Feedburner (free) vs. Aweber (costly)

vs.

It’s more about Free vs. Paid email subscriber and which one suites you best.

Aweber cost $19/month for 500 subscribers and a hefty $130/month for 25,000 subscribers.

You could always argue that free is better. But there’s a price to things that comes for free.

For this argument, I’m going to use Feedburner (free) and Aweber (paid) as examples. Both are the best services out there, with big corporate websites utilizing them.

Feed Burner vs. Aweber. Which which is best for you?

After reading this post, you will know the answer to that.

Ok. Here we go.

Both Feedburner and Aweber allow you to collect email addresses from your visitors. Aweber on the other hand allows you to collect names on top. So when you contact your subscribers, it is more personal. Ex: Dear John, how are you today.

Feedburner doesn’t allow you to contact your subscriber directly via email. Your subscribers can only receive emails from you when you post a new blog.

That sucks! I worked extremely hard to collect my subscribers. I should have the right to do what I want with it.

That’s right. We learned this from every marketing Guru.

You have to have a LIST!

After all this is the reason you start a blog….is to eventually sell something to your subscribers.

Wait. Don’t get disappointed yet. Feedburner gives you another option.

If you’re really stubborn and you want to contact your subscribers with offers and and promotions. Feedburner has an option to export the email addresses as CSV, which can be imported to other email providers.

You can now contact all your subscribers directly. Viola!

You’re now thinking, the best things in life are free and Feedburner is definitely one of them.

If you’re sending emails to a few people, then this formula definitely works and worth an effort.

As your list gets bigger and bigger to a few thousands, it will start to become a pain in the ass.

The biggest issue is not the exporting part. It’s the work you have to do to send emails to your subscribers.

Email service providers caps the amount of emails you send at once. So you have to break your list up to accommodate for this.

FYI: Gmail allows you to send maximum of 500 emails per day. That’s actually a pretty good number. You can thank Google anytime…not to mention they make a ton of money advertising around your inbox.

Okay. What’s the issue then?

Well, the biggest issue is really how the receiver’s provider classifies your email. If you send massive amount of emails all at once, then there’s a huge chance, your email will not arrive at all. It will be classified as SPAM!

Email service providers have the technology to detect this kind of actions.

Services like Feedburner and Aweber authenticates emails using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail ).

Many providers such as AOL, Gmail, Earthlink, Outblaze, Road Runner, Hotmail, Bellsouth, Verizon, Charter, Shaw, Adelphia, and Juno also use SPF.

So there’s no way around this. Especially if your email is your domain name as a sender.

So why can’t I contact my subscribers directly from Feedburner?

When visitors sign-up using Feedburner, it is linked up to an RSS feed of your blog. Next time you post blog, they will be sent an excerpt through their email.

Aweber allows you to do that as well, and has the ability to send direct emails to your subscribers.

As your list and your business grow, sending emails to your subscribers becomes time consuming and tedious. Aweber’s magic power is its ability to send auto responders so you can automate your responses.

For instance, if you want to sell a product to your subscriber and that person has not done so, you can automate a series of emails that will be sent in different days to persuade that person to buy in.

The options many people take is to usually start with feedburner. As their list grows, they import them to Aweber. You could to that, but Aweber won’t let you send a single email unless your subscriber opts-in first. Chances are, you could lose 60% of your subscribers because they don’t want or too lazy to double opt-in.

I hope I cleared some things for you. I apologize for my English grammar. It’s my third Language and I’m still learning my vocabularies.

If you like this article, subscribe to my blog to learn more about how to make money using video content to promote your business / project.

Here’s a sample of a Feedburner sign-up form.
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And here’s an example of anAweber sign-up form.

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