Why I Haven\’t Been Publishing My E-Mail Newsletter

(UPDATE NOV. 8: I’ve resumed my e-mail alerts now that I’ve found a more labor-efficient strategy for publishing them.)

Some longtime Contentious readers have written me lately to ask why I haven’t been publishing my e-mail summary of this newsletter for a few months. The answer is, I’ve had to set that aside due to a lack of time.

Here’s the deal: The vast majority of Contentious readers currently find out about my new content via feed. My e-mail audience, while important, is much smaller.

Also, to be frank, the people who tend to hire me generally find and read me via feed. I very rarely get business from my e-mail newsletter readers. I’m an independent self-employed person, and I have to prioritize my time according to what helps build my business the most.

I’d still like to offer the e-mail summary edition. However, I honestly can’t take the time to produce it. So here are two options to allow it to continue. Let me know which you prefer…

Get e-mail summaries of individual items as they are posted. This is something I could automate fairly easily. This means that instead of getting one e-mail that offers summaries of several recent Contentious articles, you’d get them one at a time as they are published. E-mail me to let me know if you’d like or wouldn’t like this option.
Volunteer to produce my e-mail newsletter. If some generous Contentious reader would volunteer to produce a biweekly or monthly summary of my recent postings, I would definitely welcome that effort. All you’d have to do would be to create the content (body) of the newsletter. Everything else is already automated. E-mail me to volunteer.

Again, I know a lot of people enjoy getting Contentious by e-mail. I hate to let that service die, but times do change. So let me know what you think, and I’ll make my decision taking that into account.

If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds

2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Thanks for the idea Paul, but I don’t think FeedBlitz is the right solution for me.

First of all, distribution is not my problem. I already have an e-mail list service I’m happy with: Mail-List.com. I’ve been using them for years, and the service is great and reasonably priced. Best of all, this is a double opt-in e-mail list service, which I consider to be an absolutely vital feature of any e-mail publication I’m involved with. When you don’t have double opt-in, spammers and scammers take advantage. I don’t ever want to be accused of spamming people because some jerk abuses my system.

Right now, my blogging software (WordPress) would generate basically the same kind of e-mail newsletter that FeedBlitz would. But the problem would be that this would have to be one posting per e-mail newsletter, no way to do a biweekly or monthly summary. That means people would get pelted with an e-mail from me every time I posted a blog entry. I’m guessing that might not be popular.

What I really need is some automated way to scrape my site periodically and generate from that content for the body of an e-mail newsletter — without me having to copy, paste, and edit. That may not sound like much, but it is a significant task. Or if someone was willing to volunteer to perform that task, that would be fine too,

Maybe there is another solution, I’m open to suggestions. Here are my requirements:
1. Creation of the newsletter content must be automated, or done by someone other than me.
2. It must work with a double opt-in sysstem – either the one I already have (my preference) or another one that wouldn’t cost me anything more than what I’m already paying.
Ideas?

- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious

[Reply]
1. Amy Gahran on October 17th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
Have you considered using Feed Blitz for those who prefer email?

[Reply]

2. Paul Chaney on October 17th, 2005 at 12:33 pm