New wordpress newsletter services
This week I’m going to write something of a personal announcement. As I have had a lot of technical difficulties with my former newsletter service, GetResponse, over the last few months, I have decided to ditch it and move on. It took a while to find something I needed, but I found something that integrates nicely with WordPress…
What went wrong
So for the longest time, around the time I started my blog, I used a service called GetRevue. I liked it a lot because it was simple and tightly integrated with Twitter before it became X. When Twitter was destroyed by a “philanthropist” so was GetRevue and the service was shut down. By then I had built up a small following of people who received my monthly newsletter.
So I switched to GetResponse as it was hyped as one of the best newsletter services around. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as the previous service and it took a lot more time to create a monthly newsletter. But I stuck with it because I was tired of looking for alternatives. Then suddenly I started getting a lot of spam bots subscribing to my newsletter and GetResponse asked me to install several security measures. They didn’t seem to work and I finally gave up as it was taking up too much of my time.
Where I am now
So I did some more searching and found something interesting. As my website is a self-hosted WordPress site, I thought, why not self-hosted a newsletter service? Again, I did not really find what I was looking for, but I did find something else. I found MailPoet, a WordPress plugin. It is very convenient as I do not have to use another service and can create my newsletters right here in the backend.
I will be sending out my first newsletter this month and I really hope it works well. So to those who have already subscribed: Sorry for missing the last two months. Hopefully we can continue as usual now. And to those who have not yet subscribed: Want to know what the newsletter is about?
What is the newsletter about
First of all: It is short. I also subscribe to some newsletters and I never get through them. I have so much to read from day to day that I can’t read several newsletters at the same time. So I decided to keep it short and monthly (instead of weekly). The newsletter is mainly a reminder and collection of the current month’s posts. In case you missed one, the newsletter gives you a nice overview. But wait, there is more.
I start the newsletter with some personal notes. What I have been doing this month or what I am about to do. The idea is to give a small window into the life of an academic and what we have to deal with. These are usually topics that I do not cover in my blog posts. Sometimes there are useful links. I also had a section called “Tweet of the Month”, but for obvious reasons that has become “Toot of the Month”, where I present something nice or funny from Mastodon. That’s about it. Curious? It’s free and saves you money. You can subscribe right here on the right!
