Blogs are a powerful tool for online marketers. They’re a preferred media outlet for many news seekers because they offer a person-to-person connection without the corporate BS of more mainstream mass media outlets. The rapidly growing popularity of blogs allows for a wide array of topics, and the volume of blog posts allows more sophisticated readers to gauge truth and accuracy in a story by the number of reputable bloggers that are sharing it.
If you own a blog or are thinking of starting one, you know that one of the greatest challenges is staying in the forefront of your reader’s mind. Still considered a secondary form of media, blogs can be popular one day and forgotten the next.
Although RSS syndication and newsreader applications help bloggers to communicate with their readers, this technology has not been adapted by average users as a standard.
Recently, we found several online services that allow bloggers to maintain their readership through email without the use of the scary RSS technology. Email is a much more accepted means of communication and is accepted by the vast majority of internet users.
Here are a few of the services we found:
Bloglet.com is the first of several email notification (or notification2email as it’s sometimes called) services that helps bloggers update their reader base via email.
Signup with Bloglet
Place a subscription form on your site
Your readers subscribe through this form
Every day, readers receive a single email from Bloglet informing them of your site updates
FeedBlitz another notification2email service for any type of xml feed. Their base service is free and doesn’t include any spam or advertising.
FeedBlitz is a service that monitors blogs, RSS feeds and Web URLs to provide greater reach for feed publishers. FeedBlitz takes all the headache out of converting feed and blog updates into email digests, delivered daily to subscribers’ inboxes. FeedBlitz manages subscriptions, circulation tracking, testing, and is compatible with all major blogging platforms and services such as Blogger, Typepad and FeedBurner. Unlike other blogmail services, FeedBlitz is reliable, scalable and fully supported. No betas, wish lists or road map items here. You’re in production, and so is FeedBlitz.
Blo.gs is more of a site monitoring service than a notification2email utility. They’ve recently been purchased by Yahoo!, so they may morph into something entirely different by the time everything is said and done.
blo.gs lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs via the web and email. you can even put the list on your site: a blogroll that knows what is new!