Should You Send Full Or Partial Blog Posts To Your Email Newsletter?

Ivan — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 11:34:00 +0000

One of the dilemmas when using email is deciding if you should send the entire blog post in the email or just an extract. I do both on different sites as my readers have different preferences. Recently, I moved to AWeber as it lets me send extracts (teasers) via email and then encourage them to visit the website. Of course, you can also send the full email to the website as we’ll show next.

Send Entire or Extract Blog Posts to Newsletters?

One of the hidden features in AWeber is the ability to send an excerpt of the blog post to an email newsletter or send the entire email to your blog.

Like we said, one of the nice features of AWeber is the ability to connect your emails to your blog. In other words, every time you send out an email, it becomes a blog post.

And you can turn it around.

Every blog post can be sent out as an email!

In order to have all content shown in your email newsletter, make these changes:

Log into AWeber
Open your blog newsletter template
Find the string {!rss_item_description}
Replace it with {!rss_item_content}
Save it.

Aweber will now send out the entire blog post to your email subscribers.

This is ideal if you want to ‘tease’ readers into visiting your site, which is ideal if you want to get them to take action on your site, for example, buy products from your webstore or to increase the traffic to the site.

Remember to Test

The {!rss_item_content} merges the HTML and images from your blog post into the newsletter. Make sure to test your newsletter to make sure the HTML displays correctly in Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and other email clients.

Note: Aweber lets you send out test emails that don’t appear on the blog.

Difference Between AWeber and Feedburner?

They are both great in their own ways. I use Feedburner for sites where I want to keep things simple, reduce costs and automate the publishing process.

But when you want more advanced features, such as emails to be blog posts blog posts to be emails, then sign up for the trial version of AWeber and see how it works.

For me, it’s made a huge difference with email marketing campaigns as it helps with upselling, split testing, and sending out special offers to my subscribers that don’t appear on the blog. That element of exclusivity really helps when you’re nurturing your customers.

What other tools let you do this? Maybe there are ways to do this with Feedburner that I’m not aware of. Let me know if you have any ideas.

And I guess this brings us back to the question: should you send full or partial blog posts to your email newsletters?

AdSense Tip – Why Your Content is Critical For Targeted Ads?

Ivan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:03:23 +0000

Google provide some very useful guidelines on fine-tuning your AdSense campaigns.

Remember that:

1. AdSense works by crawling your web pages for content.

2. It delivers ads based on that content.

Help Google Crawl your site

So, if your content is limited, its crawler may have difficulty identifying the information on the page.

This means that you may see ads that are not directly relevant to your page or public service ads. You need to create more compelling, focussed content.

How to get Google ads that match your site

Do this:

1. Ensure that your pages are full of compelling content.

2. The more targeted, text-based information you provide, the easier it will be for Google to determine what your pages are about — and the greater the relevance of the Google ads.

Here’s a simple equation from Google:

A content-rich page = Highly-targeted ads
Highly-targeted ads + Interested users = Healthy click-through & conversion rates
Healthy click-through & conversion rates = Success!

Remember – you can also use page section targeting to focus our crawler on certain sections of your page that may be more content-rich than others.

via google.com