There was a time when the only way to read informative articles was to subscribe to the publisher’s newsletter.  That’s how they grew their list of interested prospects to market to.

Recently we’ve noticed that  things seem to be changing.

In addition to the ‘traditional’ Email Newsletter (or Ezine), there are so many different routes to get your article out there – you can blog it (to your blog and as a guest post on other people’s blogs), submit it to article directories, post on forums, tweet it and even Squidoo it.

In theory this is great because using social media helps to quickly increase the visibility of your articles, but it also puts pressure on you as a writer to keep producing more and more new content.  And as it’s a way of show-casing your expertise, it has to be high quality content too!

Now, Sam and I take pride in providing original fresh content, both in our individual newsletters (Marketing Karma and Simply Business Success) and in our excellent jointly authored Savvy Marketing Tips (hint, hint!).  We truly value our subscribers and want them to keep reading, even though it’s sometimes hard for us to fit in all the writing.

As suggested in a previous post, it’s acceptable practice to use articles more than once, after a decent time interval.  However, this is what some people are doing:

They are writing an article, posting it on their blog, submitting it to directories, tweeting it and sending it out in their newsletter – all in the space of a few days!

Here’s the point.  I can get the same article on my blog reader sometimes before the email newsletter even  reaches my inbox.  If the main difference is that the newsletter also contains promotions ….. you can guess which one I prefer to subscribe to.

Email Newsletter publishers are going to have to re-think their article distribution strategy if they want to keep their subscribers reading.