Eat Your Own Dog Food

Last month saw the publication of our first newsletter in a very long time!

But this time we cheated!

At the start of the year we became members of BNI - Business Networking International; an organisation whose sole purpose is to provide a venue for members to meet and exchange business referrals they have uncovered during their day-to-day business.

At these meetings, every member must present a 60 second “infomercial” about their business. We did that.

In order to generate more traffic for our web site, we decided to post these informericals to this site. You can review the previous posts in the archives.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we are a development company that specialises in business automation and software integration.

So we automated! And we integrated!

Here in WordPress land (a popular blogging tool), there is a means to communicate with the data held in trust using an API - an application programming interface - in layman’s terms: an interface (oh wait! That ain’t no layman term - sorry …..)

What it means is that we can find out about the articles posted to this blog from another program….but we didn’t have one…so we built one.

The Wordpress Publisher 9000 (real name suppressed to protect the innocent) talks directly to Wordpress and gets a list of available content.

Then it allows you to select which of those articles are to be included in your newsletter.

Finally, it pumps them out into a predefined HTML template.

Now we have a newsletter ready to be uploaded to an emailing house prior to sending it out to our subscribers.

We chose Campaign Monitor to send our email because it allows you to upload the HTML file and a ZIP file of related images, CSS style sheets and so on. The most popular one used by professional internet markers is aWeber and we intend to give it a try shortly.

So what was once an arduous task of thinking about what to write, formatting it nicely into an email and then sending it to be read by one and all (our original emailer was a home-grown program) is now a matter of clicking a few buttons, creating the raw output, tidying it up as necessary, and uploading it to Campaign Monitor!

And with built-in unsubscribe links in the email, we only need to add a subscribe form to the web site and we’re finished!

So if you are interested in finding out more please feel free to drop us a line…

Posted by Paul O'Neill on Jun 07, 2007