of your blog's RSS feed (via RSS - Splices), which will include your pins into that feed, and by extension into any emails and updates sent from that feed. The default is to add a daily summary of pins to the feed, but you can change that on the splices page. All you do is put in your account ID, and FeedBlitz takes care of the rest.
Enabling your subscribers to pin your posts to their Pinterest boards, increasing your social sharing. Again, this is via our RSS feed service, the premium alternative to FeedBurner. Go to RSS - Social Media and enable the Pinterest "flare." Your FeedBlitz feed will now have the Pinterest icon added to its sharing options. When clicked, the first image in the post is put up for pinning along with the post's title. The icon will show up in your feed and in any mailings it powers.

This is great news for crafters, art bloggers, photographers, or any bloggers who uses imagery consistently in their posts.

If you want to add Pinterest to your blog's email subscription mailings but don't yet have a FeedBlitz RSS feed, creating one is easy. All you need to do is:

Create a FeedBlitz version of your blog's feed at RSS - New Feed.
Change your FeedBlitz mailings' article source to be the feed you created in step (1) at newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - The Basics (v3) or via the list's settings button in FeedBlitz v4.

You don't have to use that feed anywhere else if you don't want to - but you might well be tempted when you see what we can do :)

Happy pinning, folks!

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UnWord

2011-11-16T07:47:00.003-05:00

Microsoft Word, part of the Microsoft Office suite, is a great word processor. I use it myself for documents, e-books; and I use the rest of the Office suite for email, spreadsheets etc. It's a great desktop app.

It's really easy to copy / paste from Word into a blog post to make creating pretty blog posts with good spell checking super easy. Which is fine, except that unless you have (and use) a special "Paste from Word" feature in your blog's post editor, lots of Microsoft Office-specific custom HTML comes along for the ride as well. You may not see it when you're editing, or even on your blog when it goes live, but it's there. When emails built from that post arrive at non-Office subscribers, and sometimes when Office-using subscribers do something like forward an email, much weirdness can result. Text changing size and / or typeface are common symptoms; or line spacing suddenly not being what you expect.

The reasons why this happens relates to things called CSS classes and custom conditional HTML that nothing outside of Office and Internet Explorer recognize, and I'm not going into the gory details here. Suffice to say it's there, and it's frustrating to everyone when perfectly happy posts "suddenly" don't display correctly.

When things like this happen, my usual advice is "Don't paste from Word to create posts!"

But that's unrealistic. People are going to do it anyway, and that ought to be OK.

So, here at FeedBlitz, we're going to make it OK. Tools should interoperate properly and your emails should work, consistently, for as many of your readers as possible. So, as of now, FeedBlitz will attempt to fixup Microsoft Office-related custom markup to minimize the sometimes bizarre effects that it can have; we call it "UnWord." The results are more consistent rendering across the board, and your emails staying that way when your subscribers forward or reply to them.

There's nothing you need to do; it's automatic for everyone. Now you can use Word to create your posts and they will both look better and behave more consistently across the board. Although, honestly? I still recommend you draft your posts in your blog's post editor. You'll get the best results that way, no matter what.

Advanced Email Marketing: Suppression Lists in FeedBlitz

2011-11-15T08:07:00.002-05:00

In my earlier post about using Suppression Lists in email marketing, I explained how suppression lists are used to restrict to whom a third party an send a mailing. They're important because selling a direct sponsored email blast to your list can be the best form of one-off email monetization available to you, so you need to be able to use them if and when you get the chance.

This post is the promised "how-to guide" for FeedBlitz users who've sold a dedicated sponsorship email and need to use our suppression list feature.

1) Setting Up - Use FeedBlitz v4

Suppression lists are only available in the new FeedBlitz user interface, so you'll need to try that out. Visit http://www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 to start.

Once you're in, Suppression Lists (along with Custom Fields and Surveys) are in the "Publisher Tools" section of the navigation, just under your Sites. Select "Suppression List Management" in the navigation.

2) Import your Suppression List File

You can import into a new suppression list or update an existing one. If you update an existing suppression list, FeedBlitz deduplicates, so that it's safe to re-add the same addresses if all you have is a single monolithic file from your vendor. There's no practical limit on imported list size, but if the upload is so large that it times out on you, you can split it into multiple parts, or ask FeedBlitz tech support to help you out.

As you import the file and further work on your list, you'll see your activity is recorded on that suppression list's page. You can use that information to prove to your provider how you used the list if you need to.

3) Use the list!

Suppression lists are designed for one-off mailings, so you can use them in either Newsflash ("email blast") or On Demand (manually selected posts from your site) mailings. Pick the suppression list you want to use at the foot of the on demand or newsflash page, just under the subscriber segment area.

And that's it; pretty easy. The mailing will use the suppression list to ensure that nobody on the suppression list gets the email, even of they're actively opted in to your mailing list. FeedBlitz won't mail anyone on the suppression list.

Your use of the suppression list is recorded in the list's activity log, and (for newsflash) saved along with the contents of your mailing. If you like to jump start later email broadcasts by picking one you used earlier, your suppression lists selection now comes along for the ride too. If you want to use a different list (or none at all), simply change your selection in the newsflash email builder while you're editing your copy.

New Date-Based Custom Field Options

2011-11-07T12:03:00.001-05:00

Newly released into FeedBlitz, a new custom field type to hold dates. You can use this custom field like any other, such as making it public (so they enter, say, their birthday on your subscription form), or you can make it private (such as their last purchase date). Date custom fields have a handy little popup calendar to help make data entry easier, as in the screenshot below.

If you create a field for birthday, say, you can (for example) create a segment that pulls out people born before 1990 like this:

birthday<"1990-01-01"

If you play with this or any custom field feature (Newsletters - Custom fields in version three, Publisher Tools in v4), you will notice that we've added some more "system" custom fields that - interestingly and not at all coincidentally - happen to be date fields. They are Opened, Clicked, Joined and OptedIn.

Intriguing, huh? More on these tomorrow.

Fearless FeedBurner Migration - No Login Required

2011-10-27T12:49:00.031-04:00

In yesterday's post about setting up your RSS properly I talked about the risk of getting trapped with a particular feed service because your subscribers are subscribing to their feed URL on their domain, not your URL on your domain.

That's bad enough. What's worse in FeedBurner's case is that people may have set up their feeds years ago (or their web folks did), and they can't figure out how to access their feeds and metrics. Or, from worse to worsest (?), FeedBurner users can migrate their account to Google apps and suddenly find out that a perfectly good FeedBurner login no longer works - and can't be recovered. Not only are you trapped at this point, you have no recourse other than abandoning your feed, its subscribers and starting over. There's no corporate support for FeedBurner at all (but it's free so that's OK, right? Perhaps not...). End up at this point and you're well and truly up the proverbial creek. You're by no means alone in your paddle-less adventure, but that's cold comfort, I know.

This is a tragic turn of events for what was once a fun, supported (and supportive) service. I've written on the topic before, but as I try and provide a little help to frustrated users in the FeedBurner forums, it's sad to see so many people disappointed and frustrated by the complete lack of engagement from FeedBurner's owners. They simply don't understand why Google doesn't care about them (another instance of digital share cropping - what would happen if FeedBurner went away? Yikes...).

Sounds like an opportunity for FeedBlitz, right? Well, not so fast. People frequently can't log in to FeedBurner to use FeedBlitz's migration wizards, so they're stuck. Often, that leaves their readers sitting out there subscribed to a FeedBurner URL, with nothing that can be done by the site owner to access that audience and its stats.

Which means, as I said yesterday, that site owners have to get all those readers to resubscribe. It's the only way to get their readers off that FeedBurner URL, and the only way for the publisher to re-take control of their feed, their readership and their RSS metrics. Even with the pain and frustration many FeedBurner users are now experiencing, the fear of starting over and "abandoning" their subscribers is just too much. They give up, and resign themselves to putting up with it. The fear and lack of access put even major bloggers on the back foot, and prevents them from making a switch they'd otherwise be more than happy to make. After all, their subscribers are their most committed audience, and surely far too important to abandon to the free but unsupported service that FeedBurner has become. It's a shame to see such confusion descend into lost hope, day after day. But that's what's going on.

Good news, then. There is hope.

As I alluded to yesterday, FeedBlitz does now have a way forward for people stuck in this scenario. It ain't pretty, but it works. Our approach assumes that you have control over the original feed that FeedBurner is polling, that you can use your blog's redirect features, and that you're going to try FeedBlitz out as a premium FeedBurner alternative.

First, set up your own feed on your own domain, like I outlined yesterday, if you haven't already done so.
If that is different from your FeedBurner original feed (our tech support can help you identify the URL FeedBurner is accessing), set up a permanent redirect from that feed to the new feed you set up in step (1) above.
Then set up your FeedBlitz feed at RSS | New based on the URL you set up at (1).
Set up a temporary redirect from your feed (1) to your new FeedBlitz feed (3), making sure that you have an exception defined so that FeedBlitz can access your source feed OK without going around in circles.

At this point you have FeedBurner - and everyone using it - redirecting to your new canonical feed on your own domain (good!), and you are then having FeedBlitz serve it for you. Which means that FeedBurner (or whatever you use) is, in fact, accessing FeedBlitz for your feed. This is the key part.

(Note that at this point we don't have to log in to Google at all, so even if you can't get in, you're golden.)

The bad news is that all the people using FeedBurner will still have to resubscribe. No avoiding that without login access. Simply asking them to do it in a blog post is unlikely to have any effect; people are lazy and - hey - the FeedBurner feed's still working (although it's a lot cooler now it's using FeedBlitz's feed goodies).

So here's the kicker. FeedBlitz has a new feature in its RSS settings that will try very, very hard to FORCE all your FeedBurner subscribers - at least the ones who are actually reading your old FeedBurner feed - to change their feed settings and resubscribe.

How? Well, when you enable the FeedBurner migration option at RSS | Settings, you can edit a fairly loud and to the point message (lots of bold text and colors) that says: We've moved, update your settings, oh faithful reader! OK, not quite so Jane Austen perhaps, but you get the idea. When the setting is enabled and FeedBlitz detects FeedBurner accessing your FeedBlitz feed (courtesy of the redirects you set up above), FeedBlitz does NOT send your post to FeedBurner (and by implication, on to every subscriber using it).

No. Instead, FeedBlitz serves the "resubscribe" message. Just to FeedBurner and its subscribers; everyone else gets your regular content. As long as you have that setting enabled in FeedBlitz it will continue to (loudly, persistently, consistently) urge your remaining FeedBurner subscribers to switch over. Not for only 15 days, but for as long as you have the FeedBlitz feature switched on. So people taking long vacations, sabbaticals or whatever will still get it. Everyone accessing your content via your old FeedBurner feed will know, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do. And they will be reminded, every single time you post, until they change.

So, although it's not as smooth as you might like, there's no need to access your old FeedBurner account to switch, which is a huge win. (If you can log in we have wizards to help expedite setup and email subscriber transfer). With this capability, FeedBlitz can basically push every one of your subscribers with a pulse over to your new core feed living at your URL on your domain. You don't need to delete your old FeedBurner feed either, which means all the old links in aggregators will work too. But everyone paying attention will quickly switch because they want your content and NOT an annoying message from the likes of us. As I said, pretty it is not. Effective, though? You betcha.

Sure, not everyone will come over. You're going to have a proportion of abandoned subscriber accounts, and so at the end of the day your numbers will start off being lower here at FeedBlitz than at FeedBurner. But what you gain is:

Control over your feed and how it's served.
Knowing you have a supported, reliable service.
Knowing the people you do have are fully (re)engaged with your content.
A powerful platform to build on going forward.

That first point is important. You can (should!) configure the message we send to FeedBurner subscribers to direct readers to the feed on your URL (remember we still serve it, because of the temporary redirect). But you own those readers on your URL on your domain. Don't care for FeedBlitz later on? Well, switch the redirect off - done! They're still yours. They won't need to resubscribe again, because as far as they're concerned they're subscribing to the same feed.

At the risk of harming FeedBlitz's future revenue growth, you could in theory start a trial with us for the sole purpose of rescuing your feed from FeedBurner, and then cancel before the trial ends, planning on the migration message having moved anyone who cares across back to you by then. Obviously, we hope you'll stick around, but it's certainly something you could consider if you want to make that move and take back your feed. Our RSS only prices are just $1.49 a month anyway, so if you don't use our email services you're not going to break the bank if (when :) ) you choose to continue with us.

I hope this helps someone get out of the quagmire. Know that, if any of this resonates with you, at least you're not alone, and there is a way out.

If you're interested and would like help getting control of your RSS feed and your subscribers back, please tweet me @phollows or contact us via support at feedblitz dot com. We're happy to hear from you and will help as best we can, client or no.

FeedBlitz News (+features, -rss)

Shopping Cart Integration / Email Parser Policy Change

Join the Conversation!

Related Stories

Adding Google+ to FeedBlitz Feeds and Emails

Join the Conversation!

Related Stories

Pinterest for Feeds and Emails

Join the Conversation!

Related Stories

UnWord

Advanced Email Marketing: Suppression Lists in FeedBlitz

New Date-Based Custom Field Options

Fearless FeedBurner Migration - No Login Required