I’ve had a couple of requests for help with adding an email newsletter to your holiday rental blog, so I’ve put together a WordPress Tutorial Screencast of how to go about doing it. Please read below before watching the Screencast.
Many people use RSS feeds to keep their visitors informed of what they’re writing about, but actually outside of the ‘blogosphere’, not many people have or know how to use RSS readers, whereas email is universally accepted. The benefit of both RSS and email are that they are a ‘push’ form of marketing… they act as a direct reminder to visit your blog and read what you’ve been seeing. We’ve all visited a blog or website before and thought “wow, that’s really useful” and then never visited again, so using RSS and email to ‘capture’ your audience is key to repeat visits and regular reading of your content.
The great news is that there are a few suppliers of ‘RSS to Email’ solutions, which periodically strip your most recent posts from your RSS feed, and turn them into an HTML email to be sent out to your subscribers.
There are two components to setting this up;
1. you need an account with an RSS to Email provider (my personal preference is Nourish but you could also check out the solution by Feedburner, although I’ve found it to be less maniable. My previous experience of Feedblitz has been horrendous (so much so that i’m not linking them!), so I’d avoid them like the plague. Once you have your account set up (usually free) you need to configure it to work with your RSS feed
2. You then need to add the ‘sign up form’ code to your blog.
This Screencast covers both (using Nourish) and in it I will show you how to add the code to your sidebar, and also how to create a sign up form stand alone page.
It also covers installing and using the excellent ‘Hide Pages’ plugin, which can be downloaded here. In this Screencast I use it to hide your ‘success’ page from the main nav, but it can also be used to create search optimised pages which you don’t want showing in your main navigation.
IMPORTANT NOTE. if you’re creating your sign up form as a stand alone page, there’s a bug in certain versions of WordPress which loses some of the form code if you switch between ‘visual’ and ‘html’ view (you’ll know this is the case if you test your form and on submit, it refreshes through to a nourish branded page rather than your ‘thanks’ page. To be safe, save and publish the form page whilst still on HTML view and don’t switch to ‘visual’ view as i’ve done in the presentation.
Incidentally, if anyone out there has any suggestions for other suppliers of RSS to Email, I’d be interested to hear in the comments. And if you like what you see / read here… ahem….why not sign up to my excellent email newsletter, made using Nourish!? ;o)
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How to add an email newsletter to your holiday rental blog
I’ve had a couple of requests for help with adding an email newsletter to your holiday rental blog, so I’ve put together a WordPress Tutorial Screencast of how to go about doing it. Please read below before watching the Screencast.
Many people use RSS feeds to keep their visitors informed of what they’re writing about, but actually outside of the ‘blogosphere’, not many people have or know how to use RSS readers, whereas email is universally accepted. The benefit of both RSS and email are that they are a ‘push’ form of marketing… they act as a direct reminder to visit your blog and read what you’ve been seeing. We’ve all visited a blog or website before and thought “wow, that’s really useful” and then never visited again, so using RSS and email to ‘capture’ your audience is key to repeat visits and regular reading of your content.
The great news is that there are a few suppliers of ‘RSS to Email’ solutions, which periodically strip your most recent posts from your RSS feed, and turn them into an HTML email to be sent out to your subscribers.
There are two components to setting this up;
1. you need an account with an RSS to Email provider (my personal preference is Nourish but you could also check out the solution by Feedburner, although I’ve found it to be less maniable. My previous experience of Feedblitz has been horrendous (so much so that i’m not linking them!), so I’d avoid them like the plague. Once you have your account set up (usually free) you need to configure it to work with your RSS feed
2. You then need to add the ‘sign up form’ code to your blog.
This Screencast covers both (using Nourish) and in it I will show you how to add the code to your sidebar, and also how to create a sign up form stand alone page.
It also covers installing and using the excellent ‘Hide Pages’ plugin, which can be downloaded here. In this Screencast I use it to hide your ‘success’ page from the main nav, but it can also be used to create search optimised pages which you don’t want showing in your main navigation.
IMPORTANT NOTE. if you’re creating your sign up form as a stand alone page, there’s a bug in certain versions of WordPress which loses some of the form code if you switch between ‘visual’ and ‘html’ view (you’ll know this is the case if you test your form and on submit, it refreshes through to a nourish branded page rather than your ‘thanks’ page. To be safe, save and publish the form page whilst still on HTML view and don’t switch to ‘visual’ view as i’ve done in the presentation.
Watch the Screencast on how to add an automated email newsletter to your blog here.
Incidentally, if anyone out there has any suggestions for other suppliers of RSS to Email, I’d be interested to hear in the comments. And if you like what you see / read here… ahem….why not sign up to my excellent email newsletter, made using Nourish!? ;o)
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
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