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This is Part 2 of a 3 part blog series:  How to Move from Feedburner to Mailchimp: Full Guide

STEP 3: Setting up your Blog (RSS Feed) to Email campaign in Mailchimp:

The Mailchimp blog also has a great tutorial on how to set up your RSS Feed to Email Campaign but I wanted to show you what I learned through the process.

1. Login to your Mailchimp account and Create your Campaign – select RSS-Driven Campaign from the dropdown list:
   
2. Add your RSS Feed URL.  Most of the time it is just your email address and then /feed at the end like this: http://cascadevalleydesigns.com/feed/  but if you are not sure just add your website address into the field and Mailchimp will try and find it for you.  If you have more specific needs for your blog emails such as sending a certain category or tag of your blog then find the URL to that particular tag or category and just add /feed to the end, like this: http://cascadevalleydesigns.com/tag/wordpress/feed/ .  If you want to “mashup” a couple of different blog categories such as your main blog and a custom video blog post you can click on chimpfeedr and combine a few feeds into one email – pretty slick indeed.  MailChimp also has some pretty good guides for bloggers and RSS feeds as well so check those out.
   

Recently I have been moving some of my clients over from Feedburner to Mailchimp to send out blog posts to subscribers through email.  That’s right Mailchimp is not only an Email Newsletter Manager but it also provides many services such as RSS Feeds to Email.  Before I tell you how to do this transition, lets review the reasons why this may be a good move for you:

Why move your Blog Subscriber list from Feedburner to Mailchimp?

1. Easily manage your subscriber list and use for other purposes such as sending out newsletters or announcements…not just your blog posts
2. Customize Customize Customize!  Isn’t it frustrating that you have very little control of how those blog emails look from Feedburner?  What if you wanted to add your latest product to the email footer?  Can’t do that in Feedburner but you can in Mailchimp!
3. Better scheduling:  You can send emails daily, weekly or even monthly in Mailchimp.  Feedburner only has the daily option.

Thanks to Ovaleye for hosting this online Back to Business Building Summit last week. It was a lot of fun being a part of the expert team of presenters. Here is my presentation in it’s entirety. After watching please head over to my Solutions page if you would like any help setting up your mobile website.

It was brought to my attention by a commenter on my Feedburner post that my email signup form was not working (Thanks Heidi @ Farm, Home & Garden!  I owe you big time.)  I did find it strange that no one was signing up to receive my posts by email but I just chalked it up to low interest.  As it turned out the plugin that I selected to integrate with my MailChimp list was simply doing nothing when the Submit button was clicked.  So I spent a good couple hours reviewing Wordpress plugins and testing them out before I found the perfect combination of tools to make it easy for readers to subscribe to future  blog posts and keep them coming back to my site.


Even though this post provides steps for Wordpress.org specific sites, the information is useful for all formats of websites as there are several tools out there that will perform the same results.