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February 18, 2007
Blog Email
Here's a service that I've seen several people using, or at least something similar if not from this particular supplier, blog email. This particular service is from Zookoda and the idea is that some readers might like to receive a digest of the blog in their email in box. Add their code to your site and you'll get a small box appearing. If readers put their email addy into the box then they'll be on your database (this bit is simple enough that even I get it).
OK, so you can then schedule to software to pump out a daily, weekly or monthly digest of your blog posts to that email addy. There's also all sorts of tools that allow you to spiff up these email newsletters (for that's effectively what they are: you're turning the blog into an email newsletter) and their designs and so on.
There's also the ability to make it all much simpler text, so that it can be sent to mobiles.
The aim of it all is apparently that by using blog email you're tying people into your writing more closely, thus increasing traffic and presumably, whatever monetisation options you have on the blog.
Naturally, in this modern internet world all of this is free.
Now there is one thing that puzzles me. As I say, I've seen similar things on other blogs around and about so I'd be interested in knowing what effect it has: but how is this different, better than, an RSS feed? Is it that it's a push technology, rather than a pull one?
February 18, 2007 in Paid Blogging | Permalink
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Comments
Nice idea. I have traditionally preferred the push method in principle, but have found that using the Bloglines RSS aggregator, along with its desktop notifier, gives much the same effect, with the added bonus that I rather than the publisher control the frequency.
Posted by: Infoholic | Feb 18, 2007 12:42:29 PM
As far as you're concerned you don't have to care about the distinction between pull/push because you're not paying for the bandwidth. I imagine that even if you were, the difference between having an RSS reader ping you every couple of minutes and sending out an email once a week would be in the tens or low hundreds of megabytes - hardly likely to cost more on your hosting provider (ofc, if it's the few hundred mb at the very top of your monthly limit it may be...).
I suspect that the real reason is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know about RSS but do know about blogs. They will be more used to getting emails telling them about stuff, and so it's an appropriate way to contact them.
Posted by: sanbikinoraion | Feb 18, 2007 1:00:23 PM
