The above Twitter question from Lyndon Reid is one that I get asked quite often. Bloggers are always wondering if they should concentrate on building their RSS subscriber base or their newsletter list. We all know that a large email list is worth big money, but displaying a big number on your FeedBurner chicket is great social proof.
If I had to make a choice between email or RSS, I would pick email every time. There is just so much more you can do with email that you can’t do with RSS. Your RSS just rebroadcasts your blog posts. You can’t use it to send out notices and special offers and you certainly can’t make $4,000 in a single day with it. Fortunately, you do not have to choose between email or RSS. There is a way to do both at the same time.
The Aweber Blog Broadcast
One of the coolest feature of Aweber is it allows you to build your email and RSS subscription at the same time. You do this with the Aweber Blog Broadcast feature. A blog broadcast is a fast and easy way to create content for your newsletter. What it does is allows Aweber to take the contents of your RSS feed and turn it into a newsletter that summarizes the past few days of posts that was written on your blog.
The really neat thing about the blog broadcast is it will increase the RSS counter on your FeedBurner chicklet. This is because Aweber reports subscription information to FeedBurner. So, if you have a mailing list of say 1,000 readers, setting up blog broadcast in Aweber will increase your FeedBurner RSS counter by an additional 1,000. Of the 50,000 RSS readers displayed on my FeedBurner chicket, 18,000 of them are from Aweber.
With Aweber Blog Broadcast, you don’t have to worry about whether you should concentrate on email or RSS. Just get your readers to subscribe to your newsletter, turn on the blog broadcast feature and your RSS number will increase with your newsletter number. Below is a screen cast on how to do an Aweber Blog Broadcast.