WordPress Tutorials about email newsletter
RSS Email Newsletter Feed Options
November 13, 2010
If you use WordPress and publish blog posts of any sort, whether they are events, recipes, tutorials, news or new products, your email newsletter is already taken care of. That is, as long as you have an RSS campaign setup with MailChimp to automatically send your posts to people who subscribe to your newsletter.
This post focuses on options for
- which blog content you send in your newsletter
- what the content looks like
- how to customise each newsletter before it goes out to your subscribers
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Find out how to create your RSS Campaign in my previous post. [Read more]
WordPress to MailChimp E-Newsletter
May 10, 2010
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.
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- Get a free MailChimp account.
- Click on Campaigns tab, then on the big orange Add Campaign button
- Select RSS Campaign from the drop down list
- Add your RSS Feed address and choose how often your newsletter will send
- 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.
- Add Your content Edit the content section of your template and insert an rss merge tag (this will be already there if you choose rss campaign) to display either post excerpts or full posts. You can also insert your Twitter feed, add images, special greeting etc.
- Send Yourself a Test .
- Add a Subscriber List - Add any email subscribers you already have by importing the entire list or adding them one at a time.
- 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]
Top Plugins for Large WordPress Sites
August 31, 2009
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.
WordPress Helps You Organise Content
WordPress’ built-in content management system lets you create as many pages as you need, then easily organise them into either parent pages or child pages in any order you like. WordPress then builds your navigation menu bar automatically using this information. New pages slot in seamlessly as you create them.
NOTE: You can also create pages off your child pages (I call them grandchildren).
WordPress Helps You Communicate
Every WordPress website has a built-in blogging system allowing any number of users to login to the website and write news and articles under any number of different categories. This news is automatically categorised and archived and appears on pages and sidebars automatically. Depending on the access level of the user, their news is published immediately or saved in pending format for an administrator to approve. Use the blog for regular communication with your target markets (create blog category for each market segment) and jobs.
Plugins for Large WordPress Sites
There are a number of plugins which you can add to your WordPress website to make it easier for your customers to find the information they are looking for. I have used all of these on the East Tamaki Healthcare website so have a browse through to see them all in action.
The Breadcrumbs Plugin adds a line of text links to the top of every page and post on your website to show visitors where they are on a site. There is always a homepage link plus pages show a link to the parent page and posts show links to categories the post is listed under. This allows visitors to work backwards through your site to get to more information. You can see breadcrumbs at the top of this post and every other page/post on my website.
This plugin will automatically display a hyperlinked list of child pages on every parent page. Once you have activated the plugin, you can either paste a small piece of code on each parent page or duplicate your page.php file, add a line of code, then save as a new page template. When editing parent page, just choose this template from the drop down list instead of the standard page template. Full instructions on the plugin authors website.
This plugin will automatically show the most recent posts published to a certain category directly on your website pages ensuring website visitors see the latest updates and news on any of your products or services. This allows to to show relevant fresh content inside your static webpages. A good example is to create a jobs page, then use the plugin to display all the most recent jobs (written as blog posts) on the page. On the East Tamaki Healthcare website, I have done just this so that patients, job seekers and health professionals all see relevant news and updates. Instructions on how to use this plugin on my previous post.
Other Tips for Large Sites
- Don’t forget to include a search box visible from every page. The best place is for this is usually in the website’s header or in the sidebar.
- Think about using 2 separate navigation bars to split content for different target markets.
- To only show parent pages, edit your header.php file and change the depth to 1. To show parent and child pages only, set depth to 2
