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Finally, I made the transition. This has been pending since April when Google announced that they were winding up Feedburner's email subscription service for publishers.
I searched the web for options, and there are quite a few of them. Finally I chose follow.it as the alternative to Feedburner. I was also encouraged by this post of my blog pal Liz who too opted for follow.it.
By the way, follow.it is spelt with the first letter 'f' in lower case and not capitals.
follow.it has a simple user interface; and, there are links to good explainers for people like me who are transitioning to a new service to offer feed subscriptions to readers.
The first step in the transition process was to download the list of my email subscribers from Feedburner. Not quite unexpected, only 15 out of 370 email IDs looked genuine! The rest seemed to be bot-triggered spam.
The readers who had subscribed via Feedburner have now been moved to follow.it. If I have missed anyone, please do re-subscribe to the feed via follow.it.
follow.it has a few additional features that I didn't find on Feedburner. One of them is that readers can set filters, like specific tags or keywords or even go by popularity to customise their experience.
There are multiple ways in which the email subscriptions can be received, like single email, or multiple emails as and when new posts are published. There is an option to see these feeds on follow.it. One can also get the feeds on Telegram by linking it to follow.it.
Apparently, more features like Chrome extension, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc are in the pipeline.
These are all available in the free plan. The paid option opens up a few more features like detailed analytics of subscriptions.
This is the link to follow my blog. Or you have the widget on top of the right panel on this page.
Hi Pradeep - I swapped to Mailchimp a year or so ago. It was a BIG learning curve for me (and I've probably forgotten most of it already!) I was very grateful for youtube videos and google to help me set it up. A lot of bloggers have had to sort things out since Feedburner decided to close. I'll subscribe via your new service so I can stay in touch.
ReplyDeleteHi Leanne,
DeleteI have heard of Mailchimp. Yes, the process can be confusing at times.
Luckily, we have lots of aids like helpful websites and tutorial videos to guide us through.
Thank you for subscribing to my posts.
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteI have never subscribed via email and have never provided that option to my readers. I use the Blogger widget for Followers. If that is not available to me, then I simply add the URL of the blog I wish to follow to my dashboard reading list. So far as I can tell, none of the blogs have disappeared from my reader (although as you know yours went AWOL, but for other reasons!) I have never really understood wanting to use widgets not native to the platform. Anyway, am glad things are sorted. YAM xx
Hi Yamini - I have always used RSS feed subscriptions to keep up with website updates. I have tried out email subscriptions with some just to see how it is.
DeleteI use Feedly to follow blogs, and after I got your email, I checked your blog and for some reason, it says it's a "dead feed". I even tried unfollowing and refollowing, but it still won't work. I'm not sure what the problem is. I don't have it with any other blogs I follow.
ReplyDeleteI had by mistake deleted the 'feed from Feedburner'. That's why my feeds dropped out of your Feedly.
DeleteI realized it, first when I saw that the post had an unusually low number of page views, and then, when the post wasn't reflecting in my Feedly.
I have since restored the feed from Feedburner. So, I guess my new posts will reflect on your Feedly. Anyway, I will put out a 'test post', to check if it's working fine.
I was not getting in the new format (follow.it). Now that you have restored feedburner, I am getting latest details about your blog. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the update, Rajan.
DeleteYeah, it was a pretty simple transition once you sit down to do it. I do believe that Feedburner is still doing the RSS thing, though, and that's probably why it fell out of my Feedly. (I'll check next thing.) I remember using Blogger's reader list until that went bye-bye. We'll see what Blogger discontinues next.
ReplyDeleteYeah, even I think that Google wound up only the email subscription feature of Feedburner. You can still burn feeds on Feedburner.
DeleteGosh, this is all news to me. How do you know who subscribes by email, Pradeep? I've never really known who follows me other than on the Blogger widget thingy, and I'm not even sure if that still works! Maybe I should find out and increase my following this way. Thank you for the tips! Mind you, I expect it will take me a while.
ReplyDeleteHi Vallypee - Well, I know it can be a bit challenging to understand it all in the beginning. But as we keep working on it, we learn in due course.
DeleteWhen we offer our readers an option on our blog (like I have on the top right) to get email alerts of the fresh posts, we also get to know the emails of the readers who have opted for it using the option we have provided.