RSS Newsletters

I have a profound dislike for Newsletters, mostly because I receive too many unwanted ones. Unsubscribing is risky enough, so my current solution is to have a Thunderbird filter that tags the message as spam. Works quite well.

As a business owner, I do have to think about marketing though. I have resisted sending out email Newsletters to-date because that would be quite hypocritical of me. I have been toying with the idea of a rich RSS Newsletter of-late and I think this is the approach I am going to take. RSS Newsletters have significant benefits over traditional email campaigns:

1) 100% permission-based…you don’t get to see it unless you consume the feed. None of the quadruple opt-in with triple permission acknowledgement and the kitchen sink required for email.

2) ZERO cost and reliable … no error-prone sending process using email software that somehow always finds a way to fail.

3) Minimal effort … create the Newsletter, post it and you are done.

4) General trackability … no covert email beacons and the like. If someone views it, you know it.

Interestingly enough, I had an email correspondence with Christoph Richner, the creator of the free Raccoom XML framework which I use in all my modules. I respect Chris’ development skills as the Raccoom framework is way better than any RSS code I have seen anywhere, including DotNetNuke. I think Chris and I may collaborate on making the Speerio NewsWire module into something quite interesting. One feature that will be in for sure is RSS Newsletters. I will post again once I have more detail.