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I have a pet peeve to share regarding the "newsletters" some members of this industry are sending out.
Apparently many people still don't get what an RSS feed is. If you don't get RSS…GET IT. It's a great way to keep up with your favorite sites. You can get all your favorite feeds aggregated to you favorite RSS "reader" such as GoogleReader or many others that act as a "homepage" as well as a reader.
Now here is the pet peeve. Nowadays, pretty much every website, blog, whatever comes with an RSS feed. Most of the time there will even be a little RSS icon right up in your browser. If you have a strength, bodybuilding, or "fitness" website (or any kind of website) you need to know what RSS is and how to use it to some extent.
Many people also have a newsletter. Why do they have a newsletter? Because they want your email address on their list. Why do they want your email address? So they can market to you. They want to sell you their products. Sure they are not going to plug a product in every newsletter but eventually a product will be plugged.
anything
There is nothing wrong with that. I'm not criticizing the concept. What I am criticizing, however, is what I see as sort of 'breaking a contract'. When a person agrees to give your their e-mail address for your newsletter you are implying that they will be getting something unique. Information that they would not receive had they not signed up for your newsletter.
Now, every little post you make on your site shows up in your RSS feed. AUTOMATICALLY. I can receive your 'syndicated' content, WITHOUT giving you my email address.
Yet, most 'newsletters' are simply a heads up on every post someone makes on their site. That is not news, dude. I can point and click to see what you've posted. I don't even need the feed. I don't need to know every time you throw up a darn youtube video. Do you know how many emails I receive in a day? Not to mention my various other "inboxes".
You see what I'm getting at? I find it extremely pretentious and grating to get an email every time someone "twitters". It is disrespectful of my time AND my level of sophistictation. WE KNOW that you didn't spend more than 5 minutes putting up that YOUTUBE video, dude. Because we just got finished putting one up ourselves. Hello.
But I can hear the argument coming. Some people might like to get posts in their email. RSS AGAIN. It's called FEEDBURNER. It's not hard. You can enable an email option so that people can receive your site feed in their inbox.
If I get your newsletter and receive a 'newsletter' every single day..I will unsubscribe. And if I get your newsletter, then check your RSS feed and find that they are identical..I WILL UNSUBSCRIBE.
An example of a great newsletter in this industry is the newsletter of Eric Cressey. He's not the only good one of course but he readily comes to mind because his newsletters are FULL of useful information that is unique from his other postings. Plus of course entries pointing to other things to read, etc…
But another practice that is not so cool is to have people subscribe to newsletters and then place links to your newsletters pages up on your site so that anybody can read them without subscribing. I know, I know, it's 'past issues'. Well, HOW WOULD YOU FEEL if, after the paper boy drops off your newspapers he then goes to all the neighboring houses and drops of yesterdays issue FOR FREE.
My email address is valuable. It is kind of like money. I don't want just anybody to get it!
I have a newsletter to which a few people have graciously subscribed. But I haven't sent much out because I don't have enough time and I haven't had anything "news worthy". Every thing is on my RSS feed. There is nothing on this site that you can't get in the form of a feed. I haven't advertised a link to every single feed but they are available. Here are some additional feeds for those who want more specific subjects.
As a matter of fact I just changed the main GUS feed to make it better. I'm learning as I go along.
I'd rather sit on your email address, keep it private and protected…sacred if you will..rather than to ever send you junk and clog up your in-box.
And now, in case you were wondering why I needed another blog in addition to GUStrength's Blog you can see that this blog is just a bit more loose and this post is just a bit more rantish!
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