Feedburner - I love you guys, but...
One of the things I'm most excited about with the new SportsLizard is that it's going to be MUCH easier for me to produce content. I used to create a page for every story I wrote, and then manually update the RSS feed, send out the newsletter, and update all of the archives. It was such a pain in the ass that I wrote far fewer articles than I should have or wanted to because I didn't feel like spending an hour publishing it.
Contrast that with the new Wordpress-run Lizard's Rant Collectibles Blog that I have set up. All I need to do is write a post and everything else is taken care of...even the newsletter that's delivered through Feedburner. Most email services charge for distribution, but not Feedburner - they let you customize EVERYTHING about the message (there's only a tiny message about Feedburner at the bottom, which most paid providers put up there anyway) and you can have an UNLIMITED list (most services limit your list size and number of messages).
So with a huge smile on my face I contacted Feedburner and asked them to import my existing subscriber list (a pretty small list of 400 subscribers). They wrote back right away, but could only import 100 emails because that's their "rule". I understand having a cap, but considering I could build a list of infinity subscribers with you, why is the import limit only 100? I love everything about Feedburner, but this is something that doesn't make much sense to me.
Now my first 100 subscribers are subscribed, and I'll have to email the other 300 asking them to subscribe again. We'll be holding a give-away for newsletter subscribers in the next month, so I'll tie that into the email, but take a wild guess as to how many of those 300 will re-subscribe? I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'll get 75 at best....I'll probably lose 225 great email subscribers to my newsletter because of a pointless rule...eh. Not really a huge deal, but something completely arbitrary that makes my launch a bit more difficult.
You could argue that the only subscriber that I care about is the one willing to click a link and re-subscribe, but I don't buy it. My hotmail account receives about 20 newsletter from everything from The GAP to CompUSA, and while I glance at these messages and sometimes even visit their site and order something, I probably wouldn't bother to re-subscribe if they took me off the list.
Contrast that with the new Wordpress-run Lizard's Rant Collectibles Blog that I have set up. All I need to do is write a post and everything else is taken care of...even the newsletter that's delivered through Feedburner. Most email services charge for distribution, but not Feedburner - they let you customize EVERYTHING about the message (there's only a tiny message about Feedburner at the bottom, which most paid providers put up there anyway) and you can have an UNLIMITED list (most services limit your list size and number of messages).
So with a huge smile on my face I contacted Feedburner and asked them to import my existing subscriber list (a pretty small list of 400 subscribers). They wrote back right away, but could only import 100 emails because that's their "rule". I understand having a cap, but considering I could build a list of infinity subscribers with you, why is the import limit only 100? I love everything about Feedburner, but this is something that doesn't make much sense to me.
Now my first 100 subscribers are subscribed, and I'll have to email the other 300 asking them to subscribe again. We'll be holding a give-away for newsletter subscribers in the next month, so I'll tie that into the email, but take a wild guess as to how many of those 300 will re-subscribe? I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'll get 75 at best....I'll probably lose 225 great email subscribers to my newsletter because of a pointless rule...eh. Not really a huge deal, but something completely arbitrary that makes my launch a bit more difficult.
You could argue that the only subscriber that I care about is the one willing to click a link and re-subscribe, but I don't buy it. My hotmail account receives about 20 newsletter from everything from The GAP to CompUSA, and while I glance at these messages and sometimes even visit their site and order something, I probably wouldn't bother to re-subscribe if they took me off the list.
posted by Adam McFarland at
3/26/2007 06:54:00 PM
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