Top 5 FeedBurner Alternatives – Why You Should Leave FeedBurner

When it comes to blogging management services, FeedBurner has been a priority of millions of bloggers since 2004. It is an all-in-one application that analyzes the traffic, offers email marketing services, sends newsletters and provides built-in support for managing Google Adsense. Although the demand and acceptability of FeedBurner were at its peak in 2010, it has faced a gradual decline in recent years. If you are using the multi-management platform, here are some reasons as to why you should leave it. Besides, we have listed the top 5 FeedBurner alternatives in the following.

Why Should You Leave FeedBurner?

In the recent years, the FeedBurner application has not received any updates. In simpler words, it is not working on the improvement of the service, even after knowing that Google is looking forward to shutting this RSS feed service down. In fact, one of its most valuable functions, i.e. Adsense for feeds was removed along with the service’s API in 2012. For this reason, if you are still using FeedBurner, it’s time to leave this Google’s service.

But how will you manage the services it provides? Well, there are several alternative options that provide similar services. If you want to leave FeedBurner and switch to an alternative option, check the following recommendations.

Dedicated Email List Building

When blogging came into existence, people used to create a list of emails and send promotional information individually to the list. Therefore, bloggers prefer using an application for sending emails to their subscribers automatically, and one of the most efficient services provided by FeedBurner is email marketing. With the decline of FeedBurner, it’s time to revert to the email list building strategy.

After building the list, you can use the professional email marketing services for managing your subscribers and mails. For example, you can use MailChimp, which provides in-depth analytics of mails such as the amount of users who checked your mails and users who clicked on them. It provides a valuable base for accessing the effectiveness of email campaigns. In addition to this, it offers the flexibility of providing options in subscription; users can choose from regular, weekly and month updates.

To use MailChimp instead of FeedBurner, you firstly need to export your subscribers from the latter option. After entering your FeedBurner page, click “See more about your subscribers”.

Then, click “Manage Your Email Subscriber List” by checking the drop down of “Email Subscription Services”.

Now, you can export your subscribers by clicking “Export: CSV”. Next, go to your MailChimp dashboard, create a new list, and import your CSV.

In fact, you can switch to one of the effective mail marketing services to enhance the management of your emails and subscribers. Some leading services come in a free version with certain limitations. For this reason, you can use the trial period for paid versions and choose the most appropriate one for managing your emails.

WordPress Feeds

As investigated, about 40% of the visitors who drop into your website utilize the feed reading applications such as Flipbook and Google’s Newsstand. Noticing this, thousands of bloggers have used FeedBurner for improving the sharing options on their blog sites. But, with the decline of FeedBurner, the right move is to switch back to WordPress feeds. Although this is a tactical step, its execution is of utmost importance in order to leave FeedBurner.

To start with the procedure, you should check whether your blog is redirecting the feeds to the FeedBurner service by checking http://www.domainname.com/feed/. If the URL can redirect to FeedBurner, you need to move to the second step that involves creating a blog post that informs the subscribers to update their feed URLs and to switch to another feed reading service for staying updated with your future posts.

However, you should not delete the FeedBurner feed from the core of your blog because FeedBurner makes a new post for the subscribers stating that your blog’s feed has changed, instead of telling them your update. If subscribers do not take actions, you’ll lose them. Even, your competitors may get your FeedBurner URL, along with your huge subscription base. Hence, you should avoid deleting the feed; rather, you must create a post manually, asking your subscribers to modify their URLs to your WordPress feeds.

Creating or Editing Subscription Forms

Once you create the email list and drive your prospective subscribers to the WordPress feeds, you should make sure that the presence of FeedBurner is wiped off from your site. For this, you must remove the links of FeedBurner tool and modify the subscription forms.

The manual procedure of editing email subscription forms in your website takes a lot of time. Also, if you don’t know the accurate positions of offering the form, your effort will not fulfill the desired target. For this reason, you should use a tool such as OptinMonster to add forms to your site, which can improve your subscribers by 200%.

Apart from it, you can use the customizations and flexibility offered by WordPress feeds that improve the visitor’s experience by enhancing the feeds. For example, you can present a customized RSS feed thumbnail or add content to highlight the feeds.

Feed Services – FeedBlitz

If you are not impressed enough with the idea of a switch back to WordPress feeds, you can entirely replace the FeedBurner tool with another powerful application. Since the FeedBurner has declined, the FeedBlitz has made a remarkable effort of capturing the market by executing aggressive promotional campaigns.

Being a powerful tool, it offers the integration of feeds with the leading social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. The metrics provided by this reader is reliable, and the support options are much better than the FeedBurner. It is currently being used by millions of bloggers who have left the FeedBurner reader at some earlier point in time.

Another FeedBurner Alternative – RapidFeeds

RapidFeeds is another feed management service that is currently being used by more than 200,000 bloggers. This tool allows you to manage your feeds as well as converting your RSS feeds to HTML. In addition to this, you can measure the effectiveness of your feeds by checking the advanced statistics presented by this tool. If you are concerned about the privacy of your RSS feeds, you can password protect it. In addition, you can check out its trial version before switching to it entirely.