WordJot: Combo Newsletter and Blog
March 26th, 2008 (2:00pm) Mike Gunderloy 5 CommentsTweet This
Hard though it may be for a web worker to imagine, there are still folks who don’t “get” RSS. In some pockets, the email newsletter reigns supreme, despite the hassles of spam-blocking and uncertain delivery. If you’re dealing with an audience who want or need the newsletter option, startup WordJot has a new idea. Their service looks a whole lot like a hosted blog with a traditional RSS feed – but your blog also gets a “Subscribe by email” box at the top. Readers who put their address there will get your future postings right in their inbox.
The WordJot editor is a fairly stripped-down WYSIWYG editor; you can do fonts and colors and bullets, but if you want something fancy you’ll need to drop into HTML mode. On the other hand, “fancy” doesn’t do well in most email readers; the basics WordJot offers come across fine to most email clients these days. The software also supports categories, and subscribers can choose which categories they want to get via email. You can try WordJot for free, but only up to three posts; after that, it’s $39 per month.
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Is this really worth $39 per month – you can do pretty much the same with FeedBurner (for free) unless I’m missing something?
I’m also wondering why this is necessary. Feedburner lets bloggers offer a “subscribe by email” option that delivers a nicely formatted email version of a blog. More than a third of my readers use it. Even embedded Flash and other media survive the conversion to email, at no cost to me.
If you have a blog, you can do this now with FeedBlitz (www.feedblitz.com), which also supports IM and Twitter distribution as well as email, RSS and web. If you don’t have a blog, FeedBlitz makes an RSS feed and web archive for you as well as mailing your content to subscribers. FeedBlitz is available in free and premium versions, and has an ad network to help monetize your mailing lists.
Phil Hollows
Founder
FeedBlitz
http://www.feedblitz.com
I’m similarly mystified by this. The options mentioned (Feedblitz and Feedburner) work just fine and are free or near-free. Also many blogging packaged like WordPress have an email subscriber feature/plug-in.
Why on earth would someone pay a fairly hefty $39/month for a feature like this? Can you tell us if we are missing something and what the advantage to this service is?
Hi folks, thanks for taking the time to comment. Here’s a few thoughts about WordJot which hopefully makes clearer what we’re doing:
- WordJot is aiming to be a simple, all in one service.
- As WordJot is in beta mode, and we’re just getting started, we only have one account plan at the moment. This may change in the future, the pricing may change when we come out of beta, and ideally we will eventually offer a free version.
- FeedBlitz isn’t free either, and their newsletter plan prices can be found here http://www.feedblitz.com/newsletter/pricing.asp
- The WordJot price includes hosting and technical support.
- Because WordJot is built around sending mail, the system supports subscriptions to separate categories and posting to specific categories. This for example allows a business to send a post to staff, but not customers. As far as I know Feedburner doesn’t support this kind of thing.
Hope that helps, feel free to ask anything else.