AWeber, my favorite vendor for sending e-mail autoresponders, follow ups, and newsletters, has launched a new feature that enables customers to distribute their RSS feeds by e-mail.
This has many applications for affiliates and affiliate managers, and I think this will really help to mainstream the adoption of RSS feeds.
According to an October 2005 White Paper published by Yahoo, “Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
So forget about this RSS jibber jabber!
Let your visitors opt-in for your RSS feed without calling it that – the new service from AWeber is called the Feed Broadcaster and it allows your visitors to sign up for a traditional e-mail newsletter on your blog or other website that uses RSS.
The Feed Broadcaster will take your RSS content that is published through your blog, forum or however you leverage RSS and automatically create an e-mail newsletter sent to subscribers.
I just set it up in a matter of about two minutes and it was really easy. Here’s what you have to do:
- Add the website address for your RSS feed to Feed Broadcaster.
- Select how many news/story items you would like to be in each newsletter broadcast.
- Select a pre-designed fancy HTML template and click “Load Template”.
- Edit the template that is loaded automatically or use as is.
Within one hour AWeber will automatically grab the available RSS content from your feed and queue that content as a new broadcast in review status.
You can choose to send those broadcasts or delete them. From that point forward newsletter broadcasts would be sent out to any subscriber on the list automatically when a new post to your RSS feed is detected.