You know how it is when you run your own business, you take care of your clients' needs ahead of your own business, and once in a while you forget to look to your own? Yep, that's what happened to me. I migrated my clients from Feedburner some time ago because the service was getting a little sketchy. Sometimes the feed would work, sometimes it would appear to be empty. Once Google took it over it just wasn't reliable. So we moved some client sites to Feedblitz, others decided to use WordPress's free built in RSS feed tool. But I never really got around to updating my own blogs until yesterday, when I realized two of them were no longer working.
I had a little over 10,000 subscribers and yesterday Feedburner was reporting that at a big fat 0. Now, this blog is syndicated on several sites and I send the RSS feed to Triberr and quite a few other places and they seemed to be getting the feed, so what gives? That's the thing. There's nobody to ask. Feedburner's support has gone *poof*.
I have only myself to blame. Actually I'm not even mad about it anymore, we'll just look at this as a wake up call for you, whoever out there is actually reading this post through an RSS feed that maybe no longer works.
So what should you do?
If you're still using Feedburner it's probably time to make a change. Feedblitz makes this really easy with their Feedburner migration guide. Try it free for 30 days to see if you like it. If, like many people you never migrated your Feedburner account to Google you don't even have to now. Just use the Feedblitz migration guide and it will find the feeds and migrate them for you. Remember, if you are using a plugin to manage your feed on your WordPress account, you'll need to update the link to the new feed. Feedblitz has a plugin but it hasn't been updated in some time, according to the docs, so I didn't use it.
Even if your Feedburner stats say your feed has 0 subscribers DON"T DELETE IT yet. The feed may still be working with a reporting glitch. use the tools provided by Feedblitz to migrate your feed and notify yout users first. If it'sdead it's dead, but don't take the chance and lose your subscriber base.
Why not just use the built in RSS feed on my site?
If you don't care about getting statistics back on who reads your blog that and just want to create great content and share it with the world then just stick to the feed that already exists on your blog.
I like to see what people are reading so I can fine tune the posts to what people want to read about. Not only is it good SEO but it's good to pay attention to my readers. I get this from Feedblitz and I get awesome support if I have any issues.
Why go with a paid service?
Reliable delivery is the most important, closely followed by support. Add to that email subscriptions with custom templates, statistics and tracking, importing of contacts from Outlook, Google contacts or a CSV, auto publishing to social networks and sharing buttons within the feed and it's pretty easy to figure out. You can even create an email auto responder for new subscribers.
Important!
If you do subscribe to my blog, I'd love to hear if you get this message or I'm talking to myself over here, and please re-subscribe to the new feed to be sure to keep getting my posts. http://feeds.feedblitz.com/janetfouts
Thanks!