This past month we held a contest along with Feedblitz to give away free email marketing hosting FOR LIFE (Here is Phil Hollows the founder talking with me about email marketing tips/The Feedblitz Story). Meaning a free lifetime account with Feedblitz for your newsletter, e-zine, whatever-you-send-via-email-as-opposed-to-pony-express regardless of how many people are on your list now and into the future (ummm and you aren’t going to SPAM people, right?) Quick note: I used to use Feedblitz for RISE where our subscribers (hopefully like you…hint) can receive our shows when, where and how they want it. You can now sign up for all the shows delivered to your inbox via AWeber. As you can imagine, with this contest came a HUGE response. Amazing entries. Thank you everyone for participating. And our winner is…. …drum roll please…. Adam Geller with TeachFor.us (and what a clever name that is) Here is Adam’s entry: TeachFor.Us is the independent blog community about the Teach For America experience with more than 700 bloggers running on our platform. We have struggled in the past with leveraging a continued relationship with our tens of thousands of visitors. Being able to extend our reach into visitors’ inboxes with daily digests and post previews will enable us to further our mission of informing the public about the true challenges when closing the education achievement gap in the United States all the while driving those visitors back onto the site to finish reading the teachers’ stories. Congrats, Adam! Phil will be… Read More

Disclosure: Feedblitz is a partner of The Rise To The Top. We use them for email marketing. Hooray. Ahhh elusive email marketing. I’m sure we can all agree that it is important. Having some kind of email touch with your clients, customers, fans, audience, whatever-you-call them. However, most of the time it is a pain in the butt, especially if you are already creating online content. For example, you spend tons of time creating a blog post, show, podcast, whatever and then you have to write a newsletter, e-zine, whatever-the-heck it is. It is a time succubus of annoying. Enter Phil Hollows and Feedblitz. They make it super easy and have an interesting story behind the company. Their service is fantastic and allows you to set up easy options for people to subscribe. You set how they can subscribe: Weekly, Daily, etc. They choose when they want to receive it: Weekly, Daily, etc. and how they want to receive it: Email or even via Twitter (cool). And it is as automated as you want. For our subscribers, it pulls the latest shows and emails it to them. I don’t have to do anything. But if I do want to send a quick update, I have that option as well like traditional email marketing services. In this interview, Phil tells his story and as well as best practices and ideas for your email marketing strategy (and by the way, if you haven’t subscribed to RISE in the upper right-hand corner, what… Read More