Andy Beard reported on his blog that AWeber will begin to report email subscriber numbers to Feedburner.
This triggered a line of thought in me that I hadn’t considered before. Let me tell you why…
I’ve been an AWeber user for ages now and it’s been my RSS-to-email service of choice for forever too. I never used any other RSS-to-email service and it’s been clear to me for a long time that a real email list service is the way to handle anything that has to do with email marketing - it’s a “well duh” situation in my mind.
Why people would use a service that doesn’t focus on deliverability to deliver their RSS-to-email function is beyond me, so yes, I recommend AWeber to you too. You can read my full AWeber review for more about why it is a must-have tool.
I have approximately 700 or so email subscribers that sign up to this blog using email and not the RSS feed. Way back when I set up the tool I had AWeber send out a broadcast as soon as five messages were accrued and ready to go. This meant the broadcasts would go out about once a week given my posting frequency here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. At the time, no other RSS-to-email service let me set a logical delay on broadcasts like this. I didn’t want to send out an email for every single blog post I made, my subscribers would quickly drown in emails from me and unsubscribe.
There’s a bunch of additional features you can play with using the blog broadcast tool at AWeber, including some pretty nifty customization of emails, but frankly - I never bothered. I set it up and then let it go to work doing the broadcasting for me ever since.
What I like about the AWeber blog broadcast service is that I can treat my blog subscribers, who choose email over RSS to get updates, just like any other email list subscribers. When I send broadcasts, I can include them, which is not something I can do with RSS readers.
As much as I see why RSS is important and people herald it as the savior against spam, I still prefer a good old fashioned email mail out, and for the moment, email subscribers still respond better than RSS in my experience. I’ve already written about the deficiencies of RSS as a direct marketing tool, so I won’t rattle on about that here.
Given the proposed addition of AWeber reporting to Feedburner I assume my little chicklet count would jump about 700. That’s great - I hope it does. We all know how much of a credibility tool the little feedcount chicklet is when it comes to assessing the worth of a blog, even if it’s such an unfair way of judging. People do like to sum up worth using simple numbers and you can’t argue with the masses, unless you want to do so in obscurity of course.
Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber
A month or two ago I emailed Tom Kulzer, head of AWeber (in my 30th podcast I interviewed Tom - it’s well worth a listen). At the time I was thinking - wouldn’t it be cool to report my email list subscriber numbers in some kind of feedcounter style tool - With over 15,000 I would enjoy a big boost in public credibility.
My thinking was that AWeber could produce their own chicklet, independent of Feedburner RSS counter but very similar in design, strictly for reporting email list counts. It could become the new standard reporting tool for email newsletters, really just for bragging rights but certainly a handy social proof tool for Internet marketers like myself.
Tom responded to my queries with a “great minds think alike” comment and I presumed we would have something soon enough.
Now with Andy speculating on the inclusion of AWeber in the feedburner counter I wonder how this might work? Would you nominate a specific list in AWeber as the RSS-to-email list for your blog and you can tick a box to tell AWeber to report it to Feedburner? Or would it be automatically reported to Feedburner for you?
Obviously I’d love to see my entire email list added to my feedburner count - it would bring my total to well over 22,000 subscribers, but that really wouldn’t be accurate. It would represent subscribers from all kinds of areas, people who join my blog tips newsletter, my affiliate partners list and my Blog Mastermind students, among others, certainly not an accurate reflection of my blog readership, which is what the feedburner counter is supposed to report.
I still think Tom and his crew should come out with an independent email subscriber counter we can stick on our blogs as a badge of credibility, but I also like the idea of seeing my Feedburner counter bump too. I know plenty of other bloggers enjoy inflated counters because they use Feedburner to take on email subscribers, which are included in the feedburner counter.
What Really Matters?
Of course, all of this really is a moot point. What’s important is what you can do with your RSS readership and your email subscribers, not how many you have. Public perception is important and I know plenty of top bloggers have their egos tightly wound around their RSS counts, desperately trying to climb the ladder and improve their social status in the blogosphere. Chasing status is a terribly unhealthy past time, but it’s unfortunately a very common trait in the world today.
At all times you should ask yourself why you want something. Drill down to your specific goals and ask whether social status is really something you need to be happy? Basing your success and happiness on what other people think of you is not healthy.
Right now, I’m very happy with how my business is growing and I’m excited about the year ahead. I focus my energy on creating value for the people I care about the most and if as a side effect my “status counters” improve too, that’s wonderful, but I’m very wary of attaching my happiness to anything impermanent. You can trust me on this one - having the largest RSS feed count in the world or even in your industry is not going to make you happy for very long.
Keep things in perspective and you can enjoy your growth no matter where you place on the overall ladder. It’s fun to compete and fun to watch things like feedcounters and compare email list size, but never let that be something that defines who you are.
Yaro Starak
Keeping perspective
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Hi Yaro
Once again a great post - thankyou Yaro
As you suggest in your article, I started to find myself getting caught up in RSS (learning about it from scratch!) and ‘numbers’ and always feeling disappointed about my low subscribers via Feedburner email/RSS subscribers
But this should be no surprise to me, as my Self Help blog is still relatively new, or more accurately, unstructured, and is yet to become more professional when it moves to my own domain - when I learn some more technica skills!
I agree, chasing numbers is not important - it can be a short-lived happiness, and also social proof, yes.
But your statement - ‘Basing your success and happiness on what other people think of you is not healthy’ - this really struck home with me.
I did let several people influence me over the new year/holidays, people who knew very little about the online world and thought I was being silly in what I was trying to do.
BELIEVE IN MYSELF!! We all should. What feels best for us, and to help others in the process, as the main process!
And basing happiness and success on ‘numbers’ is similiarly unhealthy. In fact, I almost lost my goals - wondering how on earth can I ‘keep up with the competition’ when there are so many fantastic blogs out there on my topic alone. But its not about ‘competition’. Its about support, providing value and much much more!
What matters is providing quality (as you do) - even helping just one person provides much greater happiness
Hopefully this year will turn around - it has been a particularly difficult new season - a ‘test’ I guess. So I will always continue to read your Blog for inspiration!
And this will be happiness and inspiration that is NOT based on numbers, but on providing quality and the intrinsic feelings one gets, again, even if a posting can just help one person
Anyway, I hope you are well Yaro - you certainly sound it in your ‘Podcast in the Park’ - lovely! - you have an exciting new year ahead - and congratulations on your new house - its lovely and bright and cheerful!
Kindest of Regards
Megan
Adelaide, South Australia
Thats good advise. Concentrating on providing value is the way to make your site successful. The reward will come financially but above all you can feel good about the quality and value of the service you are offering.
Thanks Yaro for an informative post - i’ve been toying with the idea of using AWeber for a while now - might just do it.
Hi,
I enjoyed your post. I am internet newbie as far as marketing is concerned. I used aweber for a short time but I was not brining in enough traffic before to make a monthly payment. I set up a new blog and I am using feedburner for free for a while. Once I build my traffic up I will convert back to aweber. I am writing articles this time to boot my traffic. Artemis Pro is a big help because I am can write one article then create & submit several hundred unique versions. I have submitted a handful so far. Thanks for your post again.
I agree we can’t measure ourselves by the number of subscribers - but it does mean that with more readers that we are reaching more people with our message and helping more people if that is the goal of our blog. This is why getting more subcribers via email or RSS is important to me. The more people I reach the more pet business success that I can spread!
I use the Aweber service exactly as you describe - to send updates after every 5 posts - it is so automatic you don’t have to think about it! Recommended highly you try it out.
Always you have people better than you and people worse than you. So, you can compare but you cannot put other people as your reference. The only mark to be surpassed is your own mark.
Yaro, you’ve finally convinced me to try AWeber out.
I’ve been looking for something to send my blog posts shortly after they’re made (they’re fairly time sensitive), but until you made mention of this I had no idea they offered this service.
Hopefully they pay a decent affiliate commission.
Yaro, I agree that an email news blast is a lot simpler for many people to use and keep up with, and Aweber certainly does a good job with mailing lists. My only concern is that by allowing Aweber to update Feedburner counts, it would make it easier for unscrupulous webmasters to artificially inflate their Feedburner count. For example, it would be pretty easy to use a domain with a catch-all email to sign up a new 1000 email subscribers with some scripting.
Hi Taro,
Your right about AWeber. A must have tool for site owners!
nice advices..
Concentrating on providing value is part of growing process of any blogger business, but how we can still be patient on processing time until the reward is come?
I didn’t realize that AWeber was large enough to merit Feedburner’s attention and inclusion. Do you know any of the specifics of how that deal went down? It might make an interesting post.
I found this post to be very helpful and I need all the help I can get. I have been using James Brausch as my internet marketing resource. He states that if people would give up tv, they could be making money at home. A lot of people are lazy and are not willing to give up their tv time. I gave up my tv time, as James had mentioned and lets just say, I am not regretting it. I will be checking back for updates to this post.
I was already using FeedBurners built-in RSS to email feature before I got around to using AWeber, so I never looked into the extra features that you got by using it through them. Had I known that, I’d have already switched!
Oh well, that gives me a new weekend project.
Jeremy - AWeber has over 30,000 customers, not all of whom use the RSS to email function of course, but they definitely have data that would impact the Feedburner statistics.
I don’t have any more information beyond what Andy reported on his blog.
[…] their RSS subscriber counts. Andy Beard gave the word the new feature was coming to Aweber, and I heard about it through Yaro Starak, then the numbers started showing in my Feedburner own stats a few days […]
Yaro,
I’m going to study this post and see if I can use it to my advantage as well. I’m using Aweber (thanks to you) and feedburner, and if you count all my aWeber stuff I’m way over 100 subscribers, but because of my audience, most aren’t rss yet, and don’t subscribe that way, so my RSS is very low. Thanks again for another great article.
If Aweber does this, they will probably report only those using the “Blog Broadcast” feature, which I blogged about here: http://www.easywordpress.com/labs/using-aweber-instead-of-feedburner-on-your-blog/
[…] subscribers to your blog feed! I first read about this possibility on Andy Beard’s blog with Yaro expanding on what it would mean to many bloggers who view blogs as perfect marriage between […]
I’d love an AWeber chicklet - what a cool way to encourage email signups on any page. Great idea Yaro, and I hope they implement it.
Oh, and for those who were wondering if the Feedburner integration happened - it did, at least for my accounts. The new #’s were showing yesterday.
[…] reported in this article where I asked - Will Feedburner Feed Counts Include AWeber Email Subscribers? - the answer is yes, they […]
[…] We all know how much of a credibility tool the little feedcount chicklet is when it comes to assessi… […]
[…] their RSS subscriber counts. Andy Beard gave the word the new feature was coming to Aweber, and I heard about it through Yaro Starak, then the numbers started showing in my own Feedburner stats a few days […]
You can compare but you cannot put other people as your reference.
For me, it always depends on a certain person. RSS may be preferable for some and old way of emailing may be what we prefer..
It is for others do decide what works best for them!