You don't need to have a blog and a separate mailing list. You can always setup a mailing list that automatically broadcasts your latest blog entries to your subscribers. Remember, however, that you might fall into a nasty little trap. Here's how to avoid it...

You need to ask yourself how often you will post to your blog.

If you will commit to posting once a day, people who subscribe to your RSS Feed mailing list will receive one email every single day from you.

For some people, one email a day is too much. They'll quickly click on the unsubscribe link of your mailing list. Or they'll altogether just ignore your email.

I know. That's exactly what happened to me.

And since this blog sometimes has more than one post daily, I've switched off the auto-broadcast feature. That's why the subscribers of my mailing list no longer automatically receive an email each time a new post is published here.

Instead, I will broadcast to the list a short (but related) message that mentions something not already found in the recent posts. Instead, I will expound on what has been posted. The maximum frequency I'm aiming for is one message per week.

Will this help reduce the incidence of unsubscribes? Based on the result of 3-weeks' testing, I'm happy to report to you that the technique works.

So if you've tied your mailing list to your blog's RSS feeds, please reconsider the auto-broadcast feature. Be more selective. Anyway, those posts will just be queued in your "ready to broadcast" page, just waiting for you to edit them and send them at a later date.

Happy list building, folks! :-)

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"Mailing Lists and RSS Feeds"
First Posted: December 23, 2007 | Filed in: General

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