For years, the only way to get a good understanding of how many people are reading and interacting with your blog feed was to run your feed though FeedBurner.  Now, FeedBlitz has a service to compete.

FeedBlitz RSS claims to offer better branding, more social media integration by integrating Twitter and other social networks, a mobile optimized version of your feed, better SEO, filtering, and additional feed stats.  I was hoping for some screenshots on FeedBlitz’s site, but they don’t currently offer any.

Unlike FeedBurner that is free, FeedBlitz RSS is paid.  The price minimum is $1.49 per month and goes up from there based on the number unique active email subscribers in your account.  This is where it gets a little confusing.

If you use FeedBlitz RSS you don’t need to use the FeedBlitz email service.  In that case your cost would be $1.79 per month.  If you choose to use both FeedBlitz RSS and their feed to email service, the price you pay is dependent on the number of active email subscribers you have.  So if you have 45 email subscribers and 216 RSS subscribers, you will be charged at the 45 subscriber level.

Feedblitz, one of the most popular feed to email services got quite a make over today as Feedblitz 2 launched.

Along with the new look and feel comes a wealth of new features including an upgraded API, monetization, publishing, tags, stats, subscribe to comments, diagnostics, speed and more.

I haven’t had much time to play with the new Feedblitz, but it’s looking quite nice. If you’ve dug around, share your thoughts on the upgraded service.

[tags]feedblitz, email, feed, rss[/tags]

I received a comment yesterday on how Feedblitz emails had stopped arriving for one user.  I’m not sure what blog he’s subscribed (the issue wasn’t with this one) but there could be a handful of reasons why the email notifications are not arriving.  However, today I noticed that my Feedblitz alerts, that I had previously setup for a few blogs, were now showing up in my Gmail spam box.  I’m not sure what triggered the email to be marked as spam, however Gmail didn’t like it.

If you are subscribed to a blog via Feedblitz, and the emails stop coming, check your spam box and make sure they aren’t just getting filtered out.

[tags]feedblitz, spam, gmail[/tags]

I’ve just added Feedblitz’ subscribe via email as an option on this blog. (under categories on the right)

If you think about it, subscribe via email is something every blog should have as not everyone knows what a feed is or how it all works. For every one person that knows about feeds, there are probably 10 that have no idea. However, almost everyone knows what emails is. So having a subscribe via email is an option all blogs should have.

There are quite a few services out there and one seems to be just as good as the other. I like Feedblitz as it allows me to see who’s subscribed to my blog and I can export the emails too. For an additional cost, I can also design the email templates. Other feed to email services include R|Mail, RSSFwd & Yahoo Alerts.

I’m sure there are may more, what do you like & why?

[tags]feedblitz,rmail,yahoo,email,rssfwd[/tags]