Using Aweber Instead of Feedburner on Your Blog

Most bloggers use some kind of RSS subscription service like Feedburner to manage reader subscriptions. Using Feedburner allows a reader to subscribe directly using “feed readers” like Google Reader and Feedblitz, or users can also choose to receive blog updates via email.

Feedburner is great for:

• Providing an easy way to subscribe to / unsubscribe from your blog
• Providing basic reports on your web traffic demographics
• Providing extra RSS tools via “Feed Flares” that build interactivity and embeds several important functions of social bookmarking

However, Feedburner email subscriptions have several limitations:

• You can only email your blog’s content to users, exactly as it appears on your blog
• You cannot send other commercial email to your email list
• You cannot segregate / manage / transfer your email list

For my ProfitBlogger blog, I have been using Aweber’s “Blog Broadcast” feature from the very beginning. This is because I prefer to create an ezine format for my broadcast, where I group together several posts and also add in other related content from the forum and put in some links to my products.

I can also use custom HTML for my broadcasts, and here’s how a ProfitBlogger Ezine edition looks like:

You’ll notice that I can manage and divide my content in a more presentable way, while also adding some custom messages anywhere in the email itself.

Here’s some characteristics and advantages of using Aweber’s broadcast service:

• You have 100% control over your email list and you can send them any message / email you want independent of the content on your blog
• You can broadcast individual posts, or manually group several posts at a time.
• You can also choose to send out a summary of the posts, or just the headers and link to your blog for the complete content
• You can automate the broadcast, or you can send it out manually. Sending out manually gives you the opportunity to review the content and also add in other stuff like ads and promotional messages.
• You can choose to broadcast only certain categories in your blog, by using the category feeds
• You can archive your email broadcasts, and obtain an RSS feed for the archive, provided by Aweber themselves

The only issue here is that Feedburner is free, while you’ll need to pay $17.00 / month for Aweber. However, Aweber is a complete mailing list management tool, not just a blog syndication tool like Feedburner.

If you’re just writing and building a blog, and you want to monetize your blog with Google Adsense, Kontera or other ads, you should go with Feedburner as it’s more universally accepted as a reliable indicator of a blog’s reach and popularity. A lot of bloggers advertise the amount of RSS readers they have using Feedburner’s additional tools right at the top of their blog to attract advertisers.

If on the other hand you’re not blogging for advertising bucks, choose Aweber. For example, if you’re an author or trainer and your money is made when someone buys your products or attends your events, create an Aweber opt-in form like the on you see on the right hand column of this blog and offer something of value to encourage people to sign-up.

You can then insert autoresponder messages into Aweber to follow-up with your subscribers, while driving traffic to your blog at the same time. You won’t need to show off your opt-in list, because you’re not interested in advertisers or Google Adsense.

By using Aweber, you will receive much more flexibility in terms of sending out promotional messages and special offers for your products and events to your subscribers.

Sign-up for Aweber here