The other day we discussed about web-redesign and how you need to study your audience. Sometimes you will miss things you might not even realize. One of the things we changed with our redesign was the removal of many widgets from the sidebar. This included our Twitter and FeedBlitz subscription links. We thought we had time to reconfigure things, but one emailer was faster than us. We were asked if these services would be ended. We assured them they would not. We have moved them to the RSS Feeds drop down menu above.

This reminded us to talk about FeedBlitz, as we never really explained it. We did write about Twitter in the past, so now we will explain why we use FeedBlitz and why it can work for you. Although we assume most people use RSS feeds and readers, this is not the standard for the less technically inclined. It requires you to have an RSS reader and some people are not comfortable with the idea of feeds. For those unfamiliar,  RSS feeds are a textual feed of the posts on a blog or site. They can be aggregated (put together) with feeds from any blogs or sites with feeds, and read easily in any RSS reader. One of the more popular (free) RSS readers available is from Google. With a reader, you can follow all your favorite sites and topics in one place. Some feeds provide a quick summary, and allow you to decide to visit their site, others offer a full feed, so you can read the articles directly from your reader.

Regardless of simplicity of RSS feeds , we offered FeedBlitz, because it allowed users to follow our blog without a reader. All a user needs is an e-mail. FeedBlitz reads your blog’s RSS feed and automatically creates/sends out newsletters based on your blog. Besides sending out a newsflash to your subscribers, you can build your own content/newsletter with their free editor. FeedBlitz also allows you the ability to  import memebship list, so you can quickly get up and running. They also offer you many tools including stats and reports about for your subscriber network. All these tools are free for users, but with a paid service, you can remove the ads and customize the newsletter fully.

The real extra benefit of FeedBlitz, is their associaiton with Talkr. What does that mean for you? All posts of the Mark8t blog are converted into a text-to-speech (TTS ) MP3 files you can listen to on your favourite digital music player. It is offered as an option in every newsletter you get from FeedBlitz. If you just want to get the audio versions of the blog, you can subscribe here.

If you have a blog, or a site with a feed, you should really consider using some sort of feed tools–either the traditional RSS Feed or FeedBlitz. Why? It allows your visitors a quick way to stay informed of the latest news on your site, as well as create an easy way to communicate with them. Don’t assume people will always come to you. You should always look at creative ways to get to them. Speaking of which, if you are interested in subscribing to our newsletter, you may do so here. If you wish to learn more about implementing RSS feeds and newsletters contact us at Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today.

***Update***
We’ve added Odiogo to replace Talkr which seems to have gone offline