First things first, I like this feature that Aweber offers. I like that you can customize the emails that go out – meaning your notifications get have a real eye-catching design and you can add text modify the subject lines even customize it for each subscriber.

Before moving on, allow me to backup a little bit for those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about. Blog Broadcast is a feature built into Aweber accounts where you can add any RSS feed (assumption – your blog’s feed) to the list. It will send an email to your email newsletter subscribers the moment there is a fresh post on your blog. It is similar to FeedBurner’s Email Subscriptions – only better 😉

It works great but I wanted to share two little tips.

1. When you first enable a feed, make sure you un-check the box that says “Send automatically”. If you don’t, and your feed has 10  items in it, Aweber will send them all the day you add the feed. Leave the box un-checked for a few hours, even a day so it has time to load and retrieve the feed. Once the feed is retrieved, it will queue all the items in your feed (depending how you set it up) in your pending queue.

   When you first log in to Aweber, you’ll see a list of ‘pending’ emails. These are messages that are awaiting your approval. When you add a new feed plus not send it automatically, you’ll see a few there. Queue the ones you want to send and delete the rest.

2. After you’ve done that, then you go back to the Blog Broadcast settings and check the “Send automatically” box. This tells Aweber you are ready to let it take over and send out the email immediately when a new post is published. If you don’t do this then emails won’t send but will end up in your pending queue.
   

I’ve had multiple emails sent out to people a few times just because I wasn’t aware or wasn’t paying attention to this. Hope this post will save you some embarrassment.