Below is an excerpt of a message I sent to subscribers to the Common Craft Email Updates (basically an email newsletter). I have seriously neglected the updates lately and made the call to stop writing them in the future and hope people subscribe via RSS.
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When I started Common Craft over two years ago, I wanted/needed to build an audience and I saw email updates as a viable way to do that. It made sense to me… I would blog and then cull out the popular posts, put them in an email and build another channel for people to hear why I have to say.
However, I found that my readership of the blog, particularly via RSS, grew much faster than my subscriber list for the email updates. Whereas I have hundreds of subscribers via RSS, the email list hasn’t broken 100 in over 2 years. I began to question the value and reasoning of doing both.
As if the empirical data weren’t enough, it was obvious to me what fit better with my workflow. No matter what, I will blog- that is the constant in this equation. By having email updates that are separate from my blog, I have a *second* thing that I am responsible for writing, maintaining, etc. In times of busy-ness the “second things�? take a back seat, which is where the updates have stayed in 2005.
What is interesting to me is that RSS has emerged as a replacement, and one that does not represent something more for me to do. It happens *automatically* as a result of my blogging.
Further, RSS adoption is reaching a level where I can feel confident that my readers know enough to subscribe via RSS if they wish to remain informed. This was not true two years ago. You can subscribe to my rss feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommonCraft
And so, I’m going to stop the Common Craft Email Updates. There will be one more in a month or so that will be related to my plans for 2006, which is a tertiary reason for stopping the updates.
Thanks for reading this far, for encouraging me to this point and to staying subscribed. I’m still a believer in email, but I just justify the time right now. Have a great weekend!
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