Merge Plugins for Monthly E-Newsletter

If you publish a lot of blog posts or just want to offer your reader a monthly/weekly email newsletter instead of the standard one email per post, read on to find out how to set it up quickly and easily using 2 awesome WordPress plugins.

The first is the Post Notification Plugin which allows you to create an html template including your logo, branding and custom formatting. Whenever you write a blog post, it is sent to your subscriber database as an email newsletter. The second is the List Category Posts Plugin which allows you to display posts from a particular category on either a page or a post. The latest version lets you include excerpts and thumbnail images too.

Click on the plugin names above to read my previous posts about how to setup these 2 plugins on your WordPress website.

Creating a Monthly Newsletter Post

There are several different ways to do this, depending on whether you want your newsletter on a page or a post and which subscribers you want to receive it. See my sample page or my sample post.

1. Create a new post category called ‘Monthly Newsletter’ or ‘Weekly Update’
2. Add a new post with “My Newsletter – November 09″ as the title
3. Write some text at the top summarising the newsletter
4. Add the list category posts code for the category or categories you want to include, the number of posts and whether you want an excerpt or not (see image below as an example)
5. Add some text at the bottom if you want to
6. Tick the monthly newsletter category or other relevant categories and publish

Options for Your Subscribers

By creating a new category called “Monthly Newsletter” and selecting it when you publish each newsletter, you are effectively giving your subscribers the option to receive their email updates monthly instead of per post. Add some text to your subscribe page explaining that to get your newsletter monthly, they need to select only the “Monthly Newsletter” category when they confirm their subscription.

You could also make your newsletter monthly only by changing the Post Notification settings so that subscribers can’t choose categories. If you are going to do this, set your posts and pages not to send my default and manually select send on each monthly newsletter post on the Post Notifcation drop down box. 

You could also change your post notification code to exclude all categories except the monthly newsletter one. Find out how to do this here – http://wordpress.org/support/topic/180480

Newsletter Layout and Design

To change the way your newsletter looks on your website, you need to add some css to your style sheet. Download my sample css here. I have made the titles bold and in a larger font size  and added a left margin and padding around the image. You could also fix the width and height of your images so you don’t need to resize them.

To change the way your newsletter looks in an email, you need to change the email_template.html file located in the en_US file in the Post Notification folder. This will be inside your Plugins folder if you have uploaded the plugin.  Download my sample css here. I have wrapped my @content section in an h4 tag, then added css styles for h4 hyperlinks and h4 images. If you haven’t resized your images, you will need to specify the width and height in this css too.

Make sure you change the wording on your subscription page to explain your subscription options clearly to your readers as well as the subscription process. You could also alter the wording on the templates subscribers see when confirming and activating their subscriptions (these are located inside the en_US folder). See my previous post about adding a bonus download for new subscribers.

Newsletter Options

• Summarise different categories in your newsletter by adding the name of each category with the relevant catlist code below it (you can alsdo list several category ids separated by commas)
• Don’t create a newsletter category, just send a monthly newsletter for each category. ie. People subscribed to my Google category, would get an email once a month with any posts I had written about Google.

I will be sending a sample monthly newsletter out tomorrow to everyone subscribed to my E Newsletters category. Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this post in the comments section below.

Remember to donate to the author’s of these amazing plugins!

• Post Notification Plugin Author
• List Category Posts Plugin Author