One of the most under-used features at leading autoresponder service Aweber is the Blog Broadcast. This is where your readers can receive your blog posts in their inbox. It’s great for your readers who either don’t understand RSS readers/aggregators, or haven’t had a chance to set it up.

Here’s how the blog broadcast feature works:

Your readers put their name and email into an opt-in form, just like they normally would to start getting emails from you. But instead of you having to set up a follow up series and manually send out broadcast messages, the system sends the emails for you when your blog is updated.

All you have to do is paste your website’s RSS feed, and let Aweber do the rest. Then, every time you update your blog with a new article, it will be sent to your readers.

Of course, you can control this frequency. You can set it up so you have to have a certain number of new blog posts before the broadcast gets sent out. Or you can set it up so that on a particular day of the week, all of the new blog posts since the prior week’s broadcast gets sent out.

This last setting is what I am doing now here at AskBobTheTeacher.com. Every Friday, I automatically send a weekly digest of the week’s posts I’ve written (you can subscribe to it near the comments section below).

Also, you should know that the entire blog post doesn’t get sent. Each post in the digest is an excerpt, with a Read More link to bring your subscribers back to your blog. This is an especially important benefit to the blog broadcast feature as getting repeat traffic to your blog results in more comments, and a more active community.

All these settings are inside the Messages tab, under Blog Broadcast, inside your Aweber account (get one here).

A few other tips about this feature:

  • Use a different list just for the blog digest
  • Use the HTML templates that are provided for you, but feel free to add your own links for the newsletter
  • Do not mess with anything between the {tags}. These will be filled in automatically.
  • If you include images in the HTML version, make sure you have Alt-text for people that have their images turned off

I suggest you do NOT send out a broadcast after every new post. Instead, wait for 3 new posts, or send once per week. Your subscribers will appreciate it!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Have more questions about how to use Aweber to build your list and communicate with your current and future customers? Check out my autoresponder training and video tutorials.

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