FeedBurner is the free RSS subscription service that has been used for over a decade by many bloggers and website owners to notifiy their followers about new posts.
It was acquired by Google years ago but they have been slowly killing it off by removing API access, Adsense for feeds was discontinued, they failed to renew the feedburner.jp domain and their social profiles on Twitter and Google+ have been removed, and now they announced that they are deprecating its email subscription service.
This leaves many bloggers & website owners wondering: what service to switch to?
What is follow.it?
Meet follow.it – a free service which allows your visitors to follow you, and then alert them when you publish a new story, so that they come back to your site. Follow.it made a science out of it, and optimized every step in the funnel, i.e. they implemented processes which ensure that:
1. Chances are maximized that people can see that they can follow you
2. Most of them will decide to follow you
3. A high % will turn into active subscribers
4. The notifications will get delivered (i.e. in inboxes, not spam folders)
5. People open & click on your stories
6. You can optimize everything with detailed analytics
The best part is that the process is fully automatic, so all you need to do is to continue creating great content for your audience – follow.it will make sure that they come back to your site.
So: Why should I switch to follow.it?
Follow.it is a great Feedburner alternative as they cover all that Feedburner used to cover, and more.
To get a quick idea of the subscriber experience, here’s the follow.it feed page for SkyTechGeek. After you checked it, compare it with its equivalent on Feedburner.
Apart from the better design, the key reasons why you should switch to follow.it are:
Reliable email delivery: Emails land in inbox, not spam folders, due to follow.it’s excellent sender reputation
Mature: follow.it (and its predecessor SpecificFeeds) has been around for over 5 years
Used by many: follow.it is used by over 100,000 websites
More options: Followers can filter the feed and pick the delivery channel (it’s not only email!), e.g. RSS, news page, Telegram and several others to follow soon
Use pop ups for free: MyPopUps (service to show cool pop-ups on your site) is free for all follow.it users
Final words
The tool is free at its basic plan, which offers a lot, and they also have several plans with more advanced features, such as higher visibility of feeds in follow.it directory, email alerts if a user subscribed or unsubscribed, access to why unsubscribed etc.
In addition to that, follow.it has a great pipeline of future features. You can upvote the ones you’d like to have implemented soon 🙂
So: if you need a Feedburner alterantive, and/or want to get more visitors coming back to your website, start using follow.it today!
