Email vs. RSS

I use a service on this blog called Bloglet.

It powers the "subscribe to this via email" field on the upper left of my blog.

Everyday 780 people get an email from Bloglet telling them about any new posts on my blog (see my Changing Web post for more on this stuff).  That number goes up by anywhere from 2 to 5 people a day and has been since I started this blog.

It’s clearly not the most popular way to subscribe to my blog since over 4300 people have subscribed to one of my three RSS feeds.

But the 780 people who get an email from me are probably a different kind of reader.

My bet is that most of them don’t use an RSS reader which means they are not blog enthusiasts and probably only read a couple of blogs a day.

They also click thru to my blog much more often than the RSS readers do since I put the entire post into my feeds and I don’t do that with Bloglet.

I understand all the reasons that RSS is a better way to subscribe to blogs, but I also think you can’t ignore email.

Email is an everyday application for hundreds of millions of people.  RSS is at least one order of magnitude less and proabably two orders of magnitude less than that.

And subscribing via email is easy to do for most people.

So if you are looking to build lasting relationships with your readers, don’t forget about email.