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WordPress Posts to E-Newsletter

MailChimp lets you send daily, weekly or monthly e-newsletters containing your blog posts. It is all done using their ‘RSS to Email’ function (Translation: Blog Posts to Email Newsletter).

Email Newsletters with MailChimp

Once you have setup your free MailChimp account and customised an email template with your logo etc, just create an rss campaign. Enter your website’s feed address (if you use WordPress you have one), decide whether you want to show entire posts or just summaries of each, then select how often you want your newsletter to send. Any fresh content/blog posts you’ve published since the last newsletter will slot into your branded template and send automatically every day, week or month. If there is no new content, the newsletter wont send.

How to Create an RSS to Email Campaign

Unless you want to change the frequency of your newsletter or layout at some stage, this is the one and only time you will need to do the steps below. Everything after your rss campaign is scheduled is automatic.

1. Get a free MailChimp account.
2. Design/customise an email template – Before you create your campaign, you’ll want to customise one of MailChimp’s email templates with your colours, logo, links to your website, images etc. This is all done on site and is easy to use.
3. Add a Subscriber List - Add any email subscribers you already have by importing the entire list or adding them one at a time.
4. Create a new RSS Campaign – Choose your saved template and subscriber list. Edit the content section of your template and insert an rss merge tag (you’ll see the link to this) to display either post excerpts or full posts. You can also insert your Twitter feed, Flickr photo feed and all sorts of other info and links.
5. Send Yourself a Test – You can also pay to have your campaign checked on a variety of email clients.
6. Schedule Your Campaign – Select the date you want the first one to send. Eg. Mine is monthly and sends on the 2nd of every month. [Read more]

Schedule Statistics Reports By Email

If you have a free Google Analytics account linked to your website you can navigate to any section of your statistics,  then schedule a report to be emailed to you/someone else every week/month/day.

The sort of reports you might benefit from seeing regularly are:

• Weekly Summary (the first page you see when you click on View Reports)
• Most popular posts by title (look under Content tab, then Content by title)
• Posts by a certain author (go to Content by title, then add author’s name to the filter box)
• New subscribers to your newsletter (first setup a goal with your subscribe page url, click on Goals)

Email Yourself a Weekly Summary

1. Login to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click on View Reports beside your website address
3. Click on the grey Email button at the top of the page
4. Fill in boxes to send report immediately or click the Schedule tab
5. Enter additional email addresses ro recieve the report or leave as send to me
6. Add a subject (tip: setup a mail rule to put these emails into a Stats folder under your inbox)
7. Add Description (mostly useful if emailing to others or if you are creating lots of reports)
8. Choose format (pdf is easy but excel compatible formats mean you can keep all stats in a spreadsheet)
9. Choose how often you would like to receive your report
10. Tick Comparison box to include a comparison of previous month/week.
11. Click Schedule button.

Email Report Showing New Subscribers to Your Newsletter

This is really useful if you use the Post Notification plugin to send an email newsletter from your WordPress website as it doesn’t notifiy you of new subscribers. I really like comparison feature on this one too so you can see which of your new content is enticing more subscribers. [Read more]

Increase Subscribers with a Bonus Download

Offering your website audience a downloadable file in exchange for their email address is a great way to encourage them to subscribe to your email newsletter. Obviously useful and regular content is the best way to keep them clicking through to your website to read more. [Read more]

Top Plugins for Large WordPress Sites

The new East Tamaki Healthcare website has 92 pages (and that’s not counting the news posts). There are a number of plugins and functions which can help manage WordPress sites like this one with a large amount of content and ensure that website visitors can always find what they are looking for. [Read more]

Creating HTML Email Templates

The Post Notification Plugin for WordPress allows you to customise the look and feel of the email newsletter your subscribers receive through the use of templates.

You can choose templates in different languages, text only templates, html templates or can customise an html template of your own to reflect your branding and website’s look and feel. [Read more]

Password Protect Your Blog Posts

If you are keen to charge people to subscribe to your blog posts or to write some blog posts which only subscribers can see, WordPress’ “password protect” feature makes it easy to manage.

To see an example of a password protected post, visit http://www.creative-web-ideas.com/index.php/2009/03/password-protected-test-post/. The password is test. [Read more]

Backup Your Website Automatically

My new year’s resolution is to make sure I send test emails to myself before publishing posts. I upgraded my newsletter today and sent it to you all on the default template. Sorry, this should look more like me.

Hopefully you are already doing it but if not imagine how you’d feel if you something happened to the server your website lives on and all your website content, carefully written blog posts, comments and subscriber database were all gone.

Make Your 2009 New Year’s Resolution to backup your website on a regular basis.

You can do this manually or use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin which you set to email you backup automatically at regular durations. The beauty of the plugin method (apart from not letting you forget) is that it will also backup:

• Your Email Newsletter subscriber database.
• Your Next Generation Photo Galleries
• Your WordPress E-Commerce shop

[Read more]

How to Write Great Blog Posts

The key to writing effective blog posts is to keep in mind that you are writing for two audiences – search engines and your customers. [Read more]

Feedburner to Promote Your Blog

Feedburner gives you an easy and effective way to promote your blog content on your website and through email subscriptions.

To get started, go to www.feedurner.com and claim your blog by typing the address of your blog feed. You get this by clicking on the orange rss button on your blog or clicking on a link titled Entries RSS on your blog’s sidebar. Copy the website url complete with http:// which appears at the top of your website browser. Give your feed a title and setup a username and password. Once your account is active, select the Publicize tab and start promoting your blog content to the world. You can get to the Publicize section at anytime by clicking on the My Feeds link, then on the title of your feed. [Read more]

Use Your Blog as an E-Newsletter

When added to your WordPress website or blog, this plugin turns your blog posts into email newsletters.

These are automatically sent out to your subscriber list when you publish your post.

You can add subscribers yourself and include a signup box on your website so people can subscribe themselves to receive your blog posts via email.

You can write your posts under any number of different categories and subscribers can choose to receive all posts or only those written under the categories they are interested in.

You can customise the design and layout of your email newsletter with your logo and branding, as well as adding images, promotional text and website links.

View Table of Contents…

Download User Guide

If you’re still sending out monthly email newsletters using your office computer or spending a lot of time organising customer emails, there is an easier way. A blog post contains the same type of information you would include in an e-newsletter plus it is published to your website for search engines and new customers to discover as well as being emailed to your subscribers.

[Read more]