If you believe all the discussions about Feedburner closing down, you may find this post useful.
Who knows if Google will shut down Feedburner and if they do, will they shut down the email subscription service and keep supporting RSS only?
Maybe they’ll keep both or maybe they’ll retire Feedburner completely, what do you think?
Alternatives To FeedBurner
Lets take a look at where you can go if Feedburner decides to burn everyone and close their free service!
Jetpack – Not a bad option for new email subscribers but you cannot import email addresses into Jetpack so what do you do with your existing Feedburner email subscribers. Another problem is you cannot backup and export existing email subscriber details either. Could change down the track but not the best option at the moment that’s for sure. What do you think about Jetpack?
MailChimp/Aweber & Premium Email Services
MC – Clearly a good option as long as you’re prepared to pay for credits or a monthly service fee unless of course you have less then 2000 email subscribers and don’t need to send more than 12,000 emails a month then MC is a great option.
Aweber – The best email service provider is one of the most expensive and you won’t get any freebies from them. You will find their forms do convert better so the service can end up paying for itself.
Most big name email service providers like Aweber and MailChimp offer a RSS to email feature but it gets sent as email so ends up costing you or using up your email credits. Not the best solution for managing RSS feeds if you’re wanting a free service.
FeedBlitz
They offer free RSS feed management but you’ll have to pay for managing email your email subscribers. One of the best alternatives to Feedburner but still not completely free.
I did notice Copyblogger Media have switched to Feedblitz recently.
WordPress Native Feeds
Rather than redirect your blogs feed to Feedburner or Feeblitz, why not simply offer a link to your default WordPress feed?
You can also offer a link to specific category and tag archives very easily and its completely 100% free.
Finding Your Default Native RSS Feed
By default, your WordPress RSS feed address will be one of following:
http://example.com/feed/
http://example.com/feed/rss/
http://example.com/feed/rss2/
RSS Feed for Categories & Tags
You can easily create new categories and tags then offer a link to each individual feed using the following url as an example:
http://example.com/category/categoryname/feed
or
http://example.com/tag/tagname/feed
Exclude Categories & Tags From RSS Feed
An easy way to exclude posts assigned to a category from your RSS feed is to add the category i.d or tag i.d to your feed url with a minus before it like this:
http://www.example.com/?cat=-1&feed=rss
Here’s a few other ways to exclude a category from your RSS feed.
Stats & Tracking Plugins For Your Native RSS Feeds
There’s several plugins which enable you to easily track your feeds.
Feedstats – Very simple stats for tracking your rss feeds.
Simple Feed Stats – Developed by Jeff Starr from Perishablepress, this plugin enables you to add custom content to your feeds, display a feed count badge in your theme using a shortcode or template tag and 5 tracking methods.
WordPress Feed Statistics – Simple tracking plugin provides stats on the most popular links clicked in your feeds content, most popular posts and a widget to display your feed count.
Conclusion
Considering Feedburner no longer offers detailed tracking statistics, its probably not a bad time to read up a little on the best alternatives for both RSS feed & email subscription management options as well as tracking and stats for these services.
How About You
What are your thoughts on Feedburner and do you have a good alternative plan in case they decide to shut down part or all of their service?
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