Newsletters VS RSS Feeds

Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major change in the way you

look at the purpose of your newsletter

My opinion is that some publishers, and most especially email publishers,

They are the marketers first and the publishers second. That means they see sales as

the primary purpose of publishing an ezine or newsletter. We all hope that our

publications will achieve that goal, but it should not be the primary purpose of

its publication. Instead, your post should focus on providing content from

the highest quality that establishes your credibility. You do that showing

your readers that you know your things, that you are, I dare to use the word, a

expert – a true expert – in his field.

This means that you should write as much as possible. If I

realize that writing articles is hard work and time consuming. That’s why we

publishers use third party articles. but do not post any article that

receive. Use a little discrimination. Use only items that complement yours

content, that is appropriate to the focus of your own newsletter. And whatever

it does, don’t just post the article as is. Write a short introduction that

Give your readers their own thoughts on the article. Remember you want

establish your reputation, your credibility, not someone else’s.

The received wisdom is that newsletters should be used to promote your own

products and services. If you look at the vast majority of email newsletters,

that’s exactly what editors seem to think is the purpose of their

Newsletter. In most, including many of the more popular newsletters,

You can hardly find the content among all the advertisements. these editors seem

You feel the need to shove your advertising in your face. However, let’s see

what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper.

Most newspapers do not crowd every page of their publications with so many advertisements.

you can’t find the items. Most of the good guys tend to have a

section for advertising. And the ads that appear in the content sections are

presented in such a way as not to interfere with the presentation of the

news. How long do you think your local newspaper will keep its subscribers if

Overloaded the news pages with ads? It’s time for online publishers to change

way we think. We need to move away from the newsletter as an advertising vehicle.

model and switch to a newsletter template as a vehicle for quality content. Effective

Direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major change in the way the

design of your newsletter.

Email publishers tend to publish discreet editions of their newsletters in a

regular schedule. The most common schedule is once a week. Each number contains

all the information that the editor wants to communicate to his

subscribers that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format,

beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as delivery

system.

The first drawback is the length. With a couple of items and a half dozen or

so classified ads, along with the usual information such as welcome,

disclaimers required with email, unsubscribe information, etc., which does

for a fairly long message. Most internet users just don’t read messages from it

long.

Yes, you could send short messages more often, but that only aggravates

the problems associated with email delivery exponentially. The more often

send an email to your subscribers, they are more likely to close it due to

a spam complaint.

By using a weblog type of format, you don’t make any inconspicuous problems. Rather you publish

an article or its advertising or editorial on any given day. Say in

On Monday, you post an article about RSS posting, then on Tuesday you post a

editorial about the upcoming elections, on Wednesday you publish a couple of

classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article about Christmas advertising and in

On Friday you post a few more announcements. Let’s say this is the same content you would use

have published in a discreet edition, except for the disclaimers and the masthead

– the things at the top that identify your newsletter, it is not necessary

post the masthead because it’s always there on your blog. You do not need

to include all email disclaimers because you are not using email. Things

such as advertisements and welcome messages can be integrated into the

overall design of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Someone

go to your blog page you will see them every time they visit.

Yes, even if you are using RSS as your delivery system for your

newsletter, your newsletter will have an HTML page and your readers

will visit each time they read an entire article in your newsletter.

You see, the RSS feed will only carry the title as a link and the first

Paragraph or two of your article, say the article about RSS posting. Each element

they will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will be kept until

fifteen items, the last fifteen items you have posted. Any good RSS publishing system

will set all of this up for you and make any necessary encoding changes. As usual

you publish your article in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you.

Doing it all manually is not effective or efficient, so I suggest you don’t

what! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier and not more difficult. More about these

systems later.

With the best publishing systems, you don’t even have to know a lot of HTML.

because they will allow you to publish your article as text and will format the

line breaks for you. As long as you put a double break at the end of each

paragraph of text, your article will look good. You can add bold or italic or

underline as needed. But, the better your HTML skills, the more creative you will be.

it can be in how your posts will look.

Also, if you have the necessary experience and tools, you can add graphics,

Flash, audio, video, or whatever else you want to animate your pages. Do not add

executable files (EXE) to your posts. That creates all kinds of problems for

its readers and is prohibited by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also if

add multimedia to your newsletter, I highly recommend that you do so in a way that

that your reader can choose to see it or not. It is not only that the courteous

what to do, but it will also prevent you from blocking the

computer. Although most people have pretty fancy computers these days,

there are still people who may not or may not want to see these

file types. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.

Doing daily posts, which I consider to be the ideal schedule, can seem like a lot more

work, but in reality and once you learn to do it, it really is less time

consume to do a large number a week. Also, many email editors

went back to making text-based newsletters to bypass some of the

email that is happening. HTML email is often blocked or HTML is disabled

unless you specifically ask to see it.

Text newsletters are boring and boring. The Internet is a visual medium in the first place and

principal. Yes, it is for content streaming, but that content has to be

visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing attractive about long text.

message using unimaginative character rows like #, @, * or others to test

to add a little zest to all that text. If you want to keep your readers, yes,

provide them with a lot of great content, but also present that content in a way

that captures your imagination.

Lastly, there is a very strong marketing reason to use a blog type of

Format. I will only touch it briefly here and explain it in detail in my next

Blog about marketing with RSS.

You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get

new people to see your newsletter, right? That means bringing traffic to your

newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do this is to get the search

engines like Google to track your newsletter every time you add a new item to

your weblog. What would you say if I told you that there is a marketing tool that

could you do that? It’s called pinging weblogs.com … more on that in my next blog!