I've converted my newsletters to a new blog

While I’ve been blogging since 2005, at https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ , I’ve been publishing the first two of my monthly e-newsletters all the way back to 1997 (I added another one in 2003, and had planned to launch a fourth son).

At the time I started my zines, I had one website, spam was almost a non-issue, and you could be pretty sure that when you sent an e-mail it would be not only delivered but likely read. At that time, I only had one website: https://www.frugalfun.com , which went live in the spring of 1996.

But I’ve been thinking for quite some time that e-newsletters have lost much of their effectiveness I know that e-mail deliverability is by no means certain anymore, and you can’t rely on getting a bounce notice if it doesn’t get in.

Also, I know that lots of mail that does make it through gets deleted unread. This is certainly true in my own ebox, where I simply can’t compete with the volume of incoming mail. A few weeks ago I started a big purge and got my inbox down from 2400 to 800–it’s already back up to 1190, after five days on a business trip. And that doesn’t count the approximately 100-2009 per day that I throw out in my spamfilter–or the dozen or so that I try to rescue from the spamfilter but never arrive (9ne of my biggest peeves).

This month I asked the 8000 subscribers of my two largest zines if the format was working for them–and got very definite feedback that while the content is valued, the long-form single-email text only format doesn’t work.

But I *know* HTML email doesn’t work. I’ve seen the hideous results when they are corrupted in transmission, and I also know a lot of spam filters automatically catch anything with HTML.

After thinking it over, I decided to convert to a blog. Yesterday, I sent the first one in the new format–a brief email with a sentence or two about each story and a link to the TOC on my blog (which in turn has live links to all the articles).

I’m sure it will evolve (and hopefully take less time to set up, now that I can refer back to certain repeating articles, such as the one about my books).

We’ll see what happens..