Maybe newsletters are becoming a thing of the past. I hope it’s not just me being resistant to change.

The issue of producing a newsletter for income is critical. I’ve heard from many who decided that the “immediacy” of their content is when they make the money, so they continue with their subscription newsletters, often using FeedBlitz and such to send their blog posts via email feeds, but privatize access to the content on the blog until X date, then release it to the public for free. I’ll try to look more into how that works for a WordPress blog.

Newsletters are very valuable. This series is specifically for those who want to leave their newsletters behind, but let me look more into combining the two.

Personally, I had a newsletter for many years and found that I was spending more time and energy on the newsletter than on other things, and it wasn’t justifying the money I could make publishing the content publicly, without a newsletter. When I stopped the newsletter, and started putting more energy into my site’s content, income went up.

Others enjoy the balance between both, but it didn’t work for me.

Namely tagging, better cross linking, and easier to find. But most importantly, it could bring that older relevant material to a new audience that might not find it otherwise. But I need to think of some satisfactory way to combine the blog with the newsletter, which is still ongoing. I don’t think FeedBlitz is what I’m looking for. I sell advertising space in my newsletter and want to keep that stream going.

And for crying out loud, wordpress.com is blocked in China again, so your blog is hard to get to. I’m a regular reader there as well.

You will have to do the same. Decide how far back you want to go. I will be addressing the issue of preserving those past issues on your blog, which may help you, but I think the point is to pick a length of time of newsletters to convert, and then go forward with both newsletter and blog, watching subscription numbers.

Newsletters from blogs are very popular right now, though many are debating their continued value as more users become more blog-savvy. Feeds are quickly becoming the source of online information, replacing many email announcements and newsletters, so finding a way of combining those, like I covered in Integrating FeedBlitz Feed Email Service Into WordPress, might be the way to go, too.

Please ask questions along the way, so I can address the specific issues and concerns you may have.

I reckon that the project would be very exciting, but I can’t propose to her now, not when I’m still struggling to finish writing my thesis :(