Use Your Blog as Your Newsletter

Many people with an online business also maintain mailing lists to send out newsletters. Frequently, people also pay to have a mailing list service each month, such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc. But did you know that if you also have a blog at a host like Blogger or WordPress, you can use your blog as your newsletter? Not only would this save you lots of time, but it would also save you money, if you pay for a separate mailing list service. To use your blog as your newsletter, all you need to do is have your blog’s feed burned at a feed-burning site like I use: Feedburner.

Your blog usually has an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, which is really just a way of delivering web content that is frequently changing. It allows anyone to get changing web content, such as from blogs, without the need to visit the website that the content appears on. To do this, the feed gets “burned,” and that enables people to subscribe to the feed, either in a feed reader or via email. So once your feed gets burned, anyone can subscribe to it in a feed reader (I use the Google Reader myself). Better yet, you can get HTML code from your feed account that you can place on your website, enabling people to subscribe to your blog via email.

I love this feature of my blog feeds, and I use it with all my websites so that I can use my blog as my newsletters. It eliminates the need for a mailing list service. It saves you tons of time, because all you have to do is post on your blog and anyone who has an email subscription will get the post automatically by email. If they subscribe in a reader, they can read it along with any other feeds they have subscribed to there. Or, they can visit your blog at any time too, if they like. And if by some chance you’re doing the big no-no and sending out newsletters as a mass email from your own inbox, you can stop wasting the time doing that, and help prevent yourself from getting blacklisted by ISP’s for sending out spam (which, is what happens quite frequently when you are sending out mass emails from your own email account)!

So really, there are lots of great reasons to use your blog as your newsletter. After all, who doesn’t like to save time and, in today’s economy, money? BTW, have you subscribed to the blog you’re reading right now? If not, follow the link on the right side of the blog (under the SUBSCRIBE header) and subscribe today!