Making the Most of FeedBlitz: Modified Feeds and AutoCast

May 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Every second Thursday we’re going to be highlight some of the incredible ways that FeedBlitz can help you with your community building and sharing of content. Today, we follow up on Tuesday’s post on integrating third party content and walk you through creating category specific feeds. As well, we explore using AutoCast, an extension of FeedBlitz’s RSS feed management services for bloggers, podcasters and online publishers, to migrate your iTunes feeds to FeedBlitz without losing your audience.

Dicing Feeds with RSS Tag and Category Filters

One of the great things about a FeedBlitz RSS feed is that you can do more with it than simply share the feed URL. You can use filters to modify what the feed shows to subscribers. This enables you to create category-specific feeds automatically, which can then be used to create category-specific mailings.

You do this using path modifiers, /tag/ and /not/, to pick what you want in or out, respectively. If we use the FeedBlitz News RSS feed as an example (feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz), they could be used like this:

All posts tagged “FeedBlitz” only: feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/tag/feedblitz

All posts except testimonials: feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz/not/testimonials

You can have multiple /tag/ and /not/ modifiers in a single feed URL. If you have multiple modifiers they are an OR, not an AND, i.e. All posts matching ANY of the selections will be included in the criteria.

Why is this useful? Because now you can use these feeds to create category specific content that can be served to a web site via an RSS widget, and create custom mailing content for niche audiences. Or, if you want to avoid syndicating some articles beyond your web site, you can restrict what’s publicly available via RSS.

These filters work on both your feed’s tags and categories, which FeedBlitz consolidates into a single “keyword” list, against which the filters are then applied. So a post will appear in RSS feed with the filter /tag/happy if it is either tagged “happy” or in the “happy” category.

FeedBlitz AutoCast

FeedBlitz AutoCast is the extension of FeedBlitz’s RSS feed management services. Ideal for producers seeking a FeedBurner alternative, FeedBlitz’s AutoCast enables publishers using the old FeedBurner SmartCast service to switch. It also delivers value – metrics, monetization and migration – for new podcasters seeking to take advantage of content distribution from services and tools like Apple iTunes.

If you’re switching your podcast RSS to FeedBlitz, AutoCast has a vital feature to enable you to migrate your iTunes feeds to FeedBlitz without losing your audience. FeedBlitz’s AutoCast can optionally insert the iTunes <itunes:newfeed-url> tag to an RSS feed, redirecting iTunes to the podcast source’s new location. This enables simpler migration of iTunes subscriptions both to and from FeedBlitz, ensuring that you can be assured your audience won’t be “trapped” at FeedBlitz like they might have been before.

When FeedBlitz detects that the FeedBurner SmartCast service is active during a FeedBurner migration, FeedBlitz AutoCast is automatically enabled (since February 18, 2013). Moreover, any feed can be podcast-enabled from the FeedBlitz RSS feed’s settings page.

iTunes New Feed Tag Insertion

Possibly the most important function in FeedBlitz’s podcast feed capabilities, especially from a FeedBurner migration perspective, FeedBlitz AutoCast adds the required element to your podcast feed so iTunes can seamlessly transition all subscribers to the new feed source without having to lose a single audience member.

Podcast files are linked into RSS feeds using “enclosure” elements. When AutoCast is enabled, FeedBlitz tracks enclosure accesses separately from other links within the post, reporting them as downloads (D/Ls in the reports pages). It’s entirely possible, depending on the nature of the subscriber’s podcast app, that other links and tracking from the post will not be available to subscribers. Tracking downloads separately shows you the true reach of your content.

No Podcast?

No podcast? No problem! With AutoCast switched on, FeedBlitz will find any audio, video, or flash file that you link to in the post and create an enclosure from it if one isn’t already there.

AutoCast also allows you to set up to five iTunes category / subcategory combinations to be defined for the feed, making it more likely that iTunes and other podcast app users will find your podcast when searching for something new to follow.

There are many iTunes specific fields that can be optionally added to a podcast RSS feed. If they’re not already there, FeedBlitz will create them automatically from the other tags in your feed. This creates a richer subscriber experience when browsing your podcast.

Any RSS feed can be followed via email or in an RSS aggregator / reader – and that’s true for podcast feeds too. FeedBlitz now adds a relevant audio, video or other icon to the post’s content in RSS and email to highlight podcast elements that might otherwise be missed by a non-podcast feed subscriber.

And there you have it. With all the chatter lately about FeedBurner’s possible (future) demise, I hope we’ve shown you a few reasons why FeedBlitz could easily – and efficiently – become your community building and content sharing choice.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Making the Most of FeedBlitz: Integrating Third Party Content

May 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, my vacation – and what came before it – has helped me realize that it’s time for some changes. And change is good. We’re going to be introducing some new content here on the blog, including webinars, guest bloggers, and more. One thing I wanted to do is have a set day where we share some of the great insights from our guides and manuals. You can download them fully, but if you prefer, follow along every other Thursday for highlights.

Now, I recognize that today isn’t Thursday. It’s Tuesday. But in the spirit of change, we wanted to get you started with two installments this week. So come on back this Thursday, and every Thursday thereafter, to learn more about what Feedblitz can do for your organization.

So, you’ve either already switched to FeedBlitz, or are considering it. The big question will be – where to begin? And that is a question only you can answer, I’m afraid. You will know your audience, your site and your business much better than us, after all. We’re here to help facilitate your switch, and provide you with all the information you need to get started, and keep moving forward.

FeedBlitz Flexibility

One of the great things about FeedBlitz’s RSS feed functionality is how flexible it is. Which, of course, is one of the challenges: There’s a lot to figure out, and it can be daunting!

Which brings me to splicing and dicing (well, splicing actually – dicing is in the next chapter on). Splicing is the process of merging other content into your main feed so that what your subscribers end up with is more than just your source feed.

Accessed via the “Add Other Feeds” button from your RSS feed’s home page, you can add content from your other social media channels to your feed, or incorporate any other RSS feed into your posts. You can therefore enrich the RSS subscriber’s experience by merging multiple content feeds into one.

Merge and Cross-Promote

For social networks, all you have to do is identify your account. For example, my YouTube channel is at youtube.com/phollows. To include my YouTube channel’s feed into the FeedBlitz RSS feed, I simply enter “phollows” in the box next to the YouTube icon on that screen. It’s the same idea for all the other social networks too. For any arbitrary third party RSS feed, simply specify the RSS feed URL in the “Service ID” field on the form. It’s a great way to merge and cross-promote different blogs into a single feed, for example.

The drop down on the right tells you how you want the posts inserted into the main feed. A daily list that pulls all the content from the relevant feed, a daily summary that is a bulleted list of titles only, or by merging the third party content into your feed in chronological order.

Now, sometimes feeds can get very large. FeedBurner would simply give up when that happens, but instead FeedBlitz will include all new posts up to the RSS feed size limit we impose. If that content consists entirely of spliced in third party content, FeedBlitz extends the feed until at least one of the “main” feed’s posts has been included.

And that’s that! Watch this space on Thursday, and every other Thursday to come, for more on making the most of your FeedBlitz account.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz Tagged With: , , ,

Running to Stand Still

May 13, 2013 By 2 Comments

FeedBlitz as a business has been growing since we started. Successfully competing against organizations multiple orders of magnitude larger than we are. Passionate about what we do, how we do it and run with a business model that is making the company self-sustaining, even with ~60% year on year growth, over the long run.

But the challenges of building a business like this, even as it grows more or less steadily (and 60% year on year growth, over multiple years, is fast), and even though FeedBlitz is still pretty small by many standards, is that the change required to support that growth is distinctly non-linear.  The way it was run this time last year is not sustainable.  It hasn’t been for a while.

Only: I hadn’t fully grasped that fact. I was so busy dealing with the increase in business and concomitant work that I’d missed the warning signs. We couldn’t keep up with the dramatic increase in customer service.  The net result was that we all were running to stand still – and, despite our best efforts, ended up moving backwards anyway.

So it turns out that vacations are a good thing. Clearing my head gave me the time to recognize, realign and recommit.  To enable and empower the rest of the FeedBlitz team.

Last week from poolside, I decided to hire; it was in fact one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made one I’d got my head out of, um, the sand, for long enough to see what needed to be done. Heather made it happen with a brilliant move in less than 24 hours. The metrics are already moving back in the right direction, and although we’ve much catching up to do, we will do so quickly, and we’re not going to let this happen again. We’re ready for the next step.

But the change required is not just about increasing resources, though. Parts – the most important parts for the long haul – are cultural and personal. The team now knows that heroics, while occasionally welcome and indeed sometimes necessary, shouldn’t have to be the daily modus operandi.  That’s incredibly unhealthy.  I’ve got to be a better enabler, too, and focus more on what lies ahead rather than reacting to what’s happening now. Done and done.

To those who didn’t get the response they needed quickly enough, the blame is mine alone; I’m sorry. I hope we can make this right for you.

Meanwhile, though, FeedBlitz is no longer running to stand to still.

And, damn, that feels good.

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The Entrepreneur’s Nightmare: Taking Time Off

May 7, 2013 By 9 Comments

One of the challenges – and one of the most fun things – about running a rapidly growing business like FeedBlitz is that there’s always something (many somethings, let’s be honest) to do next. What’s next is exciting, frequently difficult and usually time consuming.

So I should ‘fess up here: I might be a workaholic. I love my job; building and running this crazy business. And for those of us who are driven to build businesses, the hardest thing is letting go – not only letting go to other people, but also letting go of next enough to take some time off.

I stink at taking time off. Next is so, so very seductive. But I am, this week, taking some time away (that’s a real photo of my hotel pool). I’m going more or less offline, and to hell with my Klout score (that’s an inside joke – pay no attention to your Klout score. Seriously).

Taking time off is making me antsy, nervous and all sorts of fidgety. I clearly need to take some time off! I shall try to put the phone down, keep the laptop more or less closed, and try to enjoy the down time.  And if you recognize yourself in any of this; perhaps it’s time to embrace the nightmare and enjoy a little R and R yourself. Wish me luck and a couple of pina coladas; I’ll be back next week…

Filed Under: FeedBlitz Tagged With:

Safeguarding Subscribers and Publishers

February 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Web-based malware is a headache. Not only for the damage it inflicts if you happen to visit a page hosting some rot that your system is vulnerable to, but also because if you’re unaware of a security problem on your site it may ultimately affect your site’s listing in search results. Google’s Webmaster Tools utility has a stark warning about malware (or links to malware) when it detects them on your site:

Google has detected harmful code on this site. We recommend that you act quickly to clean up your site. Failure to do so may lead to Google users seeing a warning when they attempt to visit pages on this site.

Yikes, right? It gets worse though. Sometimes simply linking to a site that has become infected or compromised can cause warnings like the one above to start appearing, even if your own site is squeaky clean. You’d want to know about that, of course — and you certainly wouldn’t want to be accidentally sending your visitors off to a bad neck of the woods to get infected with all manner of online nastiness.

As of this weekend, then, if FeedBlitz is informed that a link in one of the feeds or emails that we manage is now bad (and it may not have been hostile when you originally linked to it), several things will happen:

  1. FeedBlitz will blacklist the link in question.
  2. FeedBlitz will no longer send visitors who click on that link to the compromised page.
  3. Instead, they will be sent to a warning page.
  4. FeedBlitz will send the publisher an email about the link, describing the action taken and how to fix it.

Put another way – we safeguard your subscribers by not letting them get there from here, and we safeguard you by letting you know that there’s a problem.

More than likely you’re simply linking to a third party site in a post that now presents a security risk, and so you can’t do much about it. But you can manage your links to it, and we can protect your subscribers until the problem resolves.  If the issue is with your site, however, once it’s fixed you simply let us know. FeedBlitz will let click-throughs resume after confirming that the page in question no longer represents a threat. In the highly unlikely event that a page on your site is blacklisted, know that it only affects that page – all other normal links will work, and your services will be otherwise completely unaffected.

Bottom line: Your readers stay safe, and you get the heads up about a problem that, if left unmanaged, could adversely affect your presence in search engines.

You’re welcome.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz, security

Mailing Policy Change for Idle Lists

January 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Quick heads up on a policy change implemented this week at FeedBlitz. For RSS to email mailing lists, if there hasn’t been a post in the underlying feed for over a year, FeedBlitz will consider the underlying blog idle, and therefore change the list’s status from “active” to “paused” in order to not waste time and energy checking an apparently abandoned feed for new activity.

If you have a publisher account with us, know that any such lists and their subscribers always remain available to you; that won’t change. This update simply means lists that aren’t active will be skipped by FeedBlitz when it’s figuring out what to mail.

You can restart mailings anytime (e.g. if you start to post again) simply by logging in and restarting the list via the “Restart” link on the list’s Mailing Activity tile. For publishers on our tiered pricing scheme, paused lists won’t count to the active subscriber count and you’ll see your billing amount reduce as a result.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz

Talking Feeds on the Entrepreneur Network Podcast

September 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Listen in as host Eric Dye & I discuss:

  • The key products and services FeedBlitz offers.
  • What distinguishes FeedBlitz from the competition.
  • Some client success stories.
  • The future of FeedBurner.
  • Will email become extinct ?

Gotta love that last one (Answer: NO!).

The audio file is available from this page – the session is a little over 20 minutes long.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz Tagged With:

Radio Show and Slideshare Update

August 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you missed my appearance on the Tonya Hall Radio show on Monday you can access the roughly hour-long audio version at via this MP3 link (It’s 24MB, so don’t say you weren’t warned!)

Last night’s webcast on FeedBurner and advanced FeedBlitz usage hosted by Dan Morris included a set of slides, which I’ve uploaded to slideshare.net here: http://www.slideshare.net/phollows/feed-blitz-usage - we’ll have the webcast recording up soon.

Filed Under: FeedBlitz, feedburner

Listen TODAY 11am EDT: FeedBurner, FeedBlitz and Platforms

August 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This morning at 11 am EDT I’m going to be on the Tonya Hall Radio show, streamed online at TonyaHall.net and available in Colorado Springs live on KRCN. I’ll be talking platforms and the risks therein, a topic that’s front of mind not only because of Google’s recent actions with FeedBurner, but also because of Twitter’s API changes announced last week which affect how third parties can use their platform in the future.

So tune in! 11 am eastern at http://www.tonyahall.net

Filed Under: FeedBlitz, feedburner, Platforms Tagged With:

How To Create Content Mailing Lists for Your Blog

June 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For many bloggers, the opportunity to fine tune their email subscriptions is a great way to create focused lists with greater engagement. Visitors who arrive looking for content on one of the possibly many topics you might write about can get subscriptions to just that topic. For example, you might be interested in saving money at the store, but instead of getting deluged by loads of coupon ideas, you only want to hear about freebies.

You can do that in FeedBlitz’s RSS to email capabilities (and not with any other RSS to email product or service, I might add). Better yet, it isn’t that hard to do. Here’s how:

Prerequisites

You have a mailing list for FeedBlitz, and it is sending all your posts to its subscribers.

Step-by-Step Setup

  1. Access your main list via the FeedBlitz navigation.
  2. Click its orange “Settings” button at the top of the page.
  3. On the settings page that appears, click the green “Clone List” button.
  4. Clone it as-is, i.e. don’t change the schedule.
  5. When cloning is done you will be taken to a settings page for the NEW list.
  6. Expand “The Basics” and make sure the name of the list reflects its topic (e.g. “My Site – Freebies Only”)
  7. Expand “Tag-Driven Article Filtering” and add the tag or category name for posts that you want to include (e.g. “freebies”).
  8. Save your changes.

That’s it. Takes about 30 seconds per list once you get the hang of it. Repeat all these steps for each niche, topic-based list you want to create.

What It Does

Each new list will check for new posts in your blog that match the tags and / or categories specified in step 7 above. Any match will work, so for this example posts with two tags, e.g. “freebies, deals”, will be included in the mailing; posts without “freebies” won’t be sent.

All you have to do is tag or categorize your posts consistently. Which you’re doing already, right? Right.

How to Get Subscribers onto Your New List

You need a subscription form. You could create an individual form for each new list, by selecting the list from the navigation, clicking the form code button, and pasting the form code into the relevant pages.

But that could be a lot of work, and how do you figure out which pages should have the specific form on, and which to have the “All” form on? How do you maintain it as your site grows? Who has the time to do all that?

FeedBlitz to the rescue. You put one form on your site, and FeedBlitz will make its landing page automatically include ALL your lists. The visitor simply picks the one(s) they want. No significant extra work for you; all you have to do is replace your existing FeedBlitz form with this new one.  As you add more lists, the form even updates itself automatically – so you only have to do this once. Sweet!

Here’s what to do:

  1. Pick ANY of your lists for this site from the navigation.
  2. Click that list’s “form code” button.
  3. For question (3) on the page that appears, choose one of the “All” options.
  4. Then choose how you want Feedblitz to present the choices in the options that appear.
  5. Copy / paste the form code into your site.

That’s it. One form will offer all your lists (everything and then topic-specific); the subscriber chooses exactly what they want and everybody wins.

If you have time and the resources and LOTS of lists, you can create custom forms on your site based on this approach. Money Saving Mom has done this on her subscription landing page, offering over 100 topic-specific (in her case, store-specific) lists: http://moneysavingmom.com/subscribe-to-money-saving-mom (you might have to scroll down to see all the options).

You can use the same approach to generate lists on different schedules, such as weekly digests. I’m leaving that as an exercise for the student.

If you need help or want to know more about customizing it for your site, please contact support@feedblitz.com and we’ll be more than happy to help.

Filed Under: features, FeedBlitz
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