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09.18.07
Automating Blog & Newsletter Delivery
 By
Mike Moran
If you struggle with how to reach your customers with e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds, you're not alone.
I started out several years ago with a monthly e-mail newsletter and later added a blog that has built up to a daily posting. I've struggled with how to provide this information to subscribers without duplication using the delivery method that they want. Today, I will share what I am doing-it might help you think through your own content delivery strategy.
I'm cheap, so I started out using the list server mechanism that comes bundled with my Web hosting. It's kind of an ugly format, however, so it forced my customers to get newsletter excerpts in plain text.
And my wife and I had more work to do, originally writing a Perl script to allow folks to sign up, manually processing unsubscribes, and then having to figure what to do if something went wrong with the list server (like when we went on vacation last month and my service provider decided to upgrade the list server and sent out a cryptic message to every subscriber on the list.)
In the meantime, I also have my blog going. It seemed silly for the folks using RSS to subscribe to the blog not to see the newsletter, so I started posting blog entries each month pointing to the newsletter. But it also seemed silly to restrict the blog subscriptions to those that use feed readers-might not some newsletter subscribers want a daily e-mail instead of a monthly e-mail?
For a long time, I didn't know what to do, but I finally decided to use FeedBlitz to consolidate all my feed deliveries for e-mail and to offer all my newsletters as full-fledged blog entries. So, if you look at this blog post on my Web site, you'll find that you can subscribe either to the feed or to a daily e-mail, now powered by FeedBlitz.
I've been planning to do this for a few months, but finally got to it over the weekend. When I went to make the switchover, I noticed that FeedBlitz was to begin incorporating ads into their e-mails, but I went ahead and switched anyway.
And I am shutting down the list server, too. Once a month, I will mark a blog entry as my monthly newsletter (I've established a newsletter category) and that entry will be shipped as e-mail to the subscribers of the monthly newsletter.
So daily blog subscribers can stick with their regular RSS feed or they can change to e-mail delivery if they prefer. Monthly
newsletter subscribers can continue to get a monthly e-mail, or they can switch to a daily e-mail or RSS feed if they decide they want more.
I don't know if this will satisfy everyone, so let me know if you think I am missing something. And let me know if you have more questions on how I did this-if this kind of information is helpful to other marketers, that's even better.
Comments
About the Author:
Copyright Mike Moran
Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.
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