12 best feed burner alternatives

Launched in 2004, Feedburner quickly
established itself as the de facto RSS service
for all bloggers. It provided traffic analysis, an
email to RSS service, and built-in support for
monetizing your feed via Google Adsense. Like
most other bloggers, I used FeedBurner on all
my blogs.
The service was bought by Google in 2007 for
around $100 million. Most of it’s founders
have moved onto other things. For example,
Dick Costolo, is the current CEO of Twitter.
Despite FeedBurner being the number one RSS
service on the internet for most of its life, the
service has never been a priority for Google.
Google have assured everyone that the service
is here to stay. Their actions suggest otherwise.
In 2012, they closed the Feedburner API,
Adsense for Feeds, and said goodbye via their
Twitter account. The blog is no longer updated
either and the FeedBurner forum is not
supported. And who can actually remember
the last time Google added a new feature to
FeedBurner?
Even the most loyal FeedBurner users are
jumping ship to other services before the
service joins the Google graveyard with Knol
and Google Buzz. Don’t worry, there are many
good FeedBurner alternatives available to you.
Today I’d like to show you the best options
available to you for delivering your articles to
readers and analysing your traffic. I’m sure
you’ll find it useful.
I’ve divided the resources into different
sections such as feed services, newsletter
solutions and WordPress plugins. Most of the
resources offer similar features; I have simply
categorised the options in this way to make it
easier for you to make comparisons.
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Do Nothing!
1. Regular RSS Feed
There’s no need to look for a FeedBurner
alternative if you don’t care about how many
people are viewing your RSS feed and don’t
want to offer your content via email. Your
default RSS feed will do just fine.
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It’s arguably the most reliable way to ensure
your feed can be viewed by readers as your
feed is not reliant on a third party service. The
major limitation to this method is that you do
not know how many people are subscribing to
your blog. This restricts you from tracking the
growth of your blog and displaying the number
of RSS subscribers you have to readers and
advertisers.
Feed Services
2. FeedBlitz
FeedBlitz have been aggressively promoting
themselves to disgruntled FeedBurner users for
some time. It is one of the most popular
alternatives to Feedburner services available,
with many top blogs such as switching to
them.
It offers a lot of great features including the
ability to integrate your feed with Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. It also offers
reliable metrics and great support (support is
something Feedburner users never had!).
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FeedBlitz is also an email marketing service.
Feedburner veterans may be aware of this
already as FeedBlitz has powered the email
delivery service for Feedburner since 2005
. Many top blogs have switched over to
FeedBlitz to handle their RSS delivery and
email marketing.
If you only want to deliver your content via
FeedBlitz and track stats etc., it only costs $
1.40 per month. The price of their email
marketing service depends on the number of
subscribers you have. Prices range from $
29.95 per month for 1,000-2,499 subscribers
to $109 per month for 10,000 to 14,900
subscribers.
WordPress users can redirect all RSS queries to
FeedBlitz using the FeedBlitz FeedSmart
WordPress plugin, and they offer a free
Feedburner Migration Guide for people who
are thinking of switching from Feedburner.

3. FeedCat
FeedCat is a popular feed boosting service that
is free to use. It delivers content in a more
user-friendly fashion and provides a button to
display the number of unique readers over the
last week. It tracks page views, visits and the
number of people who subscribe to your feed.
Historical stats are displayed in a graph so that
you can see the growth or decline of your
subscriber count.
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4. RapidFeeds
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 RapidFeeds
offers two services: FeedManager and
FeedEmbed. Their FeedEmbed service provides
allows you to convert RSS to HTML whilst their
FeedManager service allows you to manage
your RSS feed.
Used by over 200,000 publishers, the
FeedManager service boasts many great
features such as advanced statistics, auto tweet
new RSS updates, iTunes support for
podcasting, password protection for RSS feeds,
and branded feed URL’s.
Prices are very competitive. Their basic
package allows up to 3 feeds and only costs $
4.49 per month. The pro package costs $6.95
per month and allows up to 7 feeds, whilst
their enterprise package allows unlimited feeds
for only $13.95 per month. There is a 15 day
trial for all packages to let you try the service
out for yourself.
Link: RapidFeeds
5. Feedity
Feedity allows you to create an RSS feed from
any web page on the web. It has support for
delivering podcasts to iTunes.
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A basic package for Feedity will set you back $
6 per month. That allows you up to 20 feeds
and 25 items per feed, with content delivered
in 4 hour intervals.
Link: Feedity
6. If This Then That
If This Then That is a great social media tool
that lets you set up actions to take place if a
certain parameter is met. It’s known more for
a social media updates, however there are lots
of RSS integration options. For example, you
can set it up so that a Tweet is sent every time
your feed is updated.
Whilst IFTTT can’t be used to track your RSS
subscribers, you can use it to manage how
your content is delivered to other services,
therefore it’s worth checking out.

7. Simple Feed Stats
Simple Feed Stats is a free WordPress plugin
from Jeff Starr that I have been trying out on
KevinMuldoon over the last week. It allows you
to track everyone who is subscribed to your
blog. Your total number of subscribers can be
displayed using a Feedburner style widget or as
plain text. The figure can be inserted using PHP
or directly into your posts and pages using a
shortcode.
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Apparently, the current subscriber count tells
you how many people have accessed your feed
over the last 24 hours, and the total subscriber
count tells you the exact number of people
who are subscribed to your blog. I’m not sure
if I don’t know what the stats mean, or if the
stats are unreliable, however as I was writing
this article it told me the total number of
subscribers here was 541, however in the
subscribers breakdown it said the figure was
638.
Simple Feed Stats is very easy to use. Those of
you who don’t want to use a 3rd party service
to track RSS stats should check it out.

8. Jetpack by WordPress
The Jetpack plugin has a subscription module
that allows subscribers to be updated
whenever a new post is published on your
blog. It also allows subscribers to be updated
of the latest comments to a blog post.
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Unfortunately, as the module is handled by
WordPress.com, you do not the email
address’s of the people who subscribe. In that
respect, it’s quite limiting, however it is a
reliable service that you should give a try.
Link: Jetpack by WordPress
9. Subscribe2
Jetpack is an easiest email subscription
solution to add to your blog. You simply drag
the widget to your sidebar or footer; that’s all
there is to it. Unfortunately, it gives you no
control over those who subscribe; it doesn’t
even tell you who has subscribed. Which is
why I believe Subscribe2 is a better solution
for most people.

The plugin allows you to send email updates to
subscribers. You have full control over the
email template and can choose to send email
updates after a post is published, every hour,
twice a day, once a day, or weekly. The
address’s of email subscribers can be seen
through the admin area, and you can add and
remove subscribers to your list too. Emails can
be sent to all registered subscribers, which is
great for informing subscribers about
important updates. Subscribe2 is the self-
proclaimed “best WordPress email subscription
plugin”. It is difficult to argue with this.

10. Subscribe by Email
Subscribe by Email is one of the best
alternatives to Subscribe2. It lets you search
through all subscribers, however it offers very
few options in comparison to Subscribe2. And
whilst Subscribe2 is free to use, Subscribe by
Email costs $19
11. Aweber
Aweber is a good way to deliver RSS content
directly to subscribers. I use it to deliver
updates to subscriber of this blog on a daily or
weekly basis. It is very flexible with how often
you send blog broadcasts. You can send
broadcasts specific days of the day, week or
month. Alternatively, you can choose to send
an update to subscribers after a certain
number of articles have been published on
your blog.

You can try Aweber out for a month for just
one dollar. It then costs $19 per month for up
to 500 subscribers. Prices increase with the
number of subscribers you have. 501 to 2,500
subscribers will cost you an extra $10 per
month whereas 2,501 to 5,000 subscribers will
cost you an additional $30 per month.

12. MailChimp
MailChimp’s RSS to Email feature is a reliable
way to send post updates to subscribers. It
works in much the same way as Aweber. You
can choose the template that is used in each
email and the frequency in which emails are
sent out to subscribers.

Posted by Kaesy Nwosu on Friday, October 24, 2014 - Rating: 4.5

Title : 12 best feed burner alternatives
Description : Launched in 2004, Feedburner quickly established itself as the de facto RSS service for all bloggers. It provided traffic analysis, an em...

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