A free alternative to email newsletters.

A free alternative to email newsletters is what we’re going to discuss here today on Phill dot Blog. Love em or hate em email marketing is still the best way to market your online gig and blog in my opinion. I have a love and hate relationship with email marketing and online newsletters.

We have all done it before, we sign up for an email newsletter on a blog and then we unsubscribe after our inboxes get blasted with hundreds of spammy emails from the person/blogger we subscribed to promoting their next big thing or an affiliate link to something they reckon we cannot do without.

I have only subscribed to a couple as they provide value and are not too ‘In Ya Face‘. As I have alluded to in This Post I also have a love and hate relationship with social media and having deleted all but one of the apps of my mobile devices I only use SM on my desktop computer. That being said my favourite is still Twitter and although I have the News Feed Eradicator installed it’s still a great place to frequent with my custom lists.

Apologies I am digressing here. This post is meant to be about email newsletters and email marking right? As I said above I love Twitter to find and nurture relationships with people like Ryan Biddulph or Anthony Gaenzle and other bloggers. A few days ago while on Twitter I came across Chris Brogan’s Twitter Profile and this is what I saw…

Did you know about that? How about Twitter for Professionals then? No!
After some research. I found that this is a free feature and it’s super easy to set up plus there are no restrictions on how many subscribe to your newsletter on Twitter and there are loads more cool features as you will soon see for yourself. Before I show you how to do this for yourself let’s have a look at my profile…

Yes I know I only have three subscribers (and yes one of those is yours truly) and I have only done 81 tweets, but hey we all got to start somewhere right? What follows is

My Step by Step guide on how to set up your free alternative to email newsletters on your Twitter Profile page.

Click here to go to your Twitter Home page then click on More. From there click on Newsletter and you will see a popup with a big blue button to Find Out More.

After clicking on the big blue Find out more button you are greeted with this page…

The rest is really easy and takes just a couple of minutes, You just click on the orange button above and sign in with Twitter. You are then taken to a page called Editing issue #1 where you can start your first newsletter here is a video showing you how…

Cool right, Well it gets a lot, Lot, LOT better than that. The next thing to do is set the subscribe section on your Twitter profile underneath your bio. As you have just signed up it’s not actually showing up there yet.

Setting the Newsletter on your Twitter Profile

At the top right click on Your Avatar > Account Settings > Integrations Tab. Simply connect to your Twitter account and then click on the Settings button under the Twitter Source. Make sure you have Show newsletter on Twitter profile checked much like this…

Many More Cool features

And there you have it, you can now grow that list for Free from your Twitter profile. I mentioned that there are many other cool features. Under the integrations tab from the Account settings, you will see that you can also connect it to Mailchimp and import your subscriber list from there. Not only that you can also create a paid version of your newsletter by connecting it to your stripe account but why anyone would want to do that I have no idea. That’s one of the things I will not do, that as well as spam you crappy content every couple of hours.

You may have noticed in the image above another cool thing. Next to my image at the top right, it has the title of the Newsletter, namely Slightly More stuff from Phill Dews. Below that is a link that goes to newsletter.phill.blog now when you sign up you get a generic link to your newsletter page off GetRevue so for even better branding and to make it look that little bit more professional let’s setup…

A Newsletter Branding Domain.

Most of you will have access to CPanel on your hosting, this is slightly technical so please bear with me on this. The first thing you need to do is to set this up is to login to your CPanel and usually at the top there is a search bar, click in there and type SUB… A box and icon with the name subdomains should appear. Click on it and there you can create a subdomain for your newsletter.

Easy right. next is to go back to the main page and in the search type Zone, click on the Zone Editor button then select Manage on the domain you just created the subdomain for. Next to filter select A and find the record for the subdomain you just created and delete it… repeat the same process for TXT…

Finally, select CNAME then click on Add Record… Make sure it’s a cname and type in the first part of your subdomain. in my case it’s newsletter. In the field marked Fully qualified domain name enter www.getrevue.co and save record. You should end up with something like this…

You are now done with your hosting CPanel. Just a word of note, as you can see my Cpanel interface is quite dark but yours may be different. However, this does not make any difference. If you like to change it hit the hosting name at the top right and select change style then you can pick the style of your CPanel interface.

We are now nearly there friend. goto back to your account page on GetRevue.co > Click on your icon > Account Settings then click on the settings tab. Scroll to the bottom and enter into the field your subdomain like below then click on save.

Unfortunately, there is no SSL for this. But I am sure GetRevue will change this in due course and when such a time arises I will update this post. In the meantime, I would be overjoyed if you would subscribe to my newsletter, especially if you have found this post useful. you can do so by visiting My Twitter Profile.

Over to you.

What do you think? Was this useful for you? Have you set up your own Twitter email newsletter. Have you learned something new today? Do you have any questions for me.