Which newsletters do you read? (a serious question)

I asked myself this very question, prior to making this reply. It is 1. A daily from green company Ideal Bite. That is the only one i subscribe to AND READ.

Aside from that i also subscribe to a few RSS email newsletters from blogger friends of mine. This number is less than 5.

What software do you use to send out your newsletter? What do you use to manage your list? Any suggestions?

Here’s my main thoughts on newsletters. Many blogs/sites feel that sending out emails, even cute little personalized ones with your name @ the top, will really help develop readership loyalty, engagement, trust, etc. and I honestly believe that this is no longer true. Every single day i open up my 3 email accounts and find that the majority of my emails, 80%, are what I consider spam. Many blogs that I follow that send me emails I consider spam. This is unfortunate because many people who have the best of intentions with their emails are not receiving the desired results.

A newsletter on the other hand is an entirely different idea presented in a similar context that can greatly increase loyalty, engagement, trust, etc because 1. it isn’t as recent or informal as an email. It shows hard work and dedication and the addition of a newsletter helps to validate the legitimacy of the site. Great explanations on the positive effects of a newsletter. I’d personally like to see more of these, even if on a monthly basis, from many of the blogs that I read.

Dilip Shaw
http://www.dilipshaw.com/

To that effect, I’m pretty surprised at the lack of blog to email services out there apart from the obvious candidates like feedburner and feedblitz.

Aweber is obviously one of the best solutions, especially for a site like yours which needs to reach out to a formidable amount of subscribers. For the little guy however, Aweber might not be such a practical or cost effective solution.

I send out a weekly/bi-weekly, non automatic newsletter (i.e. I compose it myself) using Feedburner. Feedburner is set to check for daily updates on on a particular category, rather than on my universal blog RSS. When I want to send a newsletter, I write a normal post (HTML or plain text, its up to me) and assign it that particular category. Feedburner will then update and send that single post out to all of my subscribers.

This is by far the easiest free solution I have found so far and while it doesn’t have the functionality of Aweber, it works for me at the moment. I can even add Feedburner adsense.