Sometimes people do.

http://blog.wells.ee/sometimes-people-do

by mdenny • 14 years ago

47 13 14 years ago

blog.wells.ee

sudonim2• 14 years ago

I can attest to the "Nobody wants email" myth being a myth. We started with a "Sign up to find out when we launch" form on our startup page and never planned to email until we launched. (Big mistake)

About 3 months in, with the encouragement of an email marketing guru, I started emailing people every week. People didn't unsubscribe. In fact they wrote me to tell me how valuable my little newsletter was to them. People all over the world told me it was the only newsletter from a company they read because they learned something new every week. They even forwarded it to other people in their company.

In the end, we launched, and I spun out the newsletter into it's own thing. There are over 1000 people who want me to write them an email every week. If you asked most people in tech, they would say "That's not gonna work".

It remains to be seen how well that translates into more subscriptions, but I figure if I can share what I've learned to give value to others, it probably comes back to us somehow.

bigiain• 14 years ago

Any chance of a link to your archives? I'd love to see the sort of content you wrote which got that sort of reaction.

(My email is in my profile, if you don't want to share it quite as broadly as posting it here.)

lostsock• 14 years ago

I'd also be interested if you have the archives available. My email is also in my profile.

fmela• 14 years ago

Apologies for the completely OT post, but what blog engine is this?

wells-riley• 14 years ago

It's called Svbtle. (http://svbtle.com)

FredBrach• 14 years ago

This article has a very important point. Thanks so much for having wrote it.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

When I decided to try creating a Ruby e-mail newsletter two years ago, I had people saying e-mail was old technology, they wanted RSS, it wouldn't work, etc. And I've heard that many times over the years. Now at 74k subscribers (across four newsletters) and it has become my main business by accident. My takeaway is that it's better to pay attention to what people do, rather than what they say.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Paying attention to what people do is often a good thing, but how many subscribers would you have if you had gone with blog+rss?

simonh• 14 years ago

Who knows, but they'd almost certainly be different readers.

Not everyone uses an RSS reader and people forget to check blogs. I have most of my favourite blogs bookmarked, but every now and then I come across a blog I used to read occasionally and just forgot about, or end up googling for a blog or web site I vaguely remember seeing once.

There are a few online 'magazines' I read published in PDF form. I really wish they'd send out an email when a new issue comes out with a link to download it, but as it is I keep forgetting to visit the web site regularly to get the latest copy.

For many people, email is still the main push protocol they use to receive content and it's still useful even to those of us that also use other options.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

I can actually attempt an answer at that as I launched the e-mail newsletter off the back of the most popular Ruby blog which I also run.

I grew the blog to 25,000 RSS subscribers (as measured by FeedBurner) between 2006 and 2010 but the engagement and what those readers actually do pales in comparison to my 15,000 e-mail subscribers who click more and open more in vastly greater levels. I now believe, like many, that the numbers FeedBurner give out are mostly BS and don't give any hint of engagement at all.

Separate to this I've built a 30k strong JavaScript e-mail newsletter without any blog. This is a larger regular subscription base than most other JavaScript related sites I know of.. with the exception of Ajaxian which is now half dead.

So I can't say for sure because maybe I could make a blog work better, but in terms of engagement, how much money I can earn, etc, e-mail has been a huge win over blogging.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Link 404 for me.

stan_rogers• 14 years ago

The domain seems to be gone altogether now -- there's just a generic search results page based on the domain name (wells, water, get well soon cards, that sort of thing) at the main domain and at www, and the blog subdomain is all 404.

Sometimes people do.

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