I Don’t Really Have 34,015 RSS Subscribers
I’ve had a few queries asking what is going on with my RSS feedcount. As I type this article, my feedcount according to the Feedburner chicklet looks like this -
Yeah, 34,015 readers, not bad considering I was around 6,000 a few days ago, then I jumped to around 17,000 and now it’s doubled that number.
So what’s going on?
As reported in this article where I asked - Will Feedburner Feed Counts Include AWeber Email Subscribers? - the answer is yes, they do.
I had set up my blog blaster (RSS-to-email service) in AWeber a LONG time ago, in fact, before I even used Feedburner and I realized I had my old standard WordPress RSS feed plugged into AWeber, so it wasn’t reporting to Feedburner.
I went into AWeber, switched over to my Feedburner “burned” feed and now my AWeber email subscribers are also included in the feedcount. Here’s how the feedcount breaks down now -
However, something is not quite right with these numbers because I do not have 27,000 AWeber subscribers - not yet anyway. I suspect AWeber and Feedburner haven’t quite got the communication right and no doubt tomorrow or the next day the numbers will settle to a true reflection of reality. I suspect it will fall to around the 22,000 mark, still a nice improvement.
Gobala stated - Aweber/Feedburner Integration is Good News For Marketers - and I have to agree. What will be interesting to see is if some of the Internet marketers out there with email list sizes in the hundreds of thousands begin using Feedburner chicklets on their blogs, thus catapulting them into the top of blog rankings even if the blog itself doesn’t get that much traffic.
Does this mean the Feedcount chicklet will lose its position as the standard measure of blog status, just like PageRank has? I doubt it, people still look to PageRank as a measure of a site’s worth and I suspect Feedburner chicklets will continue to be the social proof tool of choice for blogs, regardless of how accurate a measure it is. Once a standard is adopted, it’s hard to change it.
In the meantime I’m going to go and enjoy the one moment in history where I can pretend I was almost as popular as Darren. Even when the numbers are broken I can’t beat him! (…it’s not a competition Yaro 
).
Will Feedburner Feed Counts Include AWeber Email Subscribers?
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.
How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology
Read previous articles in this series:
- How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
- How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
The pieces of the puzzle to produce a successful membership site are coming together. Preeminence (credibility, reputation, key contacts) and marketing (an ability to communicate with your prospective members) are in place, or at least you know you need them to be in place, and now you can work on putting together the nuts and bolts technology to deliver your membership service.
To build your membership site you need to consider the following requirements:
- How will you protect member resources from public access?
- How will you take payments and process registrations/deliver resources?
- What content features will your membership site contain (audio, video, forums, chatrooms, webinars)?
- What email list service will you use to communicate with and how will it integrate with the rest of your membership site?
- How will you handle affiliates - track referrals, offer promo tools, pay out commissions and ingrate everything with your email list service?
As is typical with web technology, you have quite a few options to choose from to satisfy all the above requirements. The challenge is coming up with the right combination of tools that meet your needs and work well together.
My process to decide what technology to use started a long time before I launched Blog Mastermind, in fact years before I even decided to produce a membership site at all.
Before deciding to produce a mentoring program for professional bloggers I was planning to release an information product, an e-book along with some videos. This was about a year into my blogging career and at the same time I made my very first technology choice, which (eventually) impacted the structure of Blog Mastermind. I made the decision to use AWeber as my email list provider (AWeber review is here).
Thankfully AWeber integrates with pretty much every mainstream membership site software program, so although I made my email autoresponder decision early, it had little impact on what software I used to meet the rest of my membership site needs.
Membership Site Software
Beginner List Building Advice and New AWeber Features
I just checked out the news from AWeber, the company that handles my email lists and newsletters, about the new features they are launching soon. The list includes:
AWeber Upgrades
- Completely new design: Theme colors that don’t get in the way of getting work done.
- Button colors: Green is good, red makes you pause before doing something potentially bad.
- Menu navigation: Get to any page in your account with a single click.
- Reports & Statistics: Hover over any graph to see specific subscriber numbers and rotate pie charts to get a better view.
- Drag and drop to reorder follow up messages.
- One click to turn click tracking on/off without reloading the entire page.
- Currently active list and change list option is more visible.
- Search leads displays faster and paging thru hundreds of subscribers is faster.
- Web form creation wizard steps you thru creating a new form for your website.
- Bookmark any page and when you login later you’ll go directly to that page.
You can read more here: AWeber: Easier & Faster Sneak Preview.
Sounds like there might be some nice Ajax injected into their control panel, which is great news. In particular the ability to reorder emails quickly is something I appreciate. While the current AWeber system is nice and easy to use, it’s a bit clunky and there are lots of inefficiencies. To be honest though I’ve never come across an email autoresponder system that is truly efficient, which is funny given the core function - sending emails - is so simple, yet the amount of options involved in running an autoresponder service makes things quite complicated.
I’m going to rely on AWeber more and more in the near future as I build email lists for different things, so it’s very important that Tom and his team are focused on updates, it shows me that they are not sitting back and resting on their previous successes.
Beginner Newsletter Advice
My mother is about to launch her first email newsletter to augment her counselling business in Brisbane. She is not very technical so I’m not sure she will ever be able to add newsletters to AWeber herself, so will probably pay someone to do it for her (or bug me about it!).
I gave her some advice that I will pass on to you too now if you are a beginner email list builder.
Before even starting, sit down and consider the who, what and why. You want to know exactly who you are attempting to attract with your newsletter and what they get out of it from you. You also need to know why you even need the newsletter in the first place - have a clear idea of what the newsletter does for you in your overall business strategy.
In my mother’s case, she wants to build a profile in the relationships counselling area and create some form of community with her newsletter and eventually a blog too. She has much grander plans, but I told her to focus on the baby steps today and see how the market responds to what you offer first. Right now she is focusing on writing the first newsletters in her email sequence, which is definitely a good place to start while you work to find someone to handle the technical implementation for you.
If you are just getting started in online business and are about to build your first email newsletter then AWeber is something you should review when doing your research (try GetResponse too). Check out my review of AWeber to help with your decision.
How To Integrate AWeber With Paypal, Clickbank, 1Shoppingcart & More
The folks at the AWeber blog have produced a bunch of how-to guides on using the AWeber email autoresponder with popular shopping cart and payment processors, including -
You can read all the guides by clicking here.
At a very basic level you can get your online business going just by using an email autoresponder and a payment processor. Combining Paypal with AWeber gives you the tools to capture emails, promote to prospects, sell to clients and take payment - a quick and easy way to get started online and launch a real business.
Not sure how to get started? Try these article for ideas and help:
- How To Use Email Autoresponders For Passive Affiliate Income
- AWeber Review - Email Autoresponder
- How To FINALLY Start Your Online Business
