laptopmanpaul.co.uk

Adding newsletters to your website

I’ve been working on my websites today trying to nudge each one a little further towards completion.

I probably should have built one, launched one, but as I’ve progressed I keep having another bright idea, buy a domain name, then can’t help tinkering with software to see if it’s going to be possible.

The result is I have 10 websites and 1 in development … but none of them launched properly yet!

Having pretty well done what I thought was the difficult bit - building them - I’m now starting to think about how I’m going to get people to use them … and I’ve just realised that’s going to be a pretty big task too.

I bought Starting and Running an Online Business for Dummies (For Dummies) the other day and have been reading it at the breakfast table and on the bus on the way to the ‘day job’.

It’s made me think much more laterally about launching my sites and has come up with some great suggestions.

One of those is creating newsletters, to help inform people about what  you’re up to and what special offers you’ve got on.

I’ve never even thought about newsletters before, though I quite happily subscribe to them and read them … and I even bought a new camera as a result of one last week.

The solution has come in the form of Fantastico and PHP scripts, which I’ve raved about already.

I’ve attached phplist to all my websites and I have to admit I’d never even heard of it before.

However, it was really easy to install and is just the ticket.

You set up basic templates for each of your sites, import them into phplist then create and name a mailing list … for instance webcumbria_newsletters.

Each time you want to send out a new newsletter, you either write it in WYSIWYG or create a slightly more ambitious offering in HTML.

What’s eally cool about this system is that it incorporates Subscribe, Unsubscribe and Send to a friend funtions, so if I send out newsletters I can give people the choice not to receive it without getting involved in any administration.

I’ve now created a ‘web wall’ which allows users to subscribe to each of my newsletters - all 11 of them (!) and view the sites.

I can now pass the link to this ‘web wall’ around as part of my email signature and - hopefully - get people looking at my sites, subscribing to newsletters and passing on the links.

Take a look and have a play - the link is here.

I’ll tell you how I’ve integrated this link into Mozilla Thunderbird, an alternative email programme to Outlook Express, in a future post.