Should you use a newsletter?
Many sites on the web have a newsletter where people receives the updated content of the site, the links to the articles or material recently published and so on.
Some blogs (not much) have the same newsletter: through that, owners send their latest news to the visitors, sometimes in the form of a digest.
Should you create one for your blog? It depends. First of all, a newsletter must be well-written, must have nice content well formatted, must be in plain-text and must have a low frequency (e.g., once a week).
A newsletter should be quite short to read: in this case, if you post a lot, make sure to have only the excerpts of the most important news of your blog, and nothing more.
A newsletter must also include a footer and a header, and inside the footer there should be enough information to unsubscribe the newsletter. As of these days, a newsletter must also have a double opt-in/double opt-out mechanism to prevent people being spammed.
So, do you want to comply to these rules? Remember that people subscribing to the newsletter are user that will come to your site if you incentivate them, otherwise they won’t: therefore, in the newsletter always place links to the articles on the site more than to other sites.
To end this post, let me clarify you that writing a good newsletter, once a week, no more than 25-40 text lines may take you up to half an hour/an hour, and therefore it might be heavy to carry on if you blog part-time.
