March 27, 2013 / in Blogging, Business Recommendations, Social Media / by Jason Terry
Post written by Jason Terry, Entrepreneur | Social Coach | Web Developer | Scuba Instructor | Guitar Player | Cruise Traveler | Lego Collector
Ok, you technical people probably have heard of FeedBlitz and might even be using it on your website. For those of you who don’t know what FeedBlitz is, here’s a simple explanation.
If you currently have a blog for your business, and you invest time and energy updating it regularly like you should, then you probably want to make sure as many people as possible see your articles.
One of the ways people see your content is when they visit your website. You may have a “Recent Blog Posts” section on your homepage that shows the most recent three to five blog posts. Or you might also put links to your blog posts on social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
That’s all sound strategy, but what about the people that don’t come to your website regularly, or aren’t using social media tools? Those people probably have an email address. So the fallback strategy is to get your content to them with a monthly email newsletter. And that is a good idea! But it might be taking you more effort than it should.
FeedBlitz is a cloud based service that monitors your RSS Feed for new blog posts. In layman’s terms, this means that whenever you create a new blog post on your website, FeedBlitz knows about it and can act on it.
We use FeedBlitz on BlueGurus.com. When someone signs up for our blog updates (you can do this on the right sidebar of our homepage), they automatically get our new blog posts via email the day after we post them. (The delay is simply due to the fact that we want the email to be one of the first things in their inbox the next morning, so we have FeedBlitz send them out between 1am and 4am.)
This is a great service for our audience… it makes it really easy for people to get our new content delivered right into their inbox. They don’t have to remember to come back to our website to see what is new. And they don’t have to “catch” a status update on a social site before clicking to our newest blog article.
Another way to use FeedBlitz is to create your monthly email newsletter automatically. Some companies have a specific email newsletter that contains brand new content that isn’t available on the blog. If that’s the case, then FeedBlitz is probably not a good replacement for your current process. On the other hand, if your monthly email newsletter is basically a collection of the blog posts from the previous month, then FeedBlitz would save you a ton of time and automate the process.
You can create a custom email template (just like in other popular email software like MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) Then FeedBlitz will put all the blog posts that have gone live on your website in the last month into the template and send it out. You can also define rules on which blog posts to include.
What if you wanted to provide a free PDF of information people want, and in return all they had to do was provide you their email address? (Working on this exact idea with our good friend Drew over at BWTP.)
FeedBlitz makes this process a breeze. You can even do a full-blown workflow. In other words, you could set up an immediate email to the person that signed up with a link to the free PDF, and then 3 days later send them another email with additional helpful info.
You could also implement a full blown drip marketing campaign where they get a helpful email every week or every month for the next year. Sure, it would take some work to get it set up, but every single person interested in your content would automatically be reminded that you exist and why they came to you in the first place. Cool.
So for you technical people out there, Google Reader is being shut down on July 1st, 2013. And there is a lot of speculation that that FeedBurner is going to be the next Google service on the chopping block.
If you are using FeedBurner on your website to syndicate your RSS feed, you need to move to a different service as fast as you can. We previously used FeedBurner at BlueGurus.com, and switched to FeedBlitz. It took about 90 minutes because FeedBlitz has a fantastic step-by-step guide for converting to their service.
So there you have it. All you never knew you wanted to know about FeedBlitz. We love it. It works really well. It is reasonably priced. It is professionally supported. And it could add some great functionality to your current web based sales and marketing strategy.
Are you using FeedBurner? Are you using FeedBlitz? Let us know in the comments area of our website!!
We've worked with The Blue Gurus for many years, and they've been a great partner in every respect.
Honest, upbeat, knowledgeable, responsive.
They've supported us in four key areas: LinkedIn training, blogging, and web site development--and they have excelled in all three. Their core expertise is in LinkedIn and blogging, but I've found them to have such an excellent network of contacts that often they are able to bring in reliable support in other areas as well. So I consider The Blue Gurus a window into an array of excellent resources for small businesses.
David Scott
Managing Member at Avid Communications
