About one month ago I started publishing weekly newsletters of China real estate information here on Mingtiandi and the response has been stronger than I imagined. More users sign up every day from several countries around the globe, and more than 30% of our 1830 readers are reading every edition.
So if response is that strong to a weekly update then, what could we do if we gave readers daily news? But Mingtiandi is not a direct revenue earner, so to start doing daily updates I needed a way to gather, edit and distribute information that wouldn’t take significant time.
The answer that I came up with is RSS. For those of you who are less technically inclined RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and most every website has an RSS feed of their content which allows them to distribute their information automatically.
But what I set out to do is to use RSS to collect, curate and publish information, and by using a variety of tools, I am now able to publish daily newsletters on China real estate without spending more than 20 minutes a day on the project. So here’s what I set up over the last few days.
Google Alerts to Collect Information
For years, I have been using Google Alerts to gather links to news on relevant keywords about real estate and other important topics. However, I recently changed these alerts to send information to their own RSS feed rather than send me an email notice.
Yahoo Pipes to Aggregate Alert Feeds
Because I have about 30 different Google Alerts set up, checking each of these individually could take too much time and include too many duplicate links, so I used a tool called Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all of my China real estate alert feeds into one big feed which is sorted by publication dates and duplicates removed. It can even translate the titles and descriptions of Chinese articles to English. After this process, Yahoo Pipes then republishes this information as a new RSS feed.
Curating Links with Google Reader and Diigo
Now that my aggregated RSS feed is set up, I can review all of the news in Google Reader, to choose the most interesting stories for publication to my newsletter. Once I find a qualifying story, I can bookmark it using the online bookmarking utility Diigo. This utility not only makes it easy to find these relevant stories later, but it also creates another RSS feed of the stories that I have tagged for publication.
Creating and Publishing Newsletters in Mailchimp
Perhaps the biggest time-saver of all are the RSS-driven email newsletter campaigns in Mailchimp. The Mingtiandi newsletters are created from HTML templates which automatically pull the content from my RSS feed of stories that I tagged for publication. No cutting and pasting, no uploading — I just program the application to publish a newsletter from the template at the time I want and out it goes.
Now the difference between these new daily campaigns and my weekly campaigns is that they publish only a digest of web links and don’t have Mingtiandi’s original content (which you get in the weekly mail). But until I cash out of RightSite for trillions of RMB, I have a job to do every day, and it doesn’t leave much time for updating a blog several times a day.
So the actual time required to create Mingtiandi’s daily email campaigns is just the 15-20 minutes required to read through the stories from the aggregated news alert feed and choose the stories for publication. Lots of information, daily broadcasts to a couple thousand readers, and just a little RSS-magic.
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