John Chow joins Darren Rowse in the I Love Aweber club, and highlights the new Twitter feature we’ve mentioned previously. It appears as if Aweber’s got dedicated users, always a good sign.

Speaking of which, Darren Rowse published his 8 reasons why to add a newsletter to your blog:

1. Newsletters create Loyalty
2. Newsletters Develop Relationships and Trust
3. Newsletters Drive Page Views/Traffic
4. Newsletters are Familiar
5. Newsletters Build a Core Community and Enhance Reader Engagement
6. Newsletters can Track and Target Groups of Readers
7. Newsletters help build Momentum
8. Newsletters Open Up Possibilities for Monetization

All good reasons, and more in-depth in the post of course. My personal opinion is that adding a newsletter is a good idea overall, and you can most certainly get spinoffs from it. You’ll need a plan of course, but there are most certainly possibilities here.

Oh my. David Peralty of XFEP is annoyed with e-mail newsletters that are just rehashes of the RSS feed. I publish one of those myself, and without the “special notes” David mentions, using Feedburner. David says:

You should be happy that I subscribe to your RSS feed rather than punish me by making me get the same information two different ways so that you look like you have twice as many subscribers.

Agreed, and some blogs most certainly push newsletters for no reason other than to pimp the subscriber count, like David reasons. However, there’s another thing to take into consideration. If you don’t push your e-mail newsletter, how will the RSS un-savvy of your readership subscribe to your blog? read more