FeedBlitz Users Speak! A Powerful Tool for Bloggers

The poor blogging world.

We’ve been dealt some serious blows in the last few months (she says, somewhat tongue in cheek).

Twitter changes its API, making it harder for chat moderators to run events. Yikes! Google Reader goes away, leaving readers clueless as to what to do. The horror!

And now, the writing is on the wall — at least in my mind — for other Google products, including the RSS service “Feedburner,” which automates post delivery to readers and email inboxes.

So, I’ve made the switch to FeedBlitz, the Feedburner alternative, and after careful consideration, urged my readers to do the same. In a post called “Moving From Feedburner to Feedblitz“, I shared the details of the scary migration process, and why I made the choice to undertake such a big project.

Points to Consider and Tips to Remember

• With the proper setup, FeedBlitz can be very budget-friendly. Because you only pay for email subscribers, you can have as many RSS subscribers as you want and you’ll only pay the lowest fee. While FeedBurner is free, there’s a cost associated with that program — and it’s in the form of non-existent support or reliability (if you’ve ever tried to troubleshoot FeedBurner problems, you know what I mean: see “How to Fix Feedburner Issues“).

• One thing to consider is having people subscribe to your default feed (from WordPress), and to use a redirect plugin to seamlessly take people to your FeedBlitz feed. What this does is future-proof you in case you ever decide to transition to a different system in the future, and it gives you complete control over the feed. One of my biggest regrets in using Feedburner for so many years is now that I want to move off the service, I have to rely on my subscribers to follow me. FeedBlitz makes it relatively easy, allowing me to send reminders and instructions to my old feed subscribers, but I’d rather just make the move without involving any action on my readers’ parts.

• It can be VERY scary to change your subscriptions, especially if you have a large readership. I get it. But the change is coming, and I think it’s better to make the migration now, before Feedburner shuts down with little to no warning, so you have time to encourage your readers to come with you. You’ll also have help from the FeedBlitz team (they have helped me so much!) and when Feedburner does close, I’m sure the FeedBlitz support team will be overwhelmed with requests!

The FeedBlitz Migration Guide was and still is extremely helpful to me — it’s a free download, and if you’re even just thinking about starting a migration, you may want to read it through a few times, and troubleshoot any questions or concerns.

The support team will be there, and in the end, I think you’ll be happy to have taken control of your feed back from an unstable third party.