Send in the Clones

Today's new feature enables publishers to make an exact copy, or clone, of an existing syndication*

* Subscribers are not moved except for you, the publisher, nor are any premium settings**
** Well, ok, if you're a Pro Plus account using Master Template, clones will be formatted using the Master Template.

Why is this useful? Because FeedBlitz works really hard to stop any one publisher from publishing the same feed twice; otherwise things can get pretty confusing for publishers and subscribers alike. You basically can't publish the same content in the same account, and normally that's just fine.

But there are times when deliberately creating a copy is not only handy, it's essential. Here are two examples.

Enabling Multiple Delivery Schedules

We have several publishers who want to publish a real time (Turbo Express), daily (standard) and weekly (Turbo) version of the same feed. Until today, it wasn't possible to do that using a single feed in a single account.

Cloning (a new option on your syndication's popup Action sub-menu at www.feedblitz.com/f?lists ) solves this problem. You syndicate the feed as per normal (or use an existing syndication), and then clone it for (say) the Express version, and then clone it again for the weekly. Sign up for Turbo for each (or, at this point, the Turbo Plus flat rate upgrade), edit the description in FeedBlitz slightly to tell them apart, and you're done.

List Segmentation

Cloning is also really useful for list segmentation. Using tags or categories when you post, you can create multiple predefined email subscriptions. Take your syndication, add the "widgets" tag and voila! A widgets-only email subscription. Clone it, change the tag to "Sprockets" and bam! An email newsletter just for your sprocket buyers. Clone it again, change the tag filters to "My music" and bingo! From the same source, same feed, subscribers can now sign up to hear your opinions on new music.

So you can now offer distinct email subscriptions and newsletters on multiple topics from a single source, even if your underlying blogging platform or RSS service doesn't natively do that for you. If you're a power user, cloning and filtering can become one of your most valuable techniques.

Pulling it all together

Having cloned your feeds and finessed the filtering, delivery schedules - or both - you can offer the usual individual signup forms, or provide a neat a la carte option using this technique.