You might think this an odd post coming from me, but it’s really important. The more FeedBurner feeds we migrate the clearer it becomes:

The fastest way to lose your carefully nurtured
subscriber base is to delete your FeedBurner feed.

Why? Because it doesn’t work.

Well, it works, in that the feed goes away after 30 days (15, really), and it is deleted. That works.

What does NOT work is the notion that this moves your RSS audience to your blog’s feed. The FeedBurner process is absolutely no help at all if you want your subscribers to switch. And it is killing me to see people suggesting online that all you have to do is delete your FeedBurner feed and all will be well.

It won’t be. It’s a terrible idea. Don’t do it.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t leave (or plan to leave) FeedBurner. We here absolutely believe FeedBurner is going away, the signs are unmistakable. You should get going, frankly. We’d like the chance to win your business too.

But the simple “delete your feed at FeedBurner” approach will be a disaster for you and your audience. Here’s why. When you start the 30 day deletion process at FeedBurner, it automatically sends readers back to the original feed. It’s a redirect. The problem with this is twofold:

1. Feed readers following your feeds.feedburner.com don’t update themselves with the new URL automatically; and
2. It’s invisible to end users so the end user themselves do not know that they need to update their reader.

So the tools don’t update. Your readers don’t know to update. It all works seamlessly – which is, in fact, the problem. Until day 16, when your FeedBurner feed becomes a single post with teeny type saying (and I’m paraphrasing here): “This feed has moved – update your reader.”

That post doesn’t update, stays there for 15 days, and then goes away. No matter how many times you post, it doesn’t change. So once read, if the user doesn’t do anything, it won’t show up as unread again. And then the feed ends up being gone – for good.

Here’s the thing. People are lazy. You have to ask and ask and ask and ask them to resubscribe.  You have to keep at it and you might have to ask them 5, 10, more times before they’ll finally make the move. Asking them once, like FeedBurner does, and then going away?  You’re going to lose more than 75% of your RSS audience (at least the email addresses can be exported for email subscribers), because they’re not going to update their readers that one and only time. The “delete your FeedBurner feed and all will be well” process doesn’t work.

Not only this, but you also lose all your old FeedBurner links, so click throughs from old posts won’t work if you had item tracking enabled at FeedBurner; you’ll lose all your old analytics as well. Finally, when the 30 days are up, you release your FeedBurner URL for someone else to use. Think about it: Do you really want to hand that over to just anyone? Do you want a third party zombie with who-knows-what content suddenly sending updates to your readers who didn’t update their subscriptions, because FeedBurner’s native process is broken? What damage might that do to you or to your brand?

Don’t throw away all that time and investment in your RSS subscribers just because FeedBurner’s “migration process” doesn’t actually do what you think it’s going to. Don’t lose your audience, don’t ditch that data, and don’t frustrate loyal readers with suddenly broken links.

Put another way, FeedBlitz’s FeedBurner Migration Manual is over 60 pages now. It got that way because un-FeedBurnering is complicated, messy and tough to do. It is way, way more than simply trashing your FeedBurner feed, even if deleting your FeedBurner did work the way you want it to (which, of course, it really doesn’t).

Our FeedBurner alternative migration processes and documentation exist and have evolved to where they are now for a reason.

Be very, very careful when you are told that
all you have to do is delete your FeedBurner feed.
It is naive. It is not true.
Don’t sacrifice your audience and find out the hard way.

Build on our experience and safeguard your subscribers.  Get the FeedBurner Migration Manual and get it right, first time.

One of the challenges of FeedBurner RSS subscriber migration is that, when you’ve advertised your FeedBurner feed URL as your RSS feed, you’ve basically ceded all control of your site’s RSS readership to them (FeedBurner). Since there isn’t an elegant way of getting RSS readers off FeedBurner that FeedBurner provides, you have to get them to resubscribe.

This is obviously a pain and a sticking point for many. Our promise is that anyone with a pulse who cares will come over, and the process to do that is described in the FeedBurner Migration Guide (click to download) and built in to the FeedBlitz RSS service. Basically, we serve a different message to your FeedBurner subscribers when you post, encouraging them to subscribe.

For many bloggers this works great – people come over after a few posts. But for some, their readership doesn’t seem to want to come over at all. They seem to be highly resistant to this kind of coercion persuasion. Why is that, we wondered? These readers can’t all be machines or comatose, and it surely can’t be that they all don’t care any more. What is going on?

Well, one thing that we realized is that, although we serve different copy to your FeedBurner subscribers inviting them to switch, the link we serve to go with that post works just fine. So if a lazy reader doesn’t care about the message, and instead just keeps on clicking through to your site, then they get exactly where they want to be, and so won’t feel any pressure to change their subscription to your new feed address. Similar to “banner blindness” that reduces ad yields over time, these subscribers can simply tune out the “this feed has moved, please resubscribe” message and happily click through to your posts. For whatever reason, it seems that some blogs out there have a significant proportion of subscribers for whom this approach works just fine, thank you very much, and that yields to frustration when they don’t come over.

This effect is obviously a big obstacle to your regaining control over your RSS feed readership.

And so on Monday, January 21st at about 9am eastern, we’re going to make it just a little less convenient for FeedBurner RSS subscribers to avoid resubscribing like this. At that time we will change how we serve your feeds to FeedBurner, by not only changing the content we deliver, but also by changing the links that we send along for the ride.

Here’s what will happen.

If you do not have the FeedBurner migration message enabled in your FeedBlitz RSS feed, nothing different will happen when the user clicks through. They’ll get straight to your post, just like they do now.

If, however, you do have the FeedBurner migration message enabled, we’re not going to send the subscriber directly to your blog. Instead, the link will send them to a landing page we host for you, with your feed’s branding, where the migration message will be repeated, further encouraging them to resubscribe. There will also be a link that they can click on to get to the article itself, but the intent here is that the visitor will know that you really, really, REALLY want then to resubscribe; and that it is going to be much more inconvenient for them if they don’t. It’s going to go from a single lazy click to twice the effort along with repetition of the resubscribe message.

The net effect should be that more of your readership will come back into your fold, and we’ll start to wear down the last obstinate few.

Or, in other words: You get to take back control of your FeedBurner RSS feed subscribers and free your feed – with FeedBlitz!

Guide to help you get it right. The processes and features we have in place work great when you follow the Guide, but we have found a wrinkle (courtesy a client) over the weekend that’s worth highlighting to make sure a large number of your readers aren’t lost in the shuffle.

And that wrinkle is FriendFeed, an RSS / content sharing service that’s now owned by Facebook. Many bloggers who’ve been around for a while have built large followings on FriendFeed, often with thousands or tens of thousands of followers in some cases.

If you:

1. Have a large following at FriendFeed, and
2. FriendFeed was following your FeedBurner feed, and
3. You didn’t change it to look at your blog’s source feed (redirecting to FeedBlitz) as part of the migration,

Then:

Those followers either don’t appear in your FeedBlitz metrics at all, or they suddenly “disappear” when you delete your FeedBurner feed and the redirection from FeedBurner stops working after 15 days. Why? Because FriendFeed is looking at the old FeedBurner URL. The fix is simple – you have to change where FriendFeed checks for updates. Effectively what you do is resubscribe all your FriendFeed followers in one fell swoop. If you don’t do it, they won’t get your updates, and they don’t get counted.

So if your blog is well-established and you have a FriendFeed account, make sure all those readers get counted properly! Log in to FriendFeed, go to your services, and refresh the blog service. The refresh should pick up the correct feed and the results appear in the following day’s RSS metrics. If that doesn’t work, remove then re-add the blog, and all will be well: The followers re-appear.

If you use other similar publisher-managed services – Triberr comes to mind here – check them out too. Make sure you have them looking at your blog’s current RSS feed.

Generally speaking, when you switch over, it’s a good idea to see what services are delivering your readership in FeedBurner via their reports. If there’s a service there, like FriendFeed, that you control, make sure you update it with your bog’s correct feed URL on your own domain – it helps avoid scary drops in metrics! Meanwhile, we’ve upgraded the Migration Guide to highlight this need and FriendFeed specifically.