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Earlier this year, I wrote about how the changes in the rules by Google regarding bulk emails sent by gmail were going to have a major impact on my blogging. I speculated at the time about giving up blogging altogether - as I originally built my audience entirely via the RSS feed.
To cut a long story short since I only use gmail and have done for the last two decades, I wasn't about to give up on my very reliable, very efficient gmail service.
Instead:
I gave up on Mailerlite which said I could no longer use a gmail address for my RSS Feed to Email sent to subscriber inboxes.
I also continued to post regularly to my Making A Mark Facebook Page when a post was published - and all the conversations which used to take place in comments now take place there.
...and looked around for alternative arrangements - and was absolutely horrified at the prices being charged for people with as many subscribers as I have!
In the end I've settled on using Follow.it - which is not perfect. Mainly because it's got adverts which I dislike intensely but I have no choice about these for a free service. I may well upgrade - but this in part depends on how many subscribers I get. Believe me offering a subscription service does not come cheap for the more sophisticated versions!
However Follow.It works - and that's the main thing.
it's been set up in the side column of this blog for a few days - and it seems as if people are starting to subscribing without any prompting and without any problems
So if you want to subscribe - or even resubscribe - to Making A Mark can I suggest you complete the form below (or the one in the side column to the right).
THIS IS NOW A BLOG POST OF TWO HALVES - LAST NIGHT AND THIS MORNING. Last night I was very frustrated with follow.it which had promised a lot but not delivered as well as it promised.This morning we seem to be approaching something like normal and I'm not feeling so negative.
This was my message to Follow-It after a very disappointing afternoon trying to get my RSS feed to be recognised in my Follow-It account.
This was AFTER I had paid for the Cool account.
Two more critical comments on another tweet got deleted..... but the person doing the deleting doesn't realise it doesn't delete from my side
Tweets are only deleted from one side - it's still there on my account
I'm NEVER impressed by people who don't pay attention to good customer service.
It now turns out that their response to signing up is neither automated nor very prompt - but might possibly respond to tweets.... ;) (Facebook does - so maybe they do too!)
In addition, in order to transfer more than 100 subscribers you have to PROVE you have them - by taking a photo / screenshot of your Feedburner Page AND contact them separately to get those subscribers brought over.
But there's no way to indicate that when setting up the RSS feed.
I am, in part, trying to determine whether:
the feed gets recognised when I publish this post - given I've signed up to subscribe via follow.it - but it does not recognise my blog - nor does it seem to go straight to my blog....
whether to now transfer my subscribers given my growing doubts about follow-it for big accounts
whether to abandon ship and go elsewhere. Mailer Lite and Mailchimp being possibilities - but they will cost more...
UPDATE: I'm feeling better about follow.it this morning.
Somebody got my feed set up and it's now on my dashboard.
The feed for this post was published - late. I always sign up to my own blogs - because that way I can check if the feed is working! This is what it looks like. It's supposed to arrive within 30 minutes of publication but this one took about 3.5 hours - which is not OK. I'll see what happens today. It might just be the new account bedding in
This is what arrived in my inbox late last night
The statistics also showed up - and are OK - but I'm not getting anything like the detail I got with Feedburner - even with a paid account. I guess that's because follow.it can only count the emails via their set-up whereas Feedburner counted everything from whichever way people subscribed.
The way it presents in the "read" side of my follow.it account also looks good. See below
Ponderings on the future
I'm still in pondering on what to do. I think I may run an A/B test and set up my Botanical Art and Artists blog - which has c1k subscribers - with another set-up and see if that works better.
Otherwise, I'm going to have to set up a Patreon account and start subscriptions all over again, but limited to those who pay a very nominal amount to get the blog posts.
I am also thinking along the lines of getting everybody to subscribe again - because I've absolutely no idea how many never open their emails and I'm not keen on paying for subscriptions from people who never open their email!
However do not fear - I have downloaded all current subscribers as a csv file - and will be keeping that safe until such time as I decide where subscriptions or going....
At the moment I've not pulled any hair out but getting close.....
There again maybe I shall go and take another look at Substackwhich manages to create a much better impression with me and has both free and paid options for followers.
(NOTE: All this within the context that I'm now listed for surgery and am expecting that my ankle fusion operation will take place in the Autumn and I'll then have very limited movement on one leg only for at least three months followed by not a lot more mobility for some months after that - followed by a shoulder replacement - when I'll be doing everything with one hand. So exhibition reviewing is going to be minimal for some time... I'm thinking of switching to art book reviews and getting the art material and tips and techniques websites finished!)
In essence his criticism is that Google is treating Feedburner as a vehicle for distributing its ads and is just not demonstrating any interest in proving a decent service for all the various web 2.0 activities which rely on feeds. He says:
complaints about Feedburner continue
the service is becoming unreliable
Feedburner problems plague website owners far more than they should
Google has taken far too long since acquisition to absorb Feedburner and sort it out
Distribution of blog content has slowed down - a killer in the 'breaking news' business
Google are far more focused on providing a blog for their AdSense ads than they are in providing a blog which supports Feedburner and addressing questions of performance. The "Burning Questions" Feedburner blog was closed down on 23rd December 2008. (If Michael had looked a little harder he would have noticed a 7 month gap with no posts at all!)
they have to focus on the quality of the service, too, or the ecosystem won’t work. The message they’re sending to everyone is that the service doesn’t deserve a blog, just the advertising they bolt onto it. Imagine if they did the same thing with search. Feedburner Needs To Get It Together
and yet broken stats and implementation problems associated with the transfer of feeds are sitting around for days and not being resolved.
Now I'd take that as a sign that competition can only be just around the corner. Of course he could just have been really upset that his Feedburner stats figure for TechCrunch read zero rather than 1.7 million.
Transfer of Feedburner Feeds
Google started transferring the feed files recently and having sorted most of the people with adsense accounts they're now moving on to the likes of me (and you!).
Note we all MUST transfer by the end of February. The most important bit of this message is you don't have an option. You need to get your feedburner feeds transferred to a Google account before the end of February.
I transferred mine yesterday - and the transfer of feeds for multiple blogs took about 30 seconds.
There was a warning that your subscriber numbers can go a little bit haywire to start with. My subscriber numbers are fine - but my reach numbers have bombed and gone to zero. However like a lot of other people I did watch my subscriber numbers go haywire temporarily last week on the old feedburner site!
You will no longer be able to sign in to feedburner.com. From now on, you may now view and manage your feeds by visiting: http://feedburner.google.com
Your old FeedBurner feeds (at feeds.feedburner.com) will automatically redirect traffic to their new addresses on the feeds2.feedburner.com domain. All of your feeds have been moved into your Google Account, along with your traffic stats. If you see “0” for the most recent day, don’t panic! It may take up to a week for a feed’s full dose of stats to appear in your Google Account.
You can also find the link to Feedburner in your Google Account "My Account" page. If you have any questions, please visit their Transfer FAQ.
Feedburner performance in relation to e-mail feed delivery has been abysmal in the past month.
E-mails are not being sent out on time - or at all (My blog post from yesterday has still not turned up in my 'quality check' inbox).
Subscribers have been writing to me to say that they have not been getting their e-mails - or getting them very late.
Feedback to reported problems has also gone completely downhill since it's been taken over by Google. When you do get a response they are unable to explain problems that have happened
I'm not alone. There appears to be a total lack of support for people reporting problems in the new Feedburner Help (Google) Group.
Purple asparagus from the Wye Valley 8" x 10", coloured pencils on Bristol Graphic copyright Katherine Tyrrell
The bottom line - Feedburner used to be a very reliable service which I liked a lot but it is now anything but.
I've also noticed that other people's feeds are not being reported through to Bloglines. I've taken to clicking on the blog names to see whether there is anything posted when there's nothing showing up in the inbox.
Whether the problem with the feed is rooted in Blogger or Feedburner - the reality is that the problem actually lies with Google - since it owns both of them.
So just what do they spend the Google Billions on? Judging by the quality of service performance they certainly don't spend it on proving a good customer service!
I'm now looking at alternative options - which are not owned by Google - and don't require me to ask all my e-mail subscribers to shift their subscriptions. Any suggestions?
If you're having problems too why not post about them on your blog? We all tend to think it's just us until everybody starts posting. Plus the one thing that I've noticed is that services do pay attention to public comment on blogs because this gets picked up by the search engines. Witness the way Statcounter got its problems with Paypal sorted very fast (seePaypal - A Warning from StatCounter - RESOLVED) as soon as all its customers started posting on their blogs about it.
Miki asked me how to set up Feedburner on her blog so this is for her and everybody else who has been wondering!
If you want people to visit your blog you need to help them.
First of all you need to activate a feed for your blog.
Then you need to offer your visitors a subscription facility - so they can remember where to find you again and/or get your content sent to them every day.
Below I look at how you help people subscribe to your blog and analyse your blog traffic., but first some context........
What is a web feed?
Feeds are how you get your data to other people.
Feeds contain either a summary of new content from a site or the full text and images
Feeds are what people use to subscribe to your blog.
Feeds mean people know when you've published new content. Readers/subscribers are fed the latest copy from your blog as soon as its published or whenever you say, without having to visit your blog
Feeds are what power up all the various widgets that you see on blogs.
Feeds can be syndicated using a service, like Feedburner, which collects the feed from your blog and sends it to your subscribers to read - either in a feedreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) or as an e-mail.
Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere. Google - Feed 101
What are the feed formats? The two main web feed formats are RSS and Atom. As it is older, 'RSS' is frequently used as a generic term to refer to feeds irrespective of type. RSS 2.0 support for enclosures led directly to the development of podcasting.
Atom was developed because of problems with some aspects of RSS feeds. Many podcasting applications, such as iTunes, support the use of Atom 1.0. Blogger uses an Atom feed and all site feeds are published in Atom 1.0 format. However, if you add ?alt=rss to the end of any site feed URL, you can get the same feed in RSS 2.0 format.
FeedBurner can apply services to source feeds of the following formats: RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom.
What is syndication?
Web syndication usually means making the web feeds from a site available so that other people can be provided with a summary of any content which has been recently added to the site - such as the latest news or blog post or forum posts.
There are various sites which can help you syndicate your blog feed. One of these is Feedburner.
If you choose to 'burn your feed' with FeedBurner, it will check your blog feed for updates approximately every 30 minutes. Then, when it detects changes in your original feed (ie new content), then those changes are read into FeedBurner and the updates are passed through to the FeedBurner "burned" version of your syndicated content. What is a feed reader?
There are more than 2,000 different types of feed readers - which are used to read the content produced on blogs. Other names for feed readers are news readers or aggregators.
In order to contain the amount of e-mail people get, people often use feed readers to read blog.
I read most blogs I subscribe too in Bloglines Beta. Very few are delivered as e-mails to my Inbox. However I'd always advise bloggers to offer options for both feedreaders and e-mails as everybody's preference varies - and your aim is to make it easy for people to read your blog.
How do I activate my feed in Blogger?
According to the poll on my Blogging for Artists site, over 60% of artists use Blogger for their blogs. So what follows mainly focuses on how to activate your feed in Blogger. However, some of the comments apply to all bloggers irrespective of which platform they use.
Blog Posts Feed: Decide what you want your blog feed to do - options are None, Short or Full.
A short feed means that only a set number of characters are sent in the feed. Somebody reading has to click to see more. If you have your feed set to None then this is (a) useful if you don't want your blog found and (b) means you can't offer a subscription service!!!
I have a short feed because (a) I tend to have long posts and (b) because my blog gets scraped on a regular basis by spam blogs and a short feed helps to stop this happening.
Blog Comment Feed: Decide what you want to do about the feeds for Comments and per comment - again the options are none, short, and full. Remember that some people like to follow discussions in blog comments and/or get answers to questions posed. I have both of mine set to full.
Post Feed Redirect URL: If you have want to burn your post feed using FeedBurner, or used another service to process your feed, you need enter the full feed URL here. Blogger will redirect all post feed traffic to this address.
Post Feed Footer: Decide whether you want anything in the footer for your feed. This is where you enter the code if you use ads or other third-party feed additions.
Basic tab / Let search engines find your blog? You also need to make sure that you have activated the search engine facility. When you select "Yes" Blogger includes your blog in Google Blog Search but also pings Weblogs.com when you publish new content. This allows feedreaders to pick up new content.
What is Feedburner?
FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web. About Feedburner
Feedburner can provide weblog owners and podcasters and other web-based content publishers with the ability to
manage and customise their RSS feeds,
track usage of their subscribers
offer advertising (optional)
It was set up in 2004. In June 2007, Google bought Feedburner for a rumoured $10 million - which in 3 years is not a bad return on investment! As a result there is now a Feed 101 pageon the Google support website.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, FeedBurner is growing faster than MySpace and Digg with 385% traffic growth. As of 28th February 2008 it had 1,432,752 feeds by 802,775 publishers with an awful lot of subscribers!
How to burn a feed using Feedburner
You can Watch a short movie (3:14, 4.6 MB, no audio) about how to burn or you can read the following.
There are also handy QuickStart guides for Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, or MySpace. These walk you through the easy process of turning your blog content into a feed-friendly format. They do it rather better than me.
You start by putting your blog URL into the 'menu line' on the home page of Feedburner. You don't need to know the URL for your blog, the process wil tell you what's available.
You set an account with Feedburner at the same time as you begin to burn a feed - so you'll need to have decided on a user name and password in advance. You'll be asked for to say what these are when you start to burn your feed.
Don't forget to make your subscriptions service easy to find on your blog. I notice them in the most peculiar places on some people's blogs. I have stats at the top of my right hand column and then subscription services BEFORE anything else. My subscriber numbers started to climb as soon as I put these two together at the top of the right hand column. I also have a subscription service included in the blog footer element. If anybody has taken the trouble to read through a week's blog posts then I want to make sure they get the opportunity to subscribe!
If you get stuck, you can also ask for more help in the Feedburner Forums
How to track your feed traffic
You can track all of your feed traffic - including people who have subscribed in feed readers and never visit the site - by changing the feed redirect in Blogger (on the Settings/Feed tab)to include the Feedburner feed address. Blogger will then redirect all post feed traffic to this address. Mine looks like this - when I did this for the first time, I was rather surprised by the jump in numbers! The only problem then is if the Feedburner site goes 'down' (very rare) - in which case you then need to switch back temporarily to the conventional feed address.
What is a subscriber? And what is a web hit
You can add a feed counter to publicise your circulation statistics directly on your blog (or anywhere else you can post HTML). You can a;so change what it looks like.
Just go to the Publicise page. This is more information about adding a feed counter to your blog. That's the icon right at the very top of the right hand column of this blog.
I only show subscribers NOT page views/web hits in the stats at the top of the right hand column. See below as to why.
FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed. Feedburner -What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?
and a web hit is comething different. If each blog post has a unique URL, then all clicks to individual ppsts count as a hit - and would give a grossly inflated count figure - hence why I stick with subscribers. I know my hits figure is MUCH bigger! ;)
We record a hit each time someone loads your feed in a web browser, feed reader or other program. When bots and automated services request your feed, that also counts as a hit. Feedburner - what is a feed hit?
How to monitor your feed traffic
Most of you have probably already got a stats service on your blog - however you can also look at your blog stats on Feedburner. Check out the Anaylze tab. This is the FeedBurner Stats Overview and FAQ and you can read more about them here.
Can I get site feeds for specific labels? - tells you what to do to if the blog you read is using labels and also has site feeds enabled. You can then pick and choose which topics you want to subscribe to. The format for label feeds is this:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname Scraping a Feed
Blog scraping provides content for Splogs. If this has happened to you try setting your site feed to 'short'. My experience was that it usually stops it (for a while) and seems to help a lot to reducing it to minor levels. Use Google Alerts to check for scraping.
FREE Publication
I will be making this post available as a FREE pdf publication on my website so you can print it off and have it to hand while setting up your feedburner account. Check back to see whether I've got it transcribed.
Making A Mark: other posts about blogging
If you've learned something in reading this blog post you might like to check out other posts I've written in the past about blogging
