Blogging Myth: The "Newsletter" is Different and Special

I'm often asked whether FeedBlitz, as well as doing RSS to email, can cover a blogger's "newsletter" as well.  People who ask this usually do so for a couple of reasons:

1. They have a separate weekly or monthly newsletter list that they don't want to overwhelm with daily posts form the blog;
2. They like to write "special" content for the mailing list so it is not just a recap of blog posts.

So can you do this in FeedBlitz? Yes, via our Newsflash feature.

But you shouldn't! Here's why:

Everything is Bloggable

If you're writing special editorial for your mailings list in the form of a newsletter, there's no value in limiting your content to just the mailing list. If you wrote that editorial as a blog post, it would be archived on your blog, be indexed by search engines, and you'll influence a wider audience. Don't just mail it, blog it!

So what you write instead of a "newsletter" is a weekly wrap up on your blog - perhaps on weekends when things are more quiet. Consistently tag / categorize it "Weekly Wrap" or "Newsletter." @CopyBlogger does this each and every week; it's a great way to summarize your week in a single post and to add extra editorial if you want. If it's good enough for Brian Clark and his hundreds of thousands of subscribers, it's good enough for you!

How Not to Overwhelm your "Newsletter" Readers

Easy: Only mail them the weekly wrap up, as opposed to your "blog subscribers" who get everything.

Here's how.

1. Clone your blog's list in FeedBlitz via Newsletters - Settings - Clone.
2. Change the name of your new cloned list to "Weekly Newsletter" (or whatever you want to call it)
3. In Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - Tag Filters, set the include tag to be "weekly wrap" (or whatever you decide to categorize those summary posts with)
4. Import your "newsletter" subscribers to the list
5. Done!

All you do to create your "newsletter" is post a weekly summary (which also goes to your regular readers, as well as generating google juice and SEO points for your site). Then FeedBlitz mails it out to your "newsletter" list automatically - without sending them the other posts, thanks to the tag filter.

It's probably less work for you, so you save time producing the "newsletter" plus you get the SEO benefits and an online, indexable archive on your blog, none of which you'd generate doing your "newsletter" the old fashioned way.

So that's the myth of the newsletter debunked - your blog can generate it just as easily as you can any other RSS to email mailing. In fact, it's better all around, thanks to the SEO and online archive benefits.

Get FeedBlitz to Produce a Weekly Wrap Automatically with No Extra Effort

If you don't want to add extra editorial (i.e. no weekly wrap up blog post) but you do want to send a weekly summary to a group of subscribers, you can automate that in FeedBlitz too.  You create your clone, but instead of setting a tag filter, you set it to have a weekly schedule and abridge the post content.  Once a week FeedBlitz will generate a nice digest of your week's posts and mail it out to your "newsletter" subscribers - zero extra work for you. All you have to do is import the subscribers from your legacy newsletter service.

So don't let your existing legacy newsletter hold you back. Using your blog and FeedBlitz together to generate both newsletter and bog / mail subscriptions is easy, saves you time and better for your SEO.

   

What Sells Online? MSNBC has the secret.

Great article on MSNBC.com yesterday (Thursday) about how, in the current economy, companies are rediscovering the benefits of the email newsletter. Here's the sub-heading:

"They're not the newest fad, but these daily digests sent via e-mail can generate some much needed ad revenue when there's not much of it to go around."

You betcha! And, by the way, why does it work? Keep reading the article and below the fold they get to the crux: Engagement. Here's another great paragraph, my emphasis added:

"It may sound odd that space on a low-tech newsletter could be so desirable in an age of mass-market blogs, when young people increasingly rely on instant messaging, texts, and such sites as Twitter and Facebook instead of e-mail. But remember that signing up for and opening an e-mail newsletter is a much bigger commitment than passively clicking on a link that takes you to a blog post. Publishers can see how many people open an e-mail, how long they read it, and how many friends they forward it to. Advertisers eat up that kind of engagement, because it's different, tangible, and more likely to result in an action such as making a purchase."

Now, what's the easiest way to automatically generate a fully branded, customizable daily email newsletter from your site? FeedBlitz of course!

Read the full article here. HT: Tom Evslin for the link.