Converting Ezines to Blogs

Shel Horowitz write that he's converting from ezines/e-newsletters to blogs.

Shel's text below. He's now sending a short email with links back to his blog -- what do you think?

While I've been blogging since 2005, I've been publishing the first two of my monthly e-newsletters all the way back to 1997 (I added another one in 2003, and had planned to launch a fourth soon).

At the time I started my zines, I had one website, spam was almost a non-issue, and you could be pretty sure that when you sent an e-mail it would be not only delivered but likely read. At that time, I only had one website: FrugalFun.com, which went live in the spring of 1996.

But I've been thinking for quite some time that e-newsletters have lost much of their effectiveness I know that e-mail deliverability is by no means certain anymore, and you can't rely on getting a bounce notice if it doesn't get in.

 

Also, I know that lots of mail that does make it through gets deleted unread. This is certainly true in my own ebox, where I simply can't compete with the volume of incoming mail. A few weeks ago I started a big purge and got my inbox down from 2400 to 800--it's already back up to 1190, after five days on a business trip. And that doesn't count the approximately 100-2009 per day that I throw out in my spamfilter--or the dozen or so that I try to rescue from the spamfilter but never arrive (one of my biggest peeves).

This month I asked the 8000 subscribers of my two largest zines if the format was working for them--and got very definite feedback that while the content is valued, the long-form single-email text only format doesn't work.

But I *know* HTML email doesn't work. I've seen the hideous results when they are corrupted in transmission, and I also know a lot of spam filters automatically catch anything with HTML.

After thinking it over, I decided to convert to a blog. Yesterday, I sent the first one in the new format--a brief email with a sentence or two about each story and a link to the TOC on my blog (which in turn has live links to all the articles):
http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2007/06/18/positive-power-of-principled-profit-is-posted-and-ready-for-you/

I'm sure it will evolve (and hopefully take less time to set up, now that I can refer back to certain repeating articles, such as the one about my books).

Have others made this transition? Any "gotchas"?

Comments

[Mathew Patterson]

There is definitely a big move towards blogs instead of email, and as you say, it is getting more challenging to get your email delivered.

However, at Campaign Monitor ( http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ ) we still see a lot of uses of email that work much better than a blog would. If you can get past the gatekeepers of spam filters and overwhelming volume, being in someones personal inbox can be a great spot to make a real connection.

I think blogs and newsletters will coexist for a long time yet - we will probably also see a lot more from the 'turn blog posts into email' area too.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Mathew, absolutely agreed

If something makes it to my inbox, I at VERY LEAST read the subject. If I'm super busy, I can and do miss things on my favorite blogs.

[Rosa Say, author of Managing with Aloha]

Aloha Ted,
I have been thinking about doing this for a long time now, and after I read your blog post last night and slept on it, I decided to make another evolution in my switch-to-blog in July.

I started my newsletter via email editor only in 2003, and have steadily added more links to blog post articles as time has gone by. I will continue to send my email subscribers a "new edition is published" type of alert for the 'coexistence harmony' that Matthew speaks of, however my July evolution will now involve the creation of a dedicated newsletter on the blogging platform.

There are several pros and cons, however I see the biggest ones driving my decision as these:

a) Blogging platforms are vastly superior to every email editor I continually test run for publishing functionality, and
b) Spam has ruined email. That challenge to get my email editor into inboxes IS getting bigger every day. The hassle simply isn't worth it if your primary business audience has become blog-and-feed literate. It's not even about permission marketing anymore - even readers who want your newsletter get fed up with retrieving it from their own firewalls and spam filters, for the verification and opt-in processes get less and less effective.

Thank you for being the catalyst to finalize [this stage of] my thinking! I'll send you a link to the new blog when my July publish date arrives.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Rosa,
Thanks for your comments. I'm not dropping emailing the newsletter, but I will be posting it as well. Not 100% sure my longterm thoughts, although I am writing them up for my next newsletter now :)

One thing is certain: having an email list does increase your footprint on the Internet, i.e. helps get your messages out

[Bill Conerly]

I have to continually remind myself that not all the world is like me. I have clients who love my newsletter but never look at any blogs, think RSS is a government agency, and wouldn't bother with FeedBlitz. So the newsletter is the only way to connect with them.

Plenty of blog-readers don't want an email newsletter, on the other hand.

So I use the cross-platform strategy: my newsletter includes links to blog articles, and I post the availability of my newsletter on the blog. I use a different style on the two media, so that each is distinctive.