What is a Content Subscription?

How do you integrate RSS and Email subscription tools to communicate with your blog community? Do you provide exclusive content through either or both channels?

• Most bloggers offer both RSS and Email subscription options. Since we're likely to have both types of subscribers, what are the best practices to integrate the use of these different tools? Jan 17 11:  I'm updating this question to expand on the use of RSS vs. Email channels to distribute exclusive content, which is a key element of the integration question.  Some bloggers provide exclusive content for email subscribers only, but many other prominent bloggers also post their email/newsletter content on their blog. In those cases, bloggers are using RSS and Email simply as different channels to deliver the same content, a much different proposition than promoting your email subscriber list by offering exclusive content. What's your experience?

• Answer:

  Just use Google Feedburner to offer both for free. If you notice that you have a lot of email subscribers, upgrade to Mailchimp or Aweber. If you have too many RSS subscribers and you want to build a quality mailing list, start a newsletter offering a second stream of content. I use feedburner for my blog, and 90% of my users are RSS. I also run a separate mailing list where I offer non-blog content.