Why You Might Not Use Feedburner

The hardcore “bloggers” will roll their eyes with a “duh!” on this one, but for all you niche marketers using blogs as your platform, you might find this helpful.

We’re talking about Feedburner, why I don’t really like it, and why you might, perhaps even SHOULD opt not to use it on your niche blogs…

What I’m talking about here, is putting the little “subscribe to my feed” button on your site, getting the user to enter their email to receive your RSS Feed, updates on your blog, to their email inbox.

What this does, unbeknownst to blogging newbies, is it makes your reader read your content, from an email that gets sent to them, rather than reading it by actually coming to your site.

That means you get less physical traffic, it means there’s less people to see your ads, or whatever form of monetization you have on your blog, and generally, that it’s harder to make money from your blog viewers. In other words, RSS Subscribers are harder to monetize than normal readers who are coming to your blog to read.

If you DO want to use feedburner but don’t want to lose as much traffic, here’s some tips:

1. Take advantage of your MORE Tag – if you use the MORE tag for your posts, the people who read by email will have to click the link to your BLOG to read the full post. That means they will visit your site instead of reading solely by the email.

2. Use Affiliate links in your posts – If you don’t want to use the more tag, make sure there’s some way that you could make money if the reader reads only through email. The obvious way is slotting a relevant affiliate link into your post.

3. Link to old blog posts: This gives reader another reason to click from what they’re reading in their email, on to your site. This is good for internal linking too, so something you should do when you can.

4.  Embed a video: Since the RSS Feed won’t load embedded video content, putting a video in a post will force the reader to click through to see it.

5. Courtesy of John Chow – Remind your readers in your posts that RSS Feed Updates that they receive by email aren’t REAL time, and to keep checking back to your blog for the fastest updates on your new content.

At the end of the day, you should be asking WHY you’re using feedburner anyway – what are you trying to achieve from it?

The other thing you need to ask if you’re niche marketing is, why are you sending people to your Feed Subcription when you could be pointing them to an Email subscription form where you can not only tell them about updates to your blog by a mass mail if you want – but you also have the flexibility to be able to mail them any time you want, about ANYTHING you want…

Anyhow, I hope this has provided something to think about