Tenacious Frog

So, Paul Burgess wrote a great article for Net Tuts about how wordpress and feedburner can be used together to create a basic and free (as in beer) newsletter manager. In the final notes he made the quote below:

“If you wanted to go a newsletter crazy, you could go as far as setting up a WordPress blog just for newsletters, but that’s another story.”

Well, my friends, here is that story.

What Paul was talking about in that quote was exactly what I wanted to do and did. But before we look at how it is done let’s talk about why.

What is “wordburner,” why should I care about it, and how does it stack up to the other solutions available?

Using a simple wordpress blog and feedburner you can create a newsletter manager. Following the instructions Paul gives in his post you can create a wordburner on your existing wordpress site.

But why would you?

Here are (in my opinion) the pros and cons of wordburner versus other newsletter solutions:

Pros you can easily offer info as a newsletter and as a blog (related to the above) you can easily offer back issues of your newsletter online (they will be in the category you create for the newsletter easy setup (compared to installing something like phplist) a familiar interface. If you are used to blogging in wordpress then you are ready to go. so easy newsletter creation you can create multiple newsletters by creating multiple categories (see the details of my install below) you can send the same email simultaneously to multiple mailing lists by selecting your multiple newsletter categories many things wordpress can do so can your newsletter if you use the wp affiliate link manager plugin you can use it in your newsletter mailings to tidy up affiliate links can pre-date mailings. that means you can set a future date for a letter you want to send and on that day it will publish it and send it to your mailing list! Can you say vacation?

Cons poor user management (cannot transfer users from one list to another) no auto responders cannot send to specific users (only sends to all users)

While the wordburner workaround is extremely useful it is not really a replacement if you need a robust email marketing system that let’s you target and easily manage mailing list users.

The only free full featured newsletter management systems I am aware of are mailchimp (which is SaaS) and phplist (open source). Phplist is a bit much for non-techies. You have to be familiar with installing CMS and editing settings in code to install it.

MailChimp is a good (and entertaining) service. They have a chart where you can see how it compares to other services.

How I used Paul’s wordburner hack to create a multi-newsletter manager.

I have a main website about myself at TaiyoJohnson.com and several other related websites. Since the sites are all related I wanted to make one central newsletter manager rather than a separate one for each site.

I setup a subdomain called “newsletters” where my wordburner would go. So, you can see my newsletter manager at
http://newsletters.taiyojohnson.com. It doesn’t have to be in a subdomain, I just wanted to do it that way.

I setup a new wordpress blog in that subdomain. Then I followed Paul’s instructions, creating a separate category (newsletter) for each
of my websites. This is actually an easier setup because you can skip steps 2-4. You can skip them because you have no need to hide posts.

To me this system is so much easier than anything else I’ve worked with (since I love wordpress).

So you can see the multi-newsletter system at work at http://newsletters.taiyojohnson.com and you can see the subscribe box at work on the right hand side of this blog.

Was that understandable?

If you have questions feel free to leave a comment.

Have a great day,

Taiyo

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