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A New Feed

November 13, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

Ugh, here I thought I had all the hard work over. See that little “Subscribe to Email” form in the upper right-hand side? I’ve been spending about 2 hours on that little thing, trying to get my feed subscription service plugged in. I could not figure out why it wasn’t going through! Grr! Then, the little light bulb went off! I think I still had the feeds for this blog from when it used to be on Blogger. Oh, sheesh. I never changed it! I didn’t delete the old feed, seeing that there are still some subscribers there. But I just want to let you know that I have a fresh new feed for my own domain. When you get around to it, please delete the old feed and subscribe to the new feed. You can subscribe to the new feed very easily– just click the RSS button in the upper right-hand side here, or enter your email and click “subscribe” to get emailed feeds from this blog. Sorry for the confusion. Once I see that my subscribers have all done this, I’ll just delete the old feed.

Posted in blogs, miscellaneous. Tags: email, feeds, RSS. Comments Off »

Zookoda Email for Your Blog

June 18, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

Got a blog? Got readers? I have several blogs, and many readers, yay! I haven’t been too astute about providing easy means of accessing my content for my readers, however. I have RSS feed for some, but setting up RSS accounts is a real pain to do (and when the blog or blog server is down, so are all the feeds). I personally prefer receiving email updates to my favorite blogs, more than reading RSS feeds and reading them in third-party feed readers. That’s why I’m looking into Zookoda. It’s FREE and we all know how much I love that price tag! Zookoda is offered by the folks at IZEA (the brains behind PayPerPost, SocialSpark, and the Blogger’s Choice Awards).

IZEA offers Zookoda, which is an online software program where you can send email updates of your latest blog posts to your readers’ email inboxes. It’s a sophisticated piece of “bloggerware,” but it is extremely simple to use. With Zookoda, you can also manage all your subscribers, design newsletters to match your blog, schedule broadcasts, and even email in text format (this is great for mobile users who read your blogs). There is much more you can do, too. I’m very impressed with the software and how easy it is to use. And it’s free! Pretty amazing. There is also a terrific forum set up by IZEA (it includes boards for all IZEA products and services, but also has a specific one geared for Zookoda users). The IZEA forum is one of the best on the Internet, too, so you can’t go wrong with that. Check it out. I’ll be gearing up with it soon, as I want to create a subscription service for my travel blog, first. So, stay tuned for that!

Posted in blogs, desktop publishing, email programs. Tags: IZEA, RSS, Zookoda. Comments Off »

A Day at the Zookoda

April 14, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

I have been hearing of this new email broadcast program developed by IZEA, and am given the opportunity to review it. It’s called Zookoda, and it is nifty online software that allows you to send your latest blog posts via email to subscribers. Use of Zookoda is free, so that a big plus. I decided to check it out, since I am seeing growing interest in my home improvement and travel blogs.

You need to register to use Zookoda. It’s like anything else, you need your name, your email, etc. Very quick and easy to sign up. After the verification email, I logged in to see a slew of possibilities before me.

The thing I wanted to do right away was tinker with an actual email and get a feel for how good it will look. Creating an email was extremely easy. I entered the name of the email title (I just called it “New York Renovator”) and put in my RSS feed. Zookoda took my Feedburner RSS url just fine. Everything was so easy!

Next, I took a look at the templates for email format. These were a little sparse, but they still were very nice. There were four pages of Blogger-type templates. This is wonderful if you use one of these for your Blogger blog! Your email will match your blog template. However, I don’t use Blogger templates, but I did think this template was stylish.

I tried out the Zookoda template, and liked it best of all.

If you are comfortable tinkering with html, Zookoda allows you to tweak the template. Or you can even use your own custom template. I liked the flexibility of this. You can also use some of their basic images, too. I don’t like “plain jane” type templates, so these little customizations won me over.

Next was customizing content. I could pick and choose what blog posts I wanted to send. This customization is extremely helpful if you want to send only your best posts or if you want to send an anthology. Zookoda also gives you the option to send emails on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is terrific!

Finally, Zookoda offers a way to manage everything. You can create mailing lists, manage the lists, view real-time click, unsubscribe, and other activities, and you can even email blog content in text format for your mobile readers. All this is pretty amazing for a price tag of FREE.

IZEA is a blossoming mover-and-shaker in the blogosphere. Zookoda, combined with their RealRank system, SocialSpark, and Blogger’s Choice Awards, is showing the real prowess of this company as they continue to churn out innovation after innovation. I predict they will soon be the next blogger powerhouse of the Internet.

So if you’ve got readers, check out Zookoda. If you want readers, you’ll definitely want Zookoda- this will draw them like flies to honeycomb. Zookoda is clean, classy, and simply a breeze to use and manage.