I’ve been with Aweber for nearly 2 years and they are good. But I eventually decided that newsletter is not my type of thing — there are people who are making big bucks by building and maintaining a high profile email list, but I’m just not one of them. So I left Aweber and switched all my subscription forms to Feedburner email subscription.
It’s actually pretty good. On top of everything, it’s free and A LOT easier to set up. It’s got anti-spam captcha which Aweber lacks — I contacted Aweber support approximately 1 year ago about this feature and up until now, they still haven’t deployed it. The problem with a popular blog is that there are many spam bots waiting to fill every form on the pages. As a result, my list was filled with fake non-human emails which bloated my number of subscribers, thus monthly fees.
It sucks, though Aweber excels in many other regards such as demographic statistics and CTR, etc. If you’ve got a blog and just want to deliver your fresh posts to the inbox of your readers, namely blog subscription, Feedburner is perfect for you. If you want a little more as what an autoresponder does, Feedburner can somewhat help you in this as well, albeit limited in functionality.
Use Feedburner for Email Subscription
Just sign in your Google account and navigate to http://feedburner.google.com and you can start creating your feed right away. In addition to adding a Feedburner custom feed address to your blog, you can also get a email subscription form by “Type your blog or feed address here” and then click “Next”.
It’s all guided and easy to finish. After you have done, go to “Publicize” –> “Email Subscriptions” and click “Activate“, you would then be presented by a HTML code block which is the your blog subscription form that you should put at a prominent place on your blog. Readers can then enter their email addresses to sign up with your newsletter (not newsletter actually, but blog posts notifications). Recommended places to install the email subscription form include: 1) end of the post, 2) top of sidebar, etc.
Use Feedburner as Autoresponder
After you have created your feed at Feedburner, click the feed, and go to “Publicize” –> “Email Subscriptions” –> “Communication Preferences” and there’s a “Confirmation Email Body” that you are free to edit to include any messages or links you would like to show to the subscriber (yet-to-be), such as a thank-you line and the download URL of a ebook you’ve created. After you have made the changes, click “Save” to save them.
Now if anyone subscribes through the Feedburner email subscription form on your blog or website, he or she’d first receive a confirmation message from Feedburner containing things you added just now. It’s exactly like an autoresponder, and it’s free.