Fri 18 Jan 2008
RSS, Blogs and Newsletters
Posted by Mark White, Blog Consultant in Marketing with Blogs , RSS Information , Blogging News
The RSS Feed is one of those key underlying technologies in a blog that can do a huge number of things for us and yet most of us, myself included, are still only scratching the surface with it.
Its main use is of course to give your readers a secure and immediate way of receiving your latest posts by subscribing to your RSS feed through an RSS Reader. Nevertheless, with so many internet users still unfamiliar with RSS in spite of its many benefits, I always recommend also offering the option of subscribing to the RSS feed via email as well.
The easiest way to offer this is by using a third party supplier. Feedburner, for example, provides you with the code to create a basic sign up form on your blog and then visitors can use to subscribe to receiving your blog updates automatically via email. A similar service is provided by Feedblitz and Zookoda.
Normally, you receive these on a daily basis as posts are published. However, there is another provider, Aweber, which gives you the option to take that one step further and effectively create a newsletter with your posts.
Aweber is probably best known as an autoresponder and email service provider along the lines of Constant Contact and Vertical Response. However, last year, they also launched a service called Blog Broadcast which essentially delivers your blog posts via email but also offers other features in as well. As you would expect from a company which specialises in email and newsletter delivery, this is includes a range of templates to control the look of the emails sent out, personalisation of aspects of the message and title, and tracking of links or ads.
In addition, as of this week, they have added a scheduling feature to the service. This means that you can now use the service to send out your posts on a schedule which suits you and your readers rather than one decided by the software. For example, you can now automatically send your readers a newsletter every week or every month by email with all of your posts. A great way to use emails to help support your blog.
Granted this is not a free service but the additional benefits that this gives you are certainly worthwhile and particularly if you also use the other services it offers. For example, I use the autoresponder to deliver my Business Blogging eCourse and you can also use the email broadcast system to send other ezines or general communication to your readers.
So, if you want to do more than simply send out each post as you make it or you’re looking for an automated way to publish a newsletter to your list of readers, then this might well be worth looking at.















Once again the time has come to put the keyboard to one side for a few days so this will be my last post before Christmas and for a few days - family duties call! I will, however, be posting between Christmas and the New Year and planning my own blogging ahead in 2008 to try to see where blogging and social media will be fitting into the business fabric over the next 12 months.
To say that I’m not a fan of Blogger is probably understating things a bit - when it comes to business blogs, their system is certainly way down the list of blogging platforms that I’d choose or recommend.
Last year, there was lots of talk about fake blogs (aka “flogs”) and one or two notables (“Walmarting across America” and “
Well, clearly
Tags: Aweber, RSS Feeds, RSS by email, RSS and Newsletters, Feedburner, Feedblitz, Zookoda, Ezines