AP 0596: Should I Use Blog Post Excerpt Email Subscriptions?

AskPat 596 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 596 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from Vladimir, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is ZipRecruiter.com. With ZipRecruiter.com if you're building your team or looking to fill some positions as you expand your business, you can post your job description to 100 + job sites with just one or two clicks. This includes social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, all, again, with a single click. You can find candidates in any city or industry nation wide. Just post once and you'll see qualified candidates roll in to your to use interface. No juggling emails or calls to your office or anything like that. You can quickly screen candidates, rate them and hire them fast and almost a million people, or businesses have actually used ZipRecruiter to help them recruit. Right now, you can try it for free by going to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/pat. Try it out for free.

Here's today's question from Vladimir.

Vladimir: Hi Pat, my name is Vladimir Lugo from VladimirLugo.com, and I have been enjoying your podcasts on the run, literally. Yes, tennis shoes and headphones included. I've been wanting to ask you this question for awhile. I have been several bloggers for the past six months or so, and I see the camp is fairly divided when it comes to the content of their emails.

There are basically two groups: those who include the whole text of their latest post, and those who include just a description of the post with a link to visit their blog to read the rest. Here's a question. Is it better for me to email full content of posts or to email the excerpt with a link to the blog?

That's it. Thank you for the things you do, and best wishes.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up Vladimir. Thank you so much for the question. It depends on what you're sending in terms of. Is it a broadcast email that you personally write, and you're sending the full excerpt? Or, what I'm assuming you mean, is your RSS feed or blog broadcasts, so whenever you come out with a new post, people who have subscribed, they get an email notifying them that you have come out with a new post. The question is, well, do you send them the full thing or that excerpt and/or summary and then drive them back to your website with a click of a link.

Really, it's based on your personal preference, Vladimir. There are pros and cons to each. You know, the pro to sending the full text is, you know, a lot of people will subscribe and expect the full text. They feel like they got your content the way it needs to be. Plus there are of course links within those posts as well, so it's not like people are never going to come to your website if you're doing some good interlinking.

I'd prefer when I subscribe for the purposes of reading a post to read the full post. It's just extra work for people who have to read the summary and click through. Again, it also depends on the expectations that people have when they subscribe. Are you saying hey, if you want to get notified with a summary of my posts when they come out to you, you can subscribe and you'll get sent a summary. Or, if you say subscribe and you'll get the full post sent to your email, and then you only give them the summary, well then that's kind of going along with what you said. That's not going to feel very good. For me as a reader, I'd prefer to see the full post. That's why I subscribe to few blogs here and there, so I don't have to go and visit the sites. Although, I typically, like I said earlier, end up on their sites in one way, shape or form, or take actions based on the call to actions that are in that post.

Now, there's one other things that I can suggest to you, and that is creating a digest email. This is something that I've done on smartpassiveincome.com, and it's worked out really well. I've actually, I do have an email list, and I do send out broadcasts for posts sometimes across the board, across all segments of my lists. In that case, I won't even send the full post or a summary. I'll send a personal looking email, one with copy specific about what that post is about or what that podcast episode is about, and try to get people to click through to read the post. In that case, I want people to click on the website. More often than not, there's a specific reason, because I want them to take some sort of call to action, and having them on that page already is going to be very helpful. That's a blog broadcast where I write it personally and it's meant to drive traffic to that site or back to the website.

The digest is a particular segment of my audience who have subscribed to get a weekend digest with specifically summaries of all of the content across all the different mediums or platforms that I post on: blog posts, SPI TV, and also the podcast. In that sense, it just makes sense that it's the summary and not the full text, because if it was the full text for each of those things, it would be quite a lot of content in a very, very long email. Again, the purpose, getting them to click through.

But, if I have people subscribed to the RSS feed, I would prefer—and I've changed it over time, I'm experimenting, continually checking out to see what works best, so if it's otherwise that you might be part of an experiment or whatever—but I typically like to send the full posts for individual blog posts that get sent out. I do have a handful of people who are subscribed to my feedblitz email which is one that people could subscribe for way back in the day that will send out or should be sending out full text posts because that's what they subscribe for at that time.

Anyway, Vladimir, I hope that answers your question. Again, I think it is just up to you and what you feel is best or you might even want to survey your audience to see what they like best. I thank you for listening to the show, especially while you run. Maybe you can connect with the Mark in the previous Episode 595, who's actually creating resources for runners too, which is pretty cool.

Anyway, thank you so much. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show, and I also want to thank everyone else out there who's asking questions because without your questions, there wouldn't be AskPat. It would just be Pat, which is pretty much my other show, so AskPat, this is all down to you guys. I really appreciate the questions. Keep sending them in. Head on over to askpat.com. You can ask right there on that page, and we'll field those questions and answer some of them here on the podcast five days a week.

I also want to thank all of you just for your awesomeness, and also Bruce Lee because he is providing us the quote of the day here, and that quote is: the successful warrior is the average man with laser like focus.

Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.