Email marketing is one of the best ways to build traffic to your website as it allows webmasters to connect with their readers on a more personal level.
Email newsletters can prove to be a huge asset to just about any online business – if they’re carefully crafted, that is. With a growing online business, it becomes difficult to give each marketing effort enough time and ensure it delivers value to your readers. What if there was a way to automate email newsletter production?
In this post, I’ll show you how you can import great content so you can send out a professionally curated, quality newsletter to your subscribers. We’ll show you how we do the same with this powerful plugin to import the articles on WP News Desk to curate our weekly WP Mayor newsletter.
Let’s put everything into context before we get started!
Why Your Site Needs a Newsletter
Although social media is a powerful online marketing tool in itself, email marketing has its own set of benefits that you can’t get anywhere else. Let’s take a look at how email marketing is beneficial and how it can help you drive conversions.
Newsletters offer a great way to connect with readers, boost sales, and increase traffic!
- Connect with your viewership. By connecting with your readers on a more personal level you’re actually building a relationship with them which ultimately leads to more sales. Newsletters are a great way to keep your readers up to date with what’s happening and offer them exclusive coupons.
- Track your marketing efforts. One of the major reasons webmasters and online marketers still focus their energy towards email marketing is because it allows them to track important metrics. Whether its clicks, number of subscriptions, social media shares, or bounce rates, split testing your email newsletters can be done.
- Drive traffic to your site. Organic traffic doesn’t start flowing in from Day 1. Newsletters with strong call to actions and the promise of exclusive discount rates play a pivotal role in driving targeted traffic to your site.
Creating a newsletter for your business isn’t as daunting of a task as you might think. Once you’ve decided the goal you want it to achieve, it becomes easy to produce content for it and makes sure you stay on schedule – and WP RSS Aggregator makes it even more so.
An Overview of WP RSS Aggregator
WP RSS Aggregator
WP RSS Aggregator is the original RSS feed importer plugin for WordPress that offers a complete solution for webmasters who would like to import, merge, or display RSS or Atom feeds directly on their WordPress site. The core plugin is available free for download from the WordPress.org plugin repository and comes with the basic feature set which includes:
- Creating a feed source.
- Importing feeds from multiple RSS sources.
- Displaying feed items using shortcodes.
- Configuring feed settings (age, items per feed, pagination, etc.).
The plugin also has a range of premium add-ons that enhance its basic functionality for when you want to take things to the next level. There’s a total of eight premium add-ons including Feed to Post, Excerpts & Thumbnails, Keyword Filtering, and Full Text RSS Feeds and two bundles – Advanced Feeds Bundle and Simple Feeds Bundle.
The Advanced Feeds Bundle gives you everything you need to import content for a quality newsletter with WP RSS Aggregator. The bundle – containing Feed to Post, Full Text RSS Feeds, and Keyword Filtering – is designed to allow webmasters to build newsletters and websites that pull feeds from other sources.
Your Weekly Dose of WordPress
Be sure to subscribe to Your Weekly Dose of WordPress!
At WP Mayor we curate a weekly newsletter that is a compilation of some great posts, plugins, themes, podcasts, and tutorials from all across the WordPress blogosphere. We also publish useful business tips that are aimed at helping our readers build a successful WordPress business.
WP News Desk provides you with all the latest WordPress news from around the world. It showcases the latest posts and podcasts from over 100 of the top WordPress resource websites.
For our newsletter, we use the articles imported on WP News Desk to curate top quality posts for our subscribers using WP RSS Aggregator. Mark Zahra reveals how he set it all up in his post on How to Set Up a News Aggregation Site with WordPress & WP RSS Aggregator – definitely worth a read!
Hopefully, you’re convinced that creating a quality newsletter will work wonders for your online business. In the next section, we’ll show you how you can do so (just like we did!) with the WP RSS Aggregator plugin.
Importing Content for a Newsletter
While you can browse hundreds of websites every week, handpick the absolute best articles and then publish them through your newsletter, why go through all of that trouble when you’ve got the WP RSS Aggregator plugin? With this plugin installed and its Feed to Post add-on giving you access to advanced functionality, you can easily curate a quality newsletter for your business and set it up to go out every week.
In this section, we’ll show you how you can use the WP RSS Aggregator plugin to curate your weekly newsletter. To start things off, log into your WordPress website and ensure that WP RSS Aggregator and Feed to Post are both installed and activated. In our tutorial, we’ll be using the MailPoet Newsletters plugin to create the newsletter.
Feed to Post Settings
You’ll want to make sure your Feed to Post settings are configured before you begin the tutorial. Here’s a quick look at the General settings we’re using for this demonstration.
Remember to configure the Feed to Post settings.
You can configure them yourself by navigating to RSS Aggregator > Settings and clicking on the Feed to Post tab.
Add a New Feed Source
Step 1: Navigate to RSS Aggregator > Add New from the WordPress dashboard in order to add a new feed source.
Step 2: Give your new feed source a name. I’ll call this one Feeds from WP News Desk.
Add a new feed source to import content from.
Step 3: Add in the Feed Source Details where the RSS aggregator will import the content from:
- The URL determines the feed source. I added the URL to WP News Desk’s homepage.
- Limit allows you to specify how many posts you’d like to import at a time.
- Select Link to enclosure if you’d like the feed items to link to the URL in the enclosure tag.
- Tick the Unique titles only box if you only want to display feed items with unique titles.
Note: For help filling out the Feed to Source settings, please visit our comprehensive documentation in which we explain what each field means in detail.
Step 4: Click the Validate feed link below the URL box to make sure the feed source you’ve entered is valid.
Make sure the feed source is valid.
Step 5: Click the Publish Feed button.
Note: By now we’ve added a single feed source. If you’d like to import content from multiple sources, follow the steps given above to add as many feed sources as you would like.
Create a Newsletter With MailPoet Newsletters
Step 1: Navigate to MailPoet > Newsletters from the WordPress dashboard.
Step 2: Click on the Create a new email button on the following screen.
Create a new newsletter with MailPoet.
Step 3: In the first step, add in the main details for your newsletter and click Next step to proceed.
- Type of newsletter.
- When to send it.
- Subject line.
- Lists.
Give your newsletter a name.
Step 4: Drag and drop the available page elements onto the newsletter preview area.
Drag and drop page elements to create your newsletter’s structure.
Step 5: Configure the selection options.
- Post type. Select Posts from the drop down list.
- Categories and tags. If you’ve added categories and tags then you can add them here.
- Post status. Since our Feed to Post is configured to save posts as drafts, I’ve selected Draft.
Select the imported posts that you’d like to display.
Step 6: Configure the Display and insert options for the posts you’ve selected.
- Display options. Select from excerpt, full post, and title only to display on your newsletter. You can also select a title format and title alignment.
- Batch insert options. I’ve chosen to sort the imported posts from newest to oldest.
You can configure how the posts will be displayed.
Step 7: Click the Next step button to continue once you’ve designed your newsletter.
Step 8: Add in the Sender and Reply-to name & email details.
Let’s add some final touches.
Step 9: Click the Activate now button.
Preview the Newsletter
Now that we’ve successfully created our newsletter, let’s take a look at it! Here’s a preview of the final newsletter:
Here it is!
Wrapping It Up
WP RSS Aggregator is an incredibly powerful tool that lets you do just about everything related to content aggregation – even create a top quality newsletter! We showed you how to use WP RSS Aggregator with the Feed to Post premium add-on to create a newsletter that imports feed items from any given feed source. Hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take things further yourself.
We encourage you to try it out for yourself and experiment with WP RSS Aggregator’s add-ons to create a newsletter that helps you meet your business goals.
Were you able to create a newsletter for your business by following this tutorial? Did you encounter any issues along the way? We’d love to hear all about your experience so be sure to share with us by commenting below!
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