This is a Guest Post by Brankica Underwood. Brankica teaches you how to Blog like a star the simple way. You can find her on Google+.
One of the most common tips you will get when starting a blog is to start building a list from day one. That is a great tip and you should utilize it from the get go.
However, not every list building is the same. There are three most common ways I see bloggers use, but not all of them are equal.
A lot of new(er) blogs start by putting an email sign up box for Feedburner, so people can get updates with each new post on the blog.
Although a great solution for those wanting the updates, it is absolutely waste of the space on the blog and isn't really list building at all.
You can not use the emails from Feedburner to send newsletters to your list since the list isn't yours to start with. People didn't opt in to get your newsletter, just the feed.
But you only want to send the feed for now? That is OK, because the two most common email marketing services, Aweber and Mailchimp, both have the option to send the feed updates to subscribers.
So this should tell you that Feedburner is not the perfect solution for your list building - it isn't list building to start with and you can do the updates through Aweber and MailChimp.
I have used both of these services and after many months of using them, I believe Aweber is better than MailChimp. The only advantage MC has over Aweber is that it is free to start with, however you can not use it for affiliate marketing.
So if you are a marketer, you should definitely go with Aweber. It offers great selection of forms, which is a big advantage over MC forms (bad styling).
MailChimp does have better templates for your emails. There are more styling options for the looks of your newsletter but depending on your niche or the goal of the newsletter, this may not be very important to you.
Aweber has one feature that made me decide to switch from MC. You can create a pile of different forms and track where are subscribers coming from. For example, you have a landing page where you send all visitors from guest posts and add a separate form to the page. You will see exactly how many people signed up using that form and be able to track how your guest posting is working for your list building.
I would recommend trying both MailChimp and Aweber (MailChimp is free and you can try Aweber for $1 for the first month). That will give you a great idea on what you can do with forms and email styling, tracking and all the other list settings.
Bottom line, even if you don't have a newsletter and don't want to have one for a long time, feeding RSS feed to your subscribers is way better through one of these two email marketing services, because once you do decide to create a newsletter, you will have a list that is ready.
I have been using Constant Contact for my email newsletter for a number years. The newsletter came before my blog and even my website. I have been very happy with their service and the improvements they have made over the years. However, I never see Constant Contact mentioned in posts about email services. It always seems to be Awebber and Mail Chimp. Is there something I am missing? What is the one feature of Awebber or Mail Chimp that makes them a better choice than Constant Contact?
I guess they just don't do good marketing as these two :)
People know about these two and a lot of them tried it. I can't talk about CC cause I have never tried it but I did try the two I mention.
They probably need to pick up the game and promote their service heavily as others. On the other hand a lot of big marketers use Aweber and recommend it to their followers so there is a big word of mouth going here too.
Hey thank-you for the info o AWeber versus MailChimp. I did not know that the Chimp couldn't be used for affiliate marketing.
Brankica,
Thanks for another great and informative post! I didn't realize that you couldn't use MailChimp for affiliate marketing. Now, I've heard that you cannot use ConstantContact or iContact for affiliate marketing either. Maybe you could check up on that for me. :-) I'm sure many people would love to know the answer to that question. All you need to do is subcribe to all the heavy hitters of Internet Marketing and they're all (ok, maybe only 99%) using Aweber. When the top people in the industry are almost all using it, that tells you something! And yes, I use the "Blog Broadcast" feature on my blog, so that anyone who subscribes to my blog, gets all my blog posts in their email automatically (since the Aweber Blog Broadcast feature uses Feedburner, as you mention in your article). But the beauty of it is that this system also allows me to send out to that same list of 35,927 subscribers (oh alright, you busted me exagerrating again!), any email or newsletter that I please whenever I please -- something you just cannot do with feedburner alone.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Brankica!
Sincerely,
Jupiter Jim
FINALLY! A post focusing on list building vs. Feedburner!
I can't agree more. Feedburner is far from perfect - you have no way of knowing who's subscribed. It doesn't always work ... and when a service is free you can't really complain.
I use Aweber, and recommend it to everyone because you are in control of who you are talking to.
Great advice!