eWhisper’s Favorite Marketing Newsletters

I spend an hour on the train every day riding to and from work. While my little Vaio does have the ability to connect wirelessly to the Cingular network, I’ve found that moving so much makes my net access pretty limited during these trips. That’s where newsletters come in - offline access.

My favorite newsletters are the ones that have all the information contained in a single newsletter as I can read the entire article. The ones that have [continue this story] links are my least favorite as I often have to scan these newsletters before I hop on the train to open the fully story in my browser - or bookmark them for later reading.

Unfortunately, my later reading often doesn’t get done for months, and these articles never get read.

I’ve compiled a list of my favorite newsletters. Many have options to receive full HTML versions that can be read in entirety offline. If you’re involved in search marketing, or wish to keep up with the industry, these newsletters are for you.

Danny Sullivan’s Search Day - The expert on search engine news. Sometimes I disagree with Danny, other times I completely agree, but in both cases I completely respect his opinions. Danny is also the organized of SES, a conference in which I regularly speak on AdWords, local marketing, and site clinics. Always includes full articles in newsletter, so I read this one daily.

DM News Search Engine Facts - DM News is a direct marketing news company. They’ve gotten into reporting on more SEM news over the past year. However, many of the SEM ‘exclusives’ aren’t articles you should take as fact, you should read them to understand what is being reported to these marketers. They do have up to date news for when agencies buy/sell/release new products - however, sometimes their exclusives are pretty basic or something I disagree with.

However, it is necessary to understand what is being said by these marketers and read by others for when the questions come your way. (Always includes ‘read the rest of this article at our website’ so I’ve been reading this less and less lately).

ClickZ Local - This newsletter has gone through a few iterations since Justin left. It’s still one of the top newsletters around, but if you want some older insightful local news, look through the ‘Justin Sanger’ archives.

ClickZ Daily & Weekly are roundups of ClickZ articles. ClickZ has regular columns about particular themes each day or week. However, the authors vary on a daily basis. This makes it so that I can’t recommend any specific newsletter, but I do scan the titles for specific authors (like Kevin Lee) or enticing titles. I often read articles in areas where I’m not an expert (like email marketing) so that I understand what is going on in that world.

I find that having a basic understanding of many marketing methods, even those I don’t employ, is crucial to being able to add these features to our own company, outsource where is necessary, and speak intelligently to clients who are either doing this in-house or wish to outsource it. I do subscribe to some of the ClickZ daily articles only because I scan them on my train ride. If I had ‘always on’ access, I wouldn’t - I’d select my articles from ClickZ daily newsletter. I often get 5-7 of these a day, delete 3-5 of them with a quick headline scan, and read 2-3 in depth.

iMedia Connection. These are some of the best researched, well thought out articles available on the web today. My only complaint is it’s a daily newsletter and I often see the same articles from one issue to another. However, they are almost always worth reading. My biggest issue is that they’re only available online. One receives a newsletter full of article paragraphs to continue reading online. So, if you’re an offline reader - this won’t do you a lot of good.

Alexandra Search Engine Facts. This newsletter is all about promoting IBP and Aurealis. They often include interesting articles, or links to interesting articles that can be excellent reads if you keep in mind that they publish this to increase sales. I find that if they link to an article - I usually want to read it. It’s weekly, and they only link to around 5 articles a week - so they’re pretty discerning over these links. Another one you need to be online to finish reading.

Robert Clough - A good place to find articles you missed elsewhere. Robert has a newsletter and a forum which are usually affiliate commission and AdSense CTR based. He does have some original authors, however, most of their information is a few paragraphs about someone else’s articles and then a link there. So, if little is original - why do I like it? That’s pretty easy - he consolidates a lot of other articles I’d never get around to reading or have completely missed. I usually scan the newsletter daily to see what I missed, and to get a feel of what’s being said in any particular week. Full articles are never included in the newsletter. (Added. Since I first wrote this post (it was lost in Outlook) the quality of articles and the number of original content has increased significantly.)

Marketing Sherpa - Interesting case studies - some are often open just as they’re posted, but don’t stay that way for long. Marketing Sherpa’s newsletter is a sales pitch for their case studies & books. However, many of their case studies have open access for limited time (and some are permanent). This is one of my favorite newsletters, one of my favorite sources, of information, and if you actually read newsletters when they arrive - a must subscribe.

If you only visit the site or read the newsletter every few weeks, then you’ll probably become frustrated as you click on a newsletter that says open access only to find that you’re too late and that it’s now behind closed doors. Always have to finish reading online, which is why I often miss case studies.

FreePint - Great newsletter that contains many full articles, and then links to useful resources. It’s usually contains a collection of links about how to find information about a particular topic. Very good resource if you’re an online junky and want to see new and interesting tools and resources. American Marketing Association Newsletter. If you’re a member, then you can slice and dice topics to be reported to you daily as you wish. However,

Associate Program Newsletter by Allan Gardyne. If you’re an affiliate - this should be on your reading list. Often promoting other affiliate programs and still worth the read. Always full articles in the newsletter with links to the products.

Wilson Web - This newsletter has a lot of great content and articles in it. Please note, it’s also common for an article to be slightly slanted towards an eBook, offering, or other selling mechanism on the page. However, overall, if you’re reading everything above and want more content - this is it. Always full articles in the newsletter.

Marketing VOX - I use to like for similar reasons as Robert Cloudh’s newsletter - breaking news I missed - however, it seems lately their linking to more subscription only sites, or sites that require a registration. While I often use ‘bugmenot.com’ for most of these, their articles are short, and the extra time it takes to find a working password for some of these articles isn’t worthwhile anymore. If you like Robert’s roundup, and are receiving ClickZ daily, and still need more news - I’d either recommend bloglines or yahoo’s home page to add RSS feeds for news sites before adding VOX. If you’re already doing this - then it can be useful.

Added: I’m trying out Ecto for offline blog writing and it seems it publishes drafts as live posts, so I’ll add the links in the morning when I have a moment.

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