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Email Newsletters vs. Blogs vs. RSS

15 Responses (Add) | Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 10:44pm

Scott Allen posted this question on LinkedIn the other day – but I wondered if any of you had answers for him?

What’s the best way to build an e-mail newsletter from a blog?

Once my coauthor and I started blogging, we quit doing our regular e-mail newsletter — it was just too much of a hassle to maintain on top of our blogging efforts. However, we also know that we lost some people in the process who aren’t full up on blogging.

I’d really like to be able to better support people who are more comfortable with e-mail, but build the content from my blog. I don’t want to send people every post, or even a complete daily digest. Ideally, I would like a tool that every time I was ready to put together a newsletter, it would give me a picklist of the posts from my blog, I would choose 3, 5, 10, whatever, and then give a personal intro for the whole newsletter.

Does anything like this exist? What’s even close that I might look at?

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15 Comments

The Chris Pirillo Show

April 2nd, 2007
at 8:08am

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pmeme - tracking people making news - following people in the blogosphere

April 2nd, 2007
at 6:11am

Email Newsletters vs. Blogs vs. RSS (Chris Pirillo)

Steven Hodson

April 2nd, 2007
at 12:00am

If they are using a Wordpress installation I know I read somewhere not to long ago about a plugin that would let you manage a newsletter right from your Wordpress Admin area.

oliverg

April 2nd, 2007
at 2:39am

I use rss2mail servives like rmail.com and ehm, I forget the other one. aside from some ISo/UTF issues this works fine.

and If you want to mail only some of the Messages you just subscribe to a certain tag.

I set the Mailnglist to forward either
a) max once a day
b) if 50/25 kB are full.

AFAIK there are allso rss2mail php-scripts around.

What you do NOT get is a beautifilly styled optimizes RSS-Feed, but you do get people who come from the Newsletter…

Dean Collins

April 2nd, 2007
at 6:17am

Yeh it’s called Cut & Paste :)

Stop being so lazy, it would take like 10 minutes to cut and paste 4 of your blog posts each month and them email them off to the whitelist.

Probably the best thing you could do is to change the ‘format’ of your email so people understand they are reading unedited blog posts via email and then they might even think…hmm what else am i missing and check out your feed.

Cheers,
Dean

Andy Brudtkuhl

April 2nd, 2007
at 7:23am

I’ve had clients request a solution for this but I don’t think one exists. The closest I’ve found are tools like feedblitz that essentially allow people to subscribe to rss feeds via email.

Phil Gomes

April 2nd, 2007
at 9:46am

My fiancee and I use TypePad + Feedburner + FeedBlitz + del.icio.us to generate a daily family email newsletter. It’s been working pretty well and, besides, it beats some relatives’ method of FORWARDING EVERY DAMN BIT OF URBAN LEGEND EVER PUBLISHED.

Chris Webb

April 2nd, 2007
at 1:15pm

The WordPress plugin Steven mentioned is likely ShiftThis. I have not used it personally, but it looks fairly robust. The demo they provide looks like it offers the features Scott was requesting.

Mario Sundar

April 2nd, 2007
at 7:46pm

As Andy mentions, isn’t Feedblitz the easy solution.

I’ve been contemplating feedblitz for my own blog. Any drawbacks to using it?

Phil Hollows

April 2nd, 2007
at 10:58pm

Using services like FeedBlitz your blog becomes your newsletter. FeedBlitz has options such as using tags to filter posts in our out, allowing you to be selective about which articles go by mail and which are strictly for the web. Plus lots of tracking, reports, widgets, OPML … For a modest fee you can apply your own graphics, layout and styling to the output as well. http://www.feedblitz.com

Phil

Phil Hollows

April 2nd, 2007
at 11:00pm

… and I forgot to mention, one of our features is “On Demand” which lets you manually pick the posts to include from the contents of your feed as part of the delivery, which is exactly what you want (but, fair disclosure, that is a premium service). A related capability is to send a non-blog broadcast to your subscribers.

Cathy Jenkins

April 3rd, 2007
at 3:39am

Newsletter or blog. I feel there is a need to consider which format would deliver a high return on investment (ROI).

A blog would more likely come through as up-to-date and provides the opportunity for others to provide comments. It also makes life easy as your authors could write simple pages as required.

A newsletter is what people are used to.

Personally I feel inclined that sometimes people need to be pushed towards what’s better for them. Think of the costs, value and benefits.

Now getting back to your question. I used to work at a large NGO which I wont name but I can reveal they used phplist for their newsletters and they generated this newsletter based on articles people had written in their web site. Everything was opensource. They just did some php to accomplish what they required. They’ve been very successful.