My Daily Links Newsletter Experiment

• Tweet
• 

• Tweet

I’ll just come right out and say it, I really like Google+.  I know what you’re thinking, “Everyone says it’s a ghost town”, “None of my friends are on it”, “What wine goes with Cap’n Crunch?”…whoops not relevant to this discussion..

Regardless I think that G+ has the versatility to be the place where I can post information that I want to keep track of and which I think other people would be interested in as well.  It’s become my base of operations, so to speak, for my online persona.

Google + Profile

From my profile I can share links to websites, interesting pictures, stories, infographics, longer form opinion pieces along with relevant comments and I’m not limited to a tiny amount of characters that limits what I think, and want you to know.  I know ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ but on some social media sites it hinders rather than helps.

The Newsletter

To that end I’ve created a newsletter that takes all of the “Public” posts that I make in Google+ and sends them out to my subscribers.  This is a different list than the SyberBytes Newsletter, it’s a quick hit of things I find on the Interwebs, which you can see even if you’re not interested in Google+ (but you should be).

I’m using a site http://pluss.aiiane.com/ to proxy my Google+ stream and then I feed it into Google FeedBurner so that I have a nice, clean RSS feed to pass on to whatever service I wish.

How Do I Create the Newsletter?

For the newsletter I use Aweber, which is the best email autoresponder service out there in my opinion, and utilize the Blog Broadcast function to automatically send out an email at 10 AM Central Time each day.  The email is a template which the function automatically fills with my data.  Complete with links, pretty pictures, and personalized for the reader using special pieces of code to insert names and such.

Other email services could be used for this as well.  As long as they support retrieving and posting content via an RSS feed.  I know that MailChimp supports this for example and many others use it to great effect.

I have had some good response from doing this and have quite a bit of engagement on Google+ related to my posts so I believe it’s working.  It makes it easier for me to find things, as I post most of them in one place.

Sync to Other Services

If you’re interested I also upload my posts to Twitter via ManageFlitter and to Facebook with an app called RSS Graffiti.

Much of this would not have been possible without the tips from a great article from Mike Elgan showing how he does the same kind of thing.

What Should You Do?

If you want to subscribe to my Daily Links Newsletter, just Click Here! and let me know your name and email address.

If you have any questions about how you can do this yourself just ask a question in the comments and I’ll pass on any wisdom I’ve learned from this process.

- Christopher

 Email This Post |  Print This Post

Enter Your Name and Email Below and Click