Debating on adding a newsletter
Published — 2 minute read
Newsletters are the latest shiny thing that a lot of content creators are gravitating toward. Myself included. But last week I decided to kill off my newsletter after producing it for around 18 months.
Why? Because they’re painful and expensive to manage.
It’s rough that newsletters cost so much.
I’ve been thinking of adding a newsletter to my site recently just to notify people of new posts, but I haven’t seriously looked into pricing yet. When I used WordPress, I took advantage of Jetpack’s free subscriptions feature, but this is a static site, so I have no such niceties.
The reason I think it’s important to have a newsletter for new posts is that not everyone is technical or motivated enough to install and use an RSS reader. And if one is trying to make their site more IndieWeb, you’re going to want a way for people to still get your blog posts without social media, and email remains the best way to do that.
However, you should know your audience, and if your blog is more technical, chances are your audience is too, and probably already uses RSS. Kev Quirk’s blog is, and I think shutting down his newsletter was the right move for him.
I’m not sure if adding a newsletter is the right move for me, especially for the cost involved. I have a couple friends that are technical enough to use an RSS app but can’t be bothered to install yet another app, so subscribing to my blog posts via email would work well for them. But I can’t justify the recurring cost.