Comments on: Bridging The Gap Between Email And Blog Marketing

By: Steve Gill

Steve Gill — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:30:18 +0000

Just FYI, for your readers who may not be aware, Bloglet.com offers a free service to send blog posts to subscribers via email.

And you can see the email addresses of your subscribers – possible to paste into your subscribers list if you ever decide to switch to something more hardy, like Aweber.

For a small blog starting out and/or someone with a limited budget or “testing the waters”, it’s a viable alternative to Aweber and GetResponse et al…

By: Administrator

Administrator — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:44:49 +0000

Yep health and fitness weight loss type of stuff, so I knew it was uphill battle

By: Andy Hagans

Andy Hagans — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:32:02 +0000

Wow dude those results are terrible, mine have been much better…

are your sites in areas where there’s normally a lot of spam? i.e., even if your Credit card site & list are completely legit it’s gonna be hard to get it thru…

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:35:27 +0000

There’s also another avenue to explore: making your blog available via email. I do this with my blog, and it’s trivial for me because AWeber has this service that automatically broadcasts an RSS feed to a mailing list. So I created a mailing list just for my blog and anyone who signs up for it gets each blog posting mailed to them, usually within an hour or so of me posting it. They don’t have to fiddle with an RSS reader… some people are just more comfortable with email, that’s all, and I like having the option. I only has 12 people signed up on this service so far, which is not a huge number, but that’s 12 people I might not otherwise reach. Well, 11, because I think my father is one of the signups, so he doesn’t count

By: Web Professor

Web Professor — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:11:44 +0000

I noticed recently a majority of my subscribers are from myYahoo. I was really shocked. Also since your looking at email Graywolf, you might be interested in this email study from MarketingSherpa

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:15:59 +0000

My impression is that the entryway into RSS adoption is not going to be through the tech channels, but through MyYahoo and the portal sites.

By marketing your weblog into these sites, with RSS cloaked as a tool they can understand, penetration can occur. Otherwise we will be relegated to the technically proficient fringe.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:10:22 +0000

Good point about asking people to whitelist the email address you are sending from.

By: kid mercury

kid mercury — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:59:10 +0000

one of the things i’m about to try with a site of mine is to give the users blogs, rationale being that everyone wants others to read their crap but no one is particularly interested in reading the crap of others. once users have a blog and start using it the idea of rss will become intuitive, and its value will be appreciated and utilized. or so the thinking goes.

By: DavidC

DavidC — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:37:24 +0000

We tried to introduce RSS to our technical service group earlier this year, with the idea that we could move notifications of website inquiries away from e-mail into RSS. My idea was, and still is, to move our very busy corporate website into a Web 2.0 mode, and begin to create a community involving our customers, customer service, technical service, engineering and sales teams. RSS would be integral in the process, and I figured our tech service guys would be the most likely to accept new technology.

The ‘deer in the headlights’ stares and feedback I received when proposing this was very surprising to me. I concluded that we would need to ‘ease’ into this, and that an abrupt change would be likely to fail.

Most of these folks are what I would consider technology early adopters, yet none of them were prepared for RSS. When I talk about this to the average user they literally have no clue.

I know that this is a generalization, but you can, to a certain extent, find the technology level of your blog users by the browser theyâ€™re using. Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Konqueror users are more likely to be technology early adopters, IE users are more likely to be mainstream users. If youâ€™re so lucky as to get noticed by Digg or Slashdot youâ€™ll find IE users at less than 10%. My blog is geared toward lower technology folks, yet I still average IE users of only 27%. In contrast, our very mainstream corporate website sees IE users at over 91%. I think you can get a feeling where RSS integration would be most readily adopted

I strongly believe that the release of Vista and Explorer 7 later this year will begin to expose the average user to the idea of RSS, and that it will reach a tipping point sometime next year. After that, watch out, all bets are off (or on, depending on your viewpoint).

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:47:46 +0000

Does Constant Contact not have a built-in spam filter? I use AWeber and they assign each email a spam score by passing it through SpamAssassin and then telling you what’s wrong with the email and giving you a chance to correct it. Works well for me for my newsletter and for other emails I send. Of course, sometimes you can’t help getting flagged as spam… like when I tell people how to get my free e-book “the two words that can make you rich” then that email tends to get flagged and there’s not much I can do about it!

Also, when you collect email addresses, don’t forget to ask people to add you to their whitelist on the registration thank you page.

Eric