Free Email Campaign Archives: Better SEO, Zero Setup

Every active list on FeedBlitz now has an online archive - free, branded, ready for use, for all emails sent to a publisher's entire list since June 1st, 2010. 

No setup, no extra charge, all created and managed automatically. Neat! Here's the scoop:

Archive Benefits

• Good for your SEO (see below);
• Good for you - you can always reference a back issue online and share with a subscriber, reader or your social networks;
• Good for your subscribers - they can always use their browsers to read your mailings if they need to, as well as review back copies.

What's in the Email Campaign Mailing Archive

Archives contain copies of emails sent to your entire list since June 1st 2010 as they were sent to that list, with some minor tweaks appropriate for web viewing. So you already have up to five months' worth of archives online already.

There's also a branded archive index that uses your current email template. You can see recent mailings plus easily drill into previous months mailings. See these examples for how it works:

• Fractals of Change
• Seth's Blog
• Money Saving Mom

You can see your own branded public archive by going to Newsletters - Mailings - Archives (which shows you the private archive) and clicking the "public archives" link.

Public, Private and Personal Archives

Each list's archive is accessible in three different ways. Remember, too, that archives are created automatically - there's nothing you need to do to take advantage of this feature. It's up and running already, all the way back to June 1st 2010.

1) The public archive is available from the archives.feedblitz.com server; there are links to the public archive for your mailings in the footer of every mail sent since last Friday (October 29th).  Now, not all mailings sent are shown in the public archive. Mailings are included if they are sent to the whole list (i.e. a scheduled mailing, or an on-demand / newsflash sent without segmentation). Mailings sent to segments are not included here because you don't want test mails or segment-specific special offers to be made visible to everyone.

Public archives include subscription links on their index pages to encourage list growth. Public archive index pages are also branded using your currently active template for brand reinforcement; archives of individual mailings are shown using the formatting they were sent with at the time they were sent.

2) The private archive is available to logged-in list owners from the FeedBlitz site at Newsletters - Mailings - Archives. You can also click there directly using the new "Archive" link for your list in the list's "blue box" when you first click the Newsletters tab. You can view all the mailings sent to your list here, including mailings sent to segments. This page also shows you the link to the public archive which you can choose to place on your blog, site or mailing template.

3) The personal archive is specific to each subscriber and shows them mailings they received.  A cool feature is that back issues of archives are displayed to the user based on who they are logged in as, allowing them to view personalized archives as if they'd received them from you, even if they weren't on your list at the time.

Archiving Restrictions

If you delete a list its archives will become unavailable, just like online previews and subscription forms. An error message will be shown instead.

Archives are also not created for standalone subscriptions (i.e. an email subscription created by the subscriber themselves without a link to a FeedBlitz publisher). For these mailings there is no link or reference in the mail to archives. They're just not there.

Archives are also not created if an email is not sent. For example, if you send a mailing to a segment and none of your subscribers match that segment criteria then no emails are sent, nor is a corresponding archive created.

SEO Benefits

These pages all link back to your main blog and site; they therefore count as inbound links and will help you with your SEO activities. Where you have link tracking enabled, we use a "301" permanent redirect on these links, correctly identifying your page as the "canonical source" (i.e. the original source) of the content, and therefore earning you the Google juice, not us. As the search bots start to discover and traverse the archive index you'll see incrementally more benefit.  That said, if you have enabled the NOINDEX option for your list, the archives will be marked as NOINDEX too.

Archives in Your Mailings

As well as the "View Archive" link in the footer of every list mailing, as of tonight all mailings that don't use custom templates will also have a "Click here to view this mailing online" message at the top, linking to the subscriber's personal archive for that mailing. This allows subscribers on platforms that don't render HTML mail well, or where the mail is truncated by their provider or app, to quickly click through to the full content.

For users with custom templates, a new template tag has been added for use in the advanced template editor: <$BlogViewOnline$> - it substitutes in the generic archive index URL or a link to the recipient's personal archive depending on the context.  I've updated the "FeedBlitz News" blog template to use the tag at the start of the mailing; you should see it at the top if you get this via email.

No Hassle, Zero Setup, Fully Branded Email Campaign Archives

Available now for all FeedBlitz publishers, regardless of whether you are a premium customer or using our ad-funded services. Even better value for FeedBlitz publishers and their readers.

If you're not already using FeedBlitz, start a trial today!