Email RSS Feed vs Newsletter

My good friend Michael Goodman and I have been having a discussion about email newsletters vs email RSS feeds.

If you've been to my website, You notice that I have a newsletter. And if you look at the sidebar of this blog, you'll notice that you can sign up to receive the RSS feed of this blog via email. In other words, I have implemented both.

You would think that the email RSS feed would make the newsletter superfluous, and I predict that in the not-to-distant future the classic email newsletter will be dead. For now, however, more people sign up for the newsletter than the email'ed RSS feed.

Comments

[Ferdinand Reinke]

One interesting use is to aim an RSS feed at a "secret" email address. It allows content to queue in the email box with total control. No risk of spam. No overflowing jumble of messages. So, while the email newsletter, what I'd call an ezine, isn't going away anytime soon, the email addresses that one is getting may not be what you think they are (i.e., throwaway a la bloglines temporary). Very interesting. fjohn

[Michael Goodman]

Thanks for posting the discussion Dave, I am quite curious about what your readership here thinks of the notion and I will certainly present it on the AzSalesPros list as a discussion item soon. It happened because I saw someones newsletter that was a standard e-zine kind of presentation though it looked very HTML-ish. It occured to me that with the interactiveness of a blog, there would be tremendous power in creating both your personal expertise in the world as well as an interactivity with your readers. I may give it a shot on a seperate blog in my spare time.

Yeah 0k, spare time is a punch line these days, isn't it?