How to Put Your Newsletter on Auto Pilot

Carol Dunlop

Carol J. Dunlop is CCO at CSI Corporation, the company she founded twenty-five years ago with her husband Alvin. Carol is an Amazon #1 International Best-selling author for her book, UN-Market Your Business; 10 Ways for Savvy Entrepreneurs to Stand Out, Stop Struggling, and Start Profiting. Carol is known as “The Online WOW! Strategist.” She teaches entrepreneurs to convert marketing into money so they can find and perfect the marketing strategy they love to get more clients and live the life they want. Carol’s clients hail from cities across the U.S.A., the U.K., and Australia.

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Time is money, when it comes to creating your newsletter. It can be extremely time consuming, depending on how long it takes you to put everything together. I’m all about saving time, so when I began putting together this Biz News You Can Use series, I knew that I would have to create some timesaving measures somewhere without sacrificing quality of the information. If only there were a way to magically create my newsletter AND get it out to my subscribers.

Hold on a sec… I’ve got just the ticket. You can roll your blog articles into your newsletter and VOILA! instant content generation.

Relax, it’s pretty simple and you only need a couple things:

Your Blog articles
MailChimp account

Now you can publish your blogs as you normally do and have the newsletter sent out to your subscribers on a regular basis without even thinking about it.

Here’s how you do it.

Create and post your blog articles
Set up an RSS to Email campaign in MailChimp
Choose how often to send your newsletter
Choose one of the RSS templates
Customize to your liking
Hit the Send button

The way the service works, it will only send out a newsletter when you have new content or posts. So you can look at this as a reminder to create more great content so that your subscribers always have something to look forward to reading.

Customization

Of course, if you’re like me, you don’t work well with out-of-the-box solutions, so you might want to customize your newsletter a bit. During the setup, instead of choosing an RSS template, choose one of the other pre-designed or naked templates. Create your newsletter just as you would if it weren’t an RSS email, meaning take advantage of:

Copyblocks
Space for ads or coupons
Adding in static, ever-green content

Then use the MailChimp RSS Merge tags to place your RSS feed anywhere in the template. This way, you can pause (stop to edit) the newletter’s sending and change anything before the next issue goes out. Leave the RSS feed intact. Simply re-start the newsletter again when you’re finished editing.

RSS Feed Ideas

Create a monthly sales newsletter then publish automatically with your store specials
Showcase one of your Pinterest boards with MailChimp’s Pinterest templates.
Send out a monthly update in your newsletter of a particular category instead of everything.

These are just a few examples of how you can make it easier on yourself to get your content into the hands of your readers.

Ready to put your newsletter on autopilot but are unsure of what you need to do? Contact me for a Social Media Marketing Analysis so we can discuss your goals and how to accomplish them.

Click here to get your FREE Social Media Marketing Analysis