Comments on: Do you Maintain Email Newsletter Lists?

By: Joe Freudenthal

Joe Freudenthal — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:56:36 +0000

I do. I use Constant Contact. I felt that many of my “target market” (baby boomers) readers would feel more comfortable with a weekly email from me that basically is the blog post in a nice postcard email template. The reports CC generates are great also.

Http://www.BoomTips.com Weekly Wisdom for Baby Boomers

By: Dawud

Dawud — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:22:36 +0000

Yes, I do. Mainly for two reasons.

First, I’m a bit new to blogging and don’t yet have readership levels or RSS subscription numbers to stop my newsletter. And even once my readership and subscriptions numbers are higher, I might not stop my newsletter as it most reaches a non-blogging market right now.

Second reason is the end of the first…My newsletter reaches people who don’t normally blog – yet. I’m actually working to change that, but it’s just beginning. Since my past audience is mostly non-bloggers, I use my newsletter to stay in touch with them.

By: HART (1-800-HART)

HART (1-800-HART) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 09:03:21 +0000

I’m quite slow collecting RSS subscribers for my blogs, yet alone collecting Email subscribers .. but I try collecting them anyway using Feedburner for both – Maybe one day ..

I’ve been thinking about sending out a newsletter for the emensely small subscriber base that I have now – to practice .. but, then I think that I should spend the time blogging more and concentrate on network development and traffic building which, could possibly help in obtaining a bigger audience to add to any future subscriber base.

By: Mallory

Mallory — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 04:01:47 +0000

A good percentage of my RSS subscribers read via Feedburner’s email subscriptions. I don’t currently do a separate email newsletter though I’ve been thinking about it for awhile now. I can’t decide whether it’s worth the extra time and trouble, as I’d like to give the newsletter content that is different from what’s on my blog…I get annoyed by email newsletters that are exact an rehashing of what I’ve already read via RSS during the past week. I subscribe to an RSS feed AND a newsletter because I want more and not just a repeat of the same. I’d like do create this for my own blog, I just need to find the time.

By: Adrian Bruce

Adrian Bruce — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:07:21 +0000

Zookoda has some great features and it pretty much looks after itself. It allows people to opt into your newsletter and then automatically sends a verification email to the subscriber ‘just to be sure’ :)

You can configure it so that it waits till you have a certain number of posts and then it automatically sends out your posts.

Zookoda also has a great stats section where you can see you is opening your messages but you can also see who is forwarding messages. One of my readers forwarded my newsletter to 64 friends. This has got to be good for increasing traffic.

In the end, the majority or my readers are yet to embrace RSS so the newsletter is an excellent way to keep my loyal fans up to date.

Best of all Zookoda is free!

cheers

Adrian Bruce
http://www.adrianbruce.com
http://teacher-toolbox.blogspot.com

By: LennyP

LennyP — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:42:25 +0000

I don’t email my readers. I feel most people already recieve far too much email and don’t need me adding to the problem.

By: Hannes Johnson

Hannes Johnson — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:11:34 +0000

Well, I don’t have so much of a newsletter (yet). But people can sign up to get an e-mail message whenever there is a new post on my blog.

I think it’s a good idea since not everybody uses an RSS reader.

It looks like the majority of my subscribers click the link in the e-mail message and read my blog.

By: Jeffrey Kishner

Jeffrey Kishner — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:39:55 +0000

As an astrologer, I use a newsletter to inform subscribers of my main blog posts, as well as offer information about my services. Subscribers have an incentive to join because they qualify for discounts on my services. Additionally, I suspect the majority of my audience is not RSS-savvy, so the newsletter feels more familiar to them. I have many more newsletter subscribers than I do feed subscribers.

I use Constant Contact, which gives me useful information on click-through rates on the links in my emails. This helps me gauge what my readers are most interested in.

By: Deb Ng

Deb Ng — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:35:12 +0000

Because of the nature of my blog, I offer an email service which will allow visitors to be alerted to updates. I wondered recently if this was a good idea because people can always subscribe through the feeds. I got my answer last weekend when I inadvertently deleted my mailing list.

The mailing list had over 300 subscribers. 300 hundred people who visited my blog every day, thanks to the link in the email address. After I deleted the list, traffic not only went down but so did revenue.

Needless to say, I’m working on getting back my subscribers.

By: Adnan

Adnan — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:04:44 +0000

I use Feedblitz like quite a few other people, as its a quick and easy way of flirting my posts to those who don’t know how, or can’t be bothered to sign up via RSS.

However, I don’t own a “proper” newsletter, and by that I mean one which I personally update and create. I would like to however as I think they can be invaluable to building up reputation and can be an awesome form of monetization.

On the flip side, there are so many negative comments about “internet marketers” that people these days might be prejudiced about those who have newsletter subscriptions. I guess its down to whether you pepper your subscribers with affiliate link downloads everyday!

By: Laura Gibbs

Laura Gibbs — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:03:42 +0000

The readers of my blog are mostly high school teachers, many of whom do not use RSS (yet….). The Feedburner email subscription was a godsend for me. The email formatting options available are GREAT, and I am able to control the time of day the email goes out.

My email readers outnumber my RSS subscribers about 10 to 1.

By: Vahid Chaychi

Vahid Chaychi — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:58:35 +0000

When you can have a big help by spending a very low amount of money or even for free why you ignore it?

I have newsletter for my weblogs and Aweber sends the daily updates to subscribers automatically and also I can send other messages to them. I love it.

By: Mike Silversides

Mike Silversides — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:40:54 +0000

We started out with a newsletter to let people know when we had new craft activities. When we started a blog and RSS feed over a year ago I thought a large portion of our email subscribers would move over. But to our surprise over the last year our newsletter can gone from about 20,000 to over 30,000 subscribers, whereas Feedburner says our RSS feed currently averages about 50 readers per day.

Even mentioning it a couple of times in our newsletter hasn’t prompted conversions. I think it’s just in the nature of our subscribers, they’d rather get the once a month email than figure out what blog reader they need. If your readers are also bloggers, you probably won’t see the disparity that we have. But if you draw a lot of search engine traffic to your site you should offer an email newsletter to encourage them to come back.

By: Raghu

Raghu — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:40:10 +0000

I was not using subscription lists on my blog site till today. I have just added one today.

However, my question was is adding newsletter lists a way to engage with a existing reader base or to build a reader base ?

By: Cassie

Cassie — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:04:07 +0000

I definitely do! I think that having a list of subscribers is important if you want to earn money online.

I’ve been using Aweber as an autoresponder and as a regular newsletter service. I’ve tried Zookoda and phpList in the past and I decided that spending a little money on Aweber was well worth it.

I have an autoresponder for my mini-courses and a newsletter to send subscribers notices about new posts or exclusive tips. Aweber also has an RSS feature that allows you to automatically send out mailings when you have a new post on your blog.

You know what they say, “The money is in the list”.

By: John Wesley

John Wesley — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:30:37 +0000

Just using Feedblitz so at this point. Though I’ve thought about doing something with zookoda.

By: Laurie Harshbarger

Laurie Harshbarger — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:20:02 +0000

In my day job I’m responsible for producing and distributing 4 monthly e-newsletters for the metal fabricating industry. We started the oldest newsletter in 2001 and just last year added a blog to our line up. The bulk of our subscribers also subscribe to our print publications. The rest find us through recommendations from colleagues (forward to a friend) or through online searches. We do a lot of cross marketing among our various publications, and it’s worked well for us. Our combined monthly newsletter circulation is over 33,000. Our blog has recorded monthly page views fluctuating between 40,000 and 73,000.

One trend we have seen that made me decide not to produce an email newsletter for my personal site and blog is the fact that fewer of our opt-in subscribers are actually opening our emails. More subscribers are relying on feeds. Our open rate runs between 28-30% each month, which I’m told is pretty good; however, our new blog has already surpassed our newsletters in monthly readership. At this point, I can’t justify the time and expense of producing and delivering an email newsletter. Figuring out how to monetize my blog and my feeds is my biggest challenge.

By: rob

rob — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:09:02 +0000

my philosophy is the the blog captures everything…it’s the archive. occasionally we’ll email to email subscribers one of the posts with full text and photos. once a month we create a new printed letter, usually with the ‘best of’ from the previous month on the blog, or a new story or two that we snail mail. however, that newsletter goes on the blog also. we say that we’ll print out our emails and mail it to people if they want it! ;-)

By: jhay

jhay — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:07:38 +0000

Not at this moment. Traffic and readership levels are still low but steadily growing. When the right time comes, I’ll definitely put out a newsletter for my blog.

By: Martin Neumann

Martin Neumann — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:59:59 +0000

I definitely use email – what was it: only 2% of people know/use rss.

Zookoda is my choice of email services – very clean interface and easy to learn.

I like to have my newsletter placed on my website and simply send out an email to my subscriber base with the link to it. People like short emails, to the point and having your newsletter on your website is good for seo.

I’m also a heavy AWeber user – as my business is in my list.