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How We Automated 99% of Our Newsletter Business
- nikanj 6y agoAutomated newsletters is better known as spam.
- sethammons 6y agoNot all newsletters are spam, far from it. Additionally, most newsletters that I subscribe to are likely automated.
- jopsen 6y agoCurious, why subscribe to news letters? My inbox is a queue.. but I read news as a stack, only the latest, discard stuff I don't make it to.
- sethammons 6y agoThere are a few products I want to keep up on without actually having to go follow up on them. There are a few newsletters I enjoy that are things like "thoughts of the day" type things. A few that are technology based and either point to updates in, say, AWS or similar. It is not too unlike an RSS feed.
- aww_dang 6y agoLost me at "I like WordPress for the ease of SEO"
- milesvp 6y agoYeah, that one confused me too. There’s a checkbox when you setup wordpress the first time that says something about search engines, maybe that’s what he’s referring to? Could be a number of plugins that help with some aspects of SEO that google will soon penalize for. My experience with high traffic sites is that most of the things that helped our SEO were things I’d consider basic hygiene along with generally better than average content. There’s not much wordpress can do for that, in fact it will actively hurt you with it’s slow page generation if you don’t have a good caching layer.
- exolymph 6y agoWordPress is insanely widely used so Google crawls it thoroughly, is the theory.
- claudiulodro 6y agoWordPress won't remove the need to write high quality content, but the markup is very easy for Google to parse and with the Yoast plugin all of the structured data is automatically handled. WP also automatically adds alt tags to images and all the other bits of metadata Google likes.
- asar 6y agoYoast has an incredibly feature-rich free version and is very easy to use for content creators. Focus-keywords, schema markup, meta title and description lengths and so much more. They've also recently extended the plugin so you can access a post's metadata really easy when querying the WP REST API (or GraphQL API), this comes in handy when using WP as a headless CMS. I don't know of a comparable solution for React or Vue but I would be glad to hear about it.
- aww_dang 6y agoReact and Vue will never score well for page speed. Basically a non-starter for SEO in the current environment.
- biznickman 6y agoI've attempted to build automated news systems in the past and have done so successfully a couple of times. However this is completely misleading as the work is not in publishing but instead is in the actual discovery, curation, and writing of content. I don't know where the joke is from but if there is one about how engineers set up a blog it would go like this. Normal person: Goes to Medium, Wordpress, or somewhere else, starts writing and clicks publish. Developer: 1. Set up ReactJS for the front end 2. Set up a build system for automated deployments 3. Sets up MongoDB to store the articles they'll be writing 4. Sets up the backend to serve up the various articles 5. Builds an integration for Wordpress that enables Wordpress to pull and push (make sure both ways) to the MongoDB system that's storing the newsletters 6. Sets up all the integrations required for SEO 7. Sets up the integration testing framework 8. Write an article 9. Clicks publish
- jl6 6y agoYou nailed it, and even included all the security steps they go through.
- juandazapata 6y agoGrey beard: 1. Opens emacs 2. Writes the post in org-mode 3. Exports to html 4. rsyncs with a remote server
- arminiusreturns 6y agoThis or asciidoc, and I literally just git to my server with post-receive hooks that push to the public webserver dir. No sftp or rsync required.
- bigiain 6y ago> with post-receive hooks that push to the public webserver dir Setting that up is just a different version of doing points 2 through 7 in the grandparent post's list... (Though your direct parent post also left out the 30 years of "getting emacs set up just the way I like it"...)
- 6y ago
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoThis is "keeping myself informed, whilst possibly having other people pay me" it's a sensible idea. I think i have a lot of side projects that with some effort might become something people would pay for (obvious thing is a auto delete flag like outlook rules in gmail)
- cdiamand 6y agoI'm in the throes of building a finance newsletter - https://topstonks.com https://topstonks.com Building all the tech to aggregate the data is fun. Putting the newsletter together every day, less so. Newsletter fatigue is a real thing. This was super inspiring though, thanks for sharing!
- mjcohen 6y agoYou might enjoy Naked Capitalism: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
- padraic7a 6y agoDid he also somehow automate the writing of that blog post? It reads like a selection of cut-ups from other posts.
- sideproject 6y agoThis is something I did with my latest project Newsy (https://newsy.co https://newsy.co) for those who are interested. We built a tool to aggregate contents from various sources (e.g. news, videos, reddit posts etc) and then put them on a simple website (something similar to HN or Reddit). The website then has a newsletter subscription feature and then latest / popular contents will be delivered.
- markhall 6y agoJust checked out Newsy and created a site. Great concept and product! Excited to see if I get any traction from it.
- triptych 6y agoWas going to try this out but the site looks very broken on my phone. (Green buttons overlapping)
- sideproject 6y agoWill work on that one! Sorry about that.
- petercooper 6y agoI just worked out I've edited and published 3607 newsletter issues over the past 10 years so I know a little bit about this and.. automating bits and pieces around the production of a newsletter is certainly time worth spent. But automating the actual inclusion of content? Maybe for certain types of content, but you don't build up a tone, a sense of audience, or a long term narrative this way.. it just becomes a link/data dump. It's not necessarily bad or unsuitable in every case, but automating curation is in most cases not a route to a long term, loyal audience IMHO.
- binaryfour 6y agoI'd be curious what their MRR is for this business.
- swyx 6y ago> "If anyone is looking for a space to compete in… Referral Marketing!" is this not already heavily competitive? have you tried getrewardful.com?
- tdeck 6y agoPerhaps this is frivolous, but why are so many random words capitalized in this article?