Newsletters VS RSS Feeds
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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 more especially email publishers,
they are the sellers first and the publishers second. That means they see making sales like
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
your publication. Instead, your post should focus on providing quality content.
the highest quality that establishes your credibility. you do it showing
your readers who know what they are doing, who are, dare I 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 takes a lot of time. that’s why we
the publishers use third-party articles. but don’t just post any article that
receive. Use some discrimination. Only wear items that complement yours
content, which are appropriate for the focus of your own newsletter. and whatever
If you do, don’t just post the article as-is. Write a short introduction
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 the editors seem to think is the purpose of their
Newsletter. In most newsletters, including many well-known ones,
You can hardly find the content among all the advertising. these editors seem
feel the need to push your advertising in the face. However, let’s see
what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper.
Most newspapers do not fill every page of their publications with so many ads.
it can’t find the items. Most of the good ones tend to have a separate
advertising section. And the ads that do appear in the content sections are
presented in such a way that they do not interfere with the presentation of the
news. How long do you think your local newspaper would keep its subscribers if
overloaded news pages with ads? It is time for online publishers to change the
way we think. We need to move away from the newsletter-as-a-vehicle-for-advertising
model and switch to a newsletter model as a vehicle for quality content. Effective
Direct desktop publishing requires a major change in the way you view the
design of your newsletter.
Email publishers tend to publish discrete numbers of their newsletters in a
regular hours. The most common schedule is once a week. Each number contains
all the information that the editor wants to communicate to his
subscribers for that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format,
beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as its delivery
system.
The first drawback is the length. With a couple of items and half a dozen or
classified ads, along with regular information such as welcome,
required disclaimers with email, unsubscribe information, etc., which makes
for a rather long message. Most Internet users simply do not read the messages of that
length.
Yes, I could send more frequent short messages, but that only aggravates
exponentially the problems associated with email delivery. The more often you
send an email to your subscribers, they are more likely to close it due to
a spam complaint.
By using a type of blog format, you don’t do discrete problems. rather post
an article or its advertising or editorial on a given day. let’s say in
On Monday, he posts an article on RSS publishing, then on Tuesday he posts an
editorial about the upcoming elections, on Wednesday you publish a couple of
classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article about Christmas advertising and about
On Friday you post some more announcements. Let’s say this is the same content as you
have published in a discrete number, except for the disclaimers and the header
– the things at the top that identify your newsletter, you don’t need
post the header because it is always there on your blog. You do not need
to include all email disclaimers because you are not using email. Things
such as banners and welcome messages can be integrated into the
overall layout of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Someone
Going to your blog page 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 as well as your readers
will visit each time they read a full article in your newsletter.
You see, the RSS feed will just carry the title as a link and the first
paragraph or two of your article, say the article about the RSS feed. each item
they will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will hold up to
fifteen articles, the last fifteen articles you published. Any good RSS publishing system
it will configure all this for you and make all the necessary coding changes. Generally
You publish your article in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you.
Doing everything manually is neither effective nor efficient, so I suggest you don’t do it.
that! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier, not harder. more about these
systems later.
With the best publishing systems, you don’t even have to know much about HTML.
because they will allow you to publish your article as text and it will format the
line breaks for you. As long as you put a hard double jump at the end of each
paragraph of text, your article will look good. You can add bold or italics or
underline as necessary. But, the better your knowledge of HTML, the more creative you will be.
it may be in how your posts will look.
Also, if you have the necessary experience and tools, you can add graphics,
Flash, audio, video or anything else you want to animate your pages. Do not add
executable (EXE) files to your publications. That creates all sorts of problems for
its readers and is prohibited by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also if
add multimedia to your newsletter, I strongly recommend that you do so
that your reader can choose to see it or not. Not only is that courteous
to do, but it will also prevent you from blocking your reader’s account
computer. Although most people have fairly sophisticated computers these days,
there are still people who may not be able or want to see these
file types. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.
Posting daily, which I consider the ideal schedule, can seem like a lot more
work, but really, once you get the hang of it, it really is less time
consume to do a big problem a week. Also, many email publishers have
redid text-based newsletters to avoid some of the filtering of
email that is going on. HTML email is often blocked or HTML is disabled
unless you specifically ask to see it.
Text newsletters are dull and boring. The Internet is a visual medium first and
major. Yes, it is for streaming content, but that content has to be
visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing attractive in a long text.
message using rows of unimaginative characters like #, @, * or others to test
to add some 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.
Finally, there is a very strong marketing reason for using a blog type of
Format. I’ll just mention it briefly here and explain it in detail in my next
RSS marketing blog.
You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get
new people to see your newsletter, right? That means driving traffic to your
newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do this is to make the search
engines like Google to crawl your newsletter every time you add a new item to
your blog. What would you say if I told you that there is a marketing tool that
could i do that? It’s called pinging weblogs.com… more on my next blog!