John Hesch

Feedburner recently introduced a FeedBurner Email service which delivers your RSS feed via email. Many people are more comfortable receiving site updates and news via email as opposed to using a feed reader. Feedburner provides FeedBurner Email free of charge and the only branding that goes into the email is a short sentence at the bottom of the email that says “Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner.”

To activate this service, log into your FeedBurner account and make your way to the “Publicize” tab.

At the recent Seattle Business Blogging Summit there were two common themes discussed.

1. Blog feeds are rapidly replacing email as a form of proactive marketing communications
2. Marketers wishing to post their own blogs should not approach the form as another one-way communications medium, but should plan for their blogs to offer two-way dialog.

I replaced email lists with RSS feeds several years ago because of the difficulty in getting my message out to my subscribers. Even with a sophisticated opt-in subscription system I still had people angry that I was emailing them. So many people are using email spam filters, but yet don’t understand how to use them. This alone prevented my message from getting to about 25% of my subscribers.

The biggest obstacle to using RSS to replace email is teaching people to use RSS readers. I think most of the top email applications support RSS but most people are still unsure what it all means and how to use it.

It’s fun to be on the cutting edge of technology but frustrating to have to wait for the masses to catch up.

CNN now provides RSS syndicated feeds.