Somewhere along the line, it seemed like a good idea. An email newsletter to help promote my busiest site: BigBlueBall.com. I had done it before; starting and stopping without any sort of regularity. But then back in February in a moment of temporary insanity I committed to cranking them out bi-weekly.
It’s not that they are that long, or that so much time goes into pulling them together. But sometimes it’s just a drain on my brain.
Then to put the icing on the cake, I get people — subscribers mind you — that report my humble little newsletter as spam! Not a lot, but for the last issue about 7 reports were received by my email host, Constant Contact.
I hate spam. I get enough of it myself. But I detest being accused of spamming. People signed up for the newsletter. Constant Contact has stringent anti-spam requirements. They are a legitimate email service, and requests to remove yourself from the list are promptly honored.
When someone reports my email as spam, they are automatically and permanently removed from the mailing list. The newsletter has been published every two weeks for the past three months. So by now, folks have been seeing it on a regular basis. In theory, they’ve received several issues before deciding to claim the newsletter is spam. Did they bother to actually read the damn thing?
I’ll keep my eyes propped open for a few more hours and crank out another edition, but with the diminishing returns and the aggravation, I’m not sure how long it will go on. Chris Pirillo over at Lockergnome has been claiming that RSS will overtake email newsletters. Well I’ve had RSS for a while, but the jury is still out on that. I think it’s still too techie for most people.
What do you think? Am I a fool to continue the newsletter?
I like the newsletter, but it’s got to be hard to put so much work into something, and then only recieve the negative feedback. Those spam reports would be very frustrating as well!
I wouldn’t toss the newsletter yet, but perhaps dropping it down to just monthly edition would lessen the hassle?
No to the idea of a moderator volunteering to write an edition now and then?
I don’t want to overburden the moderators. I do ask for their input, and would happily accept suggestions, articles or entire newsletters if anyone is interested. Right now, I have a lot of good ideas for the next newsletter, but I just don’t have the personal bandwidth to crank them out. Maybe over the long weekend, eh?