Newsletter storage query

07 Aug 07 10:39 pm

Hi icj1,

I'm not sure what you mean by "shroud the newsletter by links to your site". Are you talking about being able to add extra content to the newsletter with links to your site? Or being able to get people to visit your site on the way to downloading the newsletter?

I don't really see the benefit in providing your newsletter series in PDF form. You can just turn your newsletters into HTML webpages and provide them that way. Send out your newsletter and direct people to click on a link back to your website to read the full article.

If you're providing things as PDFs you're going to reduce the number of people who actually end up reading your material, since it's an extra hoop they need to jump through to get to your content. Not many people will bother unless your content is REALLY good... and since you say you're using 3rd party material (no offense) it's probably not going to be all THAT awesome.

If you can explain to us what you're trying to achieve we can probably give you a bit more advice :)

All the best,
Mark

Edit: Ok, it occurs to me that you might not be talking about a "newsletter" in the sense of "something that gets sent out a couple of times a week" but more in the sense of a "special report" or some other one-time PDF product. In that case, yes that method looks fine. To enable people to download the PDF just host it somewhere on your site and provide people with the link to it.

08 Aug 07 10:38 pm

this would mean extra pages filling up in my website folder. I'm aiming at newsletter running ad-infinitum...

I'm not sure what type of hosting you have, but unless you've been restricted to like, 5mb of storage space, I don't think you're going to have a problem with running out of space for your newsletter. There's not much difference between serving the newsletter as a PDF and having it as a web page in terms of this anyway. PDF would probably take up more space! And if you got your HTML page production streamlined then it would be much faster and easier to make extra web pages.

Have you thought about publishing your newsletter as blog posts? Kinda like we do (sporadically) with Affilorama. Each newsletter is a blog post, and then you just blast it out to your list to let them know about it. That gives you a content management system to keep things running nicely, and you can customize your blog with recommended products.

If I send at a rate of say, two newsletters per week, for how long would you suggest it should run?

Depends on what kind of newsletter series you're running. A lot of people do "mini-courses" on an auto-responder which would run for a number of weeks, perhaps months. For those you should create separate web pages, rather than the blog idea. But that's ok, because the number is limited. Then there's the standard newsletter list which is "live" and better for news and updates. People can go on that in addition to the "mini course" or after completing the mini course, and that could run indefinitely on a blog type system.

I think you're much better off creating web pages instead of PDFs for the reason I mentioned in my last reply. Investigate using a blog system like Wordpress to present the content... it'll be much more "future proof" if its in a content management system.

All the best,
Mark