It shouldn't be a surprise that Google is planning on shutting down it's feed management system, Feedburner. Considering the fact that RSS news feeds are being used less and less as social media is now the new form of news gathering, news feeds are now used mostly by us dinosaurs.
This could be bad news for bloggers and businesses that have leaned heavily on getting return traffic from an RSS subscription base. And the change has forced the hand of many to find a different solution to managing their feed.
But this leads us to the question...What's next?
Here are 3 options to replacing the soon-to-be defunct feedburner service...
Option #1 Use Your Native Feed Source.
To be fair, there is very little difference between who services your RSS subscription. And to be real honest, aside from the option to monetize the feed itself, the ability to know (somewhat) how many people are tuning in (via a reader), and the credibility factor of displaying to the world your vast awesomeness with a large readership through a badge, the value of an RSS subscription feed is not much.
That said, if you are using WordPress, you really don't need a service. WordPress automatically generates feeds for everything from comments to pages to posts (also known as a native feed). Generally, the url looks something like this:
http://yoursite.com/feed
Rather than pointing your feed to a external source, you can simply keep it in house.
If you have been using feedburner to syndicate your content, you will probably need to inform your readership that you are making the switch with instructions on what they need to do in order to stay with you.
Option #2 Find A New Rss Subscription Syndication Service
You can also migrate to a different RSS subscription manager. Website services such as Feedblitz are popular options. You will get the same data that you got from feedburner PLUS a ton of other data and it gives you ability to broadcast via email. The downside? You pay for it.
Option #3 Build A List And Use The List To Promote Your Website
The final option is to actually forgo a feed reader altogether and instead promote an email subscription for your readership. From an analytics point of view, you will gain far more data as to who is reading (and who isn't) as you can see who opens your email and who doesn't.
Some list services actually gives you more details about those reading your stuff, such as Facebook and Twitter profiles!
The other upside to this is control. You can choose to send automatic updates to readers or specially tailor an article alert to include other things.
The obvious downside is that fewer may subscribe to your list than they would a reader. Another downside is that you may have to create a front end reward for them signing up.
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