There’s been a lot of buzz lately around the interwebs, the blogosphere, and even the MailChimp office about the state of FeedBurner. But let’s back up. In June of last year, it was quietly announced that the FeedBurner API would be deprecated with no scheduled date for shut down. The date was later updated to October of this year. And then in July, there were a couple mysterious tweets, which led to a lot of speculation. And blog posts. And then obviously more tweets.

But what does this mean? Is Google, gulp, shuttering FeedBurner as we know it?

To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve scoured the web, done my research, and I’m scratching my head with the rest of you. The only confirmed fact is that (NERD ALERT) the API is shutting down in a couple weeks. For you non-nerds and semi-nerds, nothing else is official. In fact, everything else is speculation, so I won’t try to guess what’s going to happen. Plus, it wouldn’t be very nice of Google to shut down a product that so many people, blogs, and businesses rely on without notice, would it? But one thing’s certain: it’s never a bad idea to know your options and be prepared. You know, just in case.

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If you’re a blogger, the business or blog question can be like the chicken and the egg­–which came first? Whether your blog is your business, you run a business through your blog, or you blog for your business, you can incorporate both into your regular MailChimp campaigns. After all, if someone’s reading your newsletter, they’ll probably be interested in following your blog too.

The easiest way to keep your customers up to date on what’s going on behind the scenes is to add your blog’s RSS feed to your template using Merge Tags. One option is to use a basic FEED tag, which will pull in certain pre-determined elements from your RSS feed, depending on which variables you include.

Here’s an example using the MailChimp blog. I want to include the last three posts as links only:

*|FEED:http://blog.mailchimp.com/feed/ [$count=3, $content=titles]|*

And this is what it looks like once it is populated with our blog content:

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If you’re a blogger, you probably feel like there’s barely enough time in the day to update your blog, let alone think about sending an email newsletter. But some of your readers might prefer to get your posts in their inbox instead of visiting your site every day or subscribing to your feed. MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email tool simplifies that process, so you can publish your content once on the blog, and we’ll automatically send it to your newsletter subscribers as often as you’d like.

RSS-to-Email was tailor-made for busy bloggers. It fills in the holes left by just including a “follow by RSS” option and puts you in more frequent contact with your readers. You don’t even have to write new content for your newsletters, it all comes directly from the carefully crafted blog updates you’re already posting. Plus, you get a ton of customization options built right in. All you need is an RSS URL and a MailChimp account. Want to include more than one RSS feed? Read this article before you set up your campaign.

You don’t have to send your loyal followers a barrage of emails. You have the power to decide how often the RSS campaigns go out–daily, weekly, or monthly. And a campaign will only go out if there’s a new post on your blog. You can choose what time you prefer to send your newsletters, too. So if you write a weekend city guide, you might want to send your campaigns on Fridays at 8am, when readers are daydreaming about their weekend plans. Or maybe you post one recipe a day to your cooking blog, so daily at noon might be more logical.

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