RSS In Email

feedblitz is targeting feedburner users directly. They actually now how to spell RSS and do things like reporting on your RSS usage. They're kind of like feedburner in that you're supposed to not publicize the feed coming directly from your site. You're supposed to set up your blog's feed to go into feedblitz and they'll give you a related feed to give to the outside world. By having everyone go through feedblitz, they can compile statistics of how many people from where are downloading your feed.

Most Content Management Systems (CMSs) have additional bits of programs, plugins, that you can install to add functionality to the site. Such is the case for building a mailing list and sending email. WordPress has their JetPack plugin, Joomla has AcyMailing, and there are many others.

Ah, FeedBurner. What can we say? It was one of the first sites to take RSS seriously. It'd process, clean up, beautify, monitize your RSS feed. Then Google bought them out. And it's been downhill ever since. It hasn't been updated in years. Google "feedburner outages" or "feedburner issues" and you'll have lots of reading material. Feedburner also allows your readers to subscribe to updates via email. This works, but is horribly broken. One client has been using it for years, and when we went to export his subscriber list, it said there were no new subscribers in the past three years, even though there had been many new subscribers. The statistics are broken, and all in all, the service is just on its last legs. Please, please don't use it.

In Mailchimp, it's fairly easy to set up a new RSS-to-email campaign. Mailchimp offers a free tier of service if you have less than 2,000 email addresses on your list and you send less than 12,000 emails per month. This covers most small businesses.

From your mailchimp control panel, click on 'campaigns', the 'create campaign' in the upper-right. Select the last option 'RSS campaign'