Today I published me newsletter for my entertainment site Digital Lard and I figured it was a good reason to blog about newsletters in general and how important I consider them to be for content sites.

My newsletter doesn’t particularly have a large distribution, it’s currently around the 3000 mark. However one thing I do know is that it has a very accurate member list, the software I use monitors all bounces so any invalid email addresses are removed from the list. Of course what I don’t know is how many people actually read it but the jump in visits on the release day and day after suggest to me that actually quite a few people do.

As I just mentioned we do get quite a noticeable jump in traffic on the newsletter days, and consequently income tends to be slightly up to. I think we also benefit from just reminding people that we’re there and that we have regular new content.

I suspect the weekly period of the newsletter would be too much for most sites, but we get away with it as there can be a lot of new content gets uploaded in a period of seven days. Plus many of our competitions only run for one month so any longer and there is a danger that people could miss one completely.

In terms of the content my newsletter is pretty simple, it lists just the latest updates for each of the site sections (news, reviews, competitions). In fact by keeping it this simple I have the advantage that most of the HTML is pre written using a .Net page. I simply customise the opening paragraph to make it unique.

If your running a content site and you don’t yet have a newsletter, I would recommend that you get one now. Even if you only distribute it once a month or once a quarter, it’s a great way to remind your users the your there. There are of course always problems, people accuse you of spamming even though they opted to subscribe. But problems aside I think my newsletter is a vital component of the site.

If your interested, I tried quiet a few different software packages for newsletter distribution and the one I settled on was enewsletterpro. It’s not the cheapest but has everything I need to keep my newsletter running.