I just finished an article series on the Blog Herald on Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog.
The series is stuffed with blogging tips, as well as many tips for using WordPress, both as a replacement for your newsletter and how to use it for a small business or membership association.
Here are some of the specifics I covered.
Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog Series
- Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog: Introduction to the series and covers pulling Page content, semi-static blog content, from the newsletter columns and content, leaving the rest as posts.
- Newsletter to Blog: Turning Article and Reports Into Blog Posts: Covers determining which content within the blog goes where and how as blog posts rather than newsletter columns. Begins to look at how content is categorized on a blog.
- Newsletter to Blog: Establishing The Post Categories: Moving from newsletter columns to categories for categorizing the blog content was more challenging than originally thought. I cover how the group rearranged and renamed their blog categories in an effort to help members find related content easily, but also help searchers find information of value to them.
- Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part I: The newsletter was published over the years in Microsoft Word and Publisher, which made converting the newsletter content to blog content a bit frustrating. In two parts, I covered the struggles of the conversion and offered tips to speed up the process.
- Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part II: Part two on converting the newsletter into blog post content, including a lot of tips for problems that come with the WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor in WordPress.
- Newsletter to Blog: Quoting, Referencing, Citing, and Not Copyright Violating: Members had to be taught how to quote, reference, cite, link, and not violate copyrights as they transferred content from the newsletter to the blog, then continue publishing on the blog.
- Newsletter to Blog: Blogger’s Friend – The Text Editor: Since much of the newsletter content, links, bits and pieces were redundant, I introduced the group to the benefits of using a text editor to help build their blog content.
- Newsletter-to-Blog: Converting Old Newsletters and The Benefits of Conversion: In conclusion, the newsletter team decided to convert their older newsletters into PDF files, and learned a lot of benefits for having a blog compared to just the printed and emailed newsletters, including re-energizing their membership.
Site Search Tags: wordpress tips, blogging tips, newsletter to blog, newsletter publishing, newsletter conversion, convert newsletter to blog, how to blog, membership blogs, group blogs, association blogs
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.
7 Comments
I’m really glad that you covered this. I had quite the ordeal convincing some skiers to make the switch to an online newsletter. There’s so much that you need to convey to people about the differences in writing for the web and writing for paper, the differences in layout, inconsistencies among browsers, etc. etc. So I found it hard to get people on board initially. Overall, though, I think it’s an important move for small organizations to make. The opportunity to have such a wealth of timely information available, can make a small organization super successful, and easily so. I guess it just takes some hand holding.
Nice. I’m going to use that in my blog but I’m thinking of grouping them by using Volume 1, 2, and so on. I hope there is a plugin that can do that. Btw, what plugin did you use in creating table of contents for your Newsletter Into A Blog series?
Volume 1, 2, etc, what? I used no Plugin on the Blog Herald. That’s created manually, however, I’ve written about Connecting Articles in Series: In Series WordPress Plugin and Technical Tips for Publishing a Series of Articles on Your Blog to explain how this is done.
I would not label or title your newsletters-to-blog posts, or categorize them, by volume. You are turning your newsletter into a blog, which means every article in the newsletter, and column, now becomes a blog post. Totally different thinking. You change from publishing a newsletter to publishing an online magazine. If you want to keep doing your newsletter, than do, and add a blog to complement it. But if you want to stop the newsletter to go totally blog, the article series will help.
When this series was originally published, I thought it had great potential for helping techies understand how to talk to non-techies about converting their traditional print collateral to the web. Now, I find that except for the first entry in the series, links to the other entries lead to pages that are blank except for the Blog Herald header. Is that intentional?
Of course it wouldn’t be intensional. I’ll check them. Was there a specific link that’s broken? Thanks for letting me know.
Well, it seems that the Blog Herald is having some design problems. Hopefully, it will be resolved soon. I don’t work for them any more, so I’ve no control over their site nor design. Thanks for letting me know and I hope you let them know as well.
If there was something specific you wish to know about converting a newsletter to a blog, let me know and I’ll help as best I can.
Thanks so much for checking. No, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just thought the series was a great reference and wanted to recommend it to others.
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[…] Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog was inspired from a project I did with a business women’s association to convert their printed and emailed newsletter into a blog. When I took on the contract, I thought it would be as simple as following the newsletter format, turning columns into categories, and transferring content. It was a nightmare as the group took “print think” and had trouble converting it to “web think”, even to the point of titling all their blog posts for that month by the month and year – no text to tell which post contained what information. On print, this worked as the eye would scan down to the content, letting them know what the article contained. On the web, May 2007 looks like May 2007 and just May 2007, without any explanation until you actually open that post. Many were helped by the lessons I learned working with this group through this article series. […]