Blogs Need Email

I agree with Fred Wilson – email can be an important way to syndicate blog content. Fred has about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers.

Until now Feedblitz was the only real choice to bloggers. I’ve chosen not to use it because of the heavy orange feedblitz branding included in emails. And while they’ve made improvements in their service, there are a number of features which are unacceptable, like the fact that they group blogs into a single user email unless a blog is paying the premium fee, etc.

Tonight I heard about Squeet, a new competitor in the space. But while Squeet seems fine for a user looking to get email from a feed, it does not supply the necessary tools to bloggers to allow them to promote the service.

What I’m looking for is a service that provides a “feedburner” level of features and service:

  • zero service provider branding on emails
  • I am in control of the email list; no spamming by the service provider
  • options on frequency of emails
  • options on email template

I’m happy to pay for this service, although I think there should be a free version as well that has ads within the email. I actually think it would be smart for the provider to share ad revenue with the blogger.

Feedburner is the obvious company to build this product, but they have a partnership with Feedblitz and seem to be making no move to build their own. I’ve been asking Constant Contact build a blog specific product, but so far no luck. They are just not set up to auto-send daily content from a blog.

Maybe MailFeed will be the answer.