iRadar: 2 Dead Simple Ways To Start Your Own Email Newsletter

Thursday, December 02, 2010

2 Dead Simple Ways To Start Your Own Email Newsletter

2 Dead Simple Ways To Start Your Own Email Newsletter: "

Regardless of what you may have heard, email is not dead. It’s still a viable way to deliver content to people and a lot of companies still use it heavily. In most cases, however, creating your own email newsletter can be difficult and even costly. It’s this reason that a lot of us choose to shy away from it altogether, at least until now.

In this article, I’ll show you two extremely simple services that let you create your own newsletter and set the price you’d like to charge people to subscribe to it. Whether you want others to access what you know for free or not, you can get it done easily. Do you know enough about something that people would want to pay for that information?

Why Would I Want An Email Newsletter?

As I alluded to, a newsletter is a way for you to show off your expertise. If you’re an expert in sports, start a sports newsletter. If you’re funny, start a comedy newsletter. It’s another opportunity for you to display your knowledge in a given area.

If you write a blog, a newsletter can complement your content. Tell your community to sign up for your newsletter for “added bonuses” or “best tips”. If you aren’t already creating content, a simple email newsletter can be a great place to start.

Letter.ly

email newsletter

Letter.ly is the first service I would like to talk about. It’s a service that allows you to create a very basic newsletter and is very easy to use. The first thing you do is go to the Letter.ly homepage and click sign up. Once you do that, you’ll be prompted for information (name, email, password) to create your account.

email marketing newsletter

On the next page, just fill out some information about your newsletter, such as its name, the URL you would like to associate with it, and the cost you would like to charge users to subscribe. Click Done!, and the signup process is complete. Don’t worry if you aren’t quite sure what type of newsletter you want to create, the information you submit can always be changed later.

create email newsletter

[Note]: With Letter.ly, the minimum you can charge for your newsletter is $0.10. If you want to give away subscriptions to friends/supporters, you can enter their email addresses into your dashboard and they will get free copies.

After you have everything straightened around, start sharing your newsletter link with people and creating content. Payments are made through Amazon and you can publish letters as often as you want. You will even be given a secret email address that you can send content to in order to create a letter.

Other features include the ability for subscribers to reply to your letters to privately comment back to you, set up auto-publishing to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and ability to unsubscribe whoever you choose.

TinyLetter

TinyLetter offers the same concept, but is different in its approach.

create email newsletter

To get started, head over to the homepage, enter your desired username, and click Continue. Then, like Letter.ly, you’ll be prompted for information about your account credentials and newsletter settings.

create email newsletter

Here’s where the two services differ a bit. With TinyLetter, you can be a bit more creative with your newsletter. Click on the Design and settings link on your dashboard and you’ll be taken to a page where you can make customizations. You can select a background image, choose where the subscription box goes, pick an email address background, and enter a YouTube embed code.

email newsletter

You can see your list of subscribers and old email newsletters at any time.

[Note]: By default, newsletters you create with TinyLetter will be free to subscribe to. If you would like to create a paid newsletter, you can do so by signing up here.

Conclusion

As you can see, both of these services are really very similar. Letter.ly seems to be more stripped down and business-oriented, which keeps it simple for you in its minimalistic style, while TinyLetter has more of a fun factor that could be better suited for the creative at heart. It’s really personal preference when deciding which one to use.

Now that you know how it works, you can begin serving up content to the public. If you’re into the whole newsletter idea, check out some of the other services we’ve covered.

Will you be starting your own email newsletter? What will yours be about?

Image Credit: sita ram

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