Email List Building for Bloggers

This isn't so much a review as a recommendation to read the series of blog posts about List Building for Bloggers (#LBB)  written by Phil Hollows, the Founder and CEO of FeedBlitz .  This is an alternative to Feedburner for pushing out RSS feeds to subscribers which I use.

This series of posts are designed to:

• help you get the most benefit from your blogging 
• harness the power and capabilities of email and social media communications network - together with your blog - to build a list of followers.

These are the posts to date on the Feedblitz blog:

Get the basics in place first

1. Why aren't Email Lists Dead in the Age of Social Media?
2. Lists, Email Marketing and Your Blog
3. Five Key Steps to Grow Your Blog's Mailing List
4. Growing Your List: Accelerating Subscriber Growth
5. Growing Your List: Improving Engagement
6. Avoiding the Spam Trap 

Optimisation of your Mailing List

1. Mailing List Underperforming? Optimize it with these Tips!

I've been reading them as they've been published and, while I wouldn't necessarily follow all the advice, there's lots and lots of good content and reminders of things you know but forgotten.

Techie: Bloglines to close down 1st October

My first ever feedreader was Bloglines - and I loved it.  However over time I gradually switched my feeds to Google Reader - and then found that I also picked up on people's blog posts increasingly via Blogger Dashboard, Facebook and Twitter.

I guess a few other people must have been doing likewise as it's been announced that Bloglines is to close on 1st October.  Bloglines is owned by Ask.com and you can find their explanation for their decision here - Bloglines Update

A little perspective: when we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of “push” versus “search” around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. 
 
Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.
 


There is a a three-week period to export feeds to another service – more detail and instructions can be found on the Bloglines website.

I've just moved all my subscriptions from Bloglines to a Google Reader and it took about two minutes - easypeasy! :)

It's worth noting that the import/export tab for Google Reader is a tab within the Google Reader Settings tab rather than a line in the menu as it is with Bloglines.