Turn Your Blog Into an Email Newsletter

I'm sure you've seen those sites with the newsletter sign-up form, inviting visitors to submit their email address and join their mailing list. If you're like me it probably seemed like a great idea, but you found the prospect of maintaining the mailing list, putting together a regular newsletter, and coordinating the mailings too complicated for your taste. And you're right, if you were trying to do all that yourself it could turn into quite a headache.

And yet it's still a great idea. After all, a blog is so much like a newsletter that it makes perfect sense to convert each post into a mini-email update. And there are undoubtedly some readers would prefer to read it in that format. Maybe they only find time to check their email in the course of their day, not surf the web. Or maybe they work someplace where their web access is extremely restricted. Or maybe they have no clue what an RSS feed is and don't really want to know. Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the old days of Usenet, when most important online communication came in via their inbox.

The good news is you can broadcast your blog via email pretty easily with a service called FeedBlitz. I found it while I was searching for sites to help promote blog RSS feeds, and it caught my attention immediately since I've always wondered if there was quick and painless way to distribute a blog via email. That's exactly what FeedBlitz does: they'll instantly convert your blog's RSS feed into an email and distribute it automatically to your subscription list.

Here's how it works:

You sign up for a FeedBlitz account, login and enter your RSS feed into their "New Feed" menu.

After you submit the form, they'll email you a sample email with all your recent blog posts. Double check it to make everything looks OK.

If it does, you can then log into your account and grab their HTML code that allows you to add an email subscription form to your blog. Paste this code into your blog template whereever you'd like it to appear, republish, take a minute to make sure everything's formatting correctly on your blog, and if it is, you're all set - you're now a newsletter publisher as well as a blogger!

Ready to get started? This complete intro to the FeedBlitz service tells you everything you'll need to know.