I have been holding back from building mailing lists. Dunno why, colour me lazy.

Anyway, I recently started to delve into this fun aspect of the biz.

One thing that interested me was the marketers who, instead of asking me to read their emails, were sending me emails linking me to their blog posts.

I liked this idea for several reasons:
1) It reduces the amount of writing I do.
2) The blog posts exist indefinately and only go to the folks on the mailing list. Mails last until they are deleted and if scanned are usually never read again.
3) The system should be easy to manage, write a post, out goes an email.

So, I did some Google work and found that I could buy custom solutions for yay much money. I could do the job by hand, which many marketers seem to be doing. Or, I could use a service to do the job.

Click, click, click - Up comes Zookoda.com These guys are giving me a free service.

I can now add a subscription form to my blogs, visitors can sign up for the newsletter (double opt-in).
Whenever I write one or more blog posts then an email is sent out at a time I schedule.
I can format the emails pretty much as I choose.

In addition I can send out emails to the list that are not part of the blog output, so I can have subscriber only offers or messages.

I have only just started to scratch the surface of this tool but I can see a lot of benefits.

Here is my humble first attempt at using Zookoda, the sub form in the top left sidebar.
At the moment I have set the script to run once per week. I will need to experiment with that setting. I must also up my posting rate here!

One thing I should try out. It looks like I can use the form code anywhere, if so one can place it on a static web page or even in an HTML email. Lots of uses for that, if it works. I will report back on that!

Andrew.