usage

IT Sales Professionals (“Reps”) generally understand the value of keeping their name and information in front of their customers, prospects and partners on a regular basis. Email newsletters are a great way to do that but there are challenges:

1. Finding content that will be of value to your contacts
2. Formatting that content each week in a tool like MailChimp or ConstantContact
3. Managing subscribers
4. Following these steps every week

Rather than doing all that work, we suggest that Reps use our IT Newsletter As A Service.

Buy vs. Build.

IT News and Events produces a weekly email newsletter for enterprise IT professionals. We curate about 80 items each week from a wide variety of professional IT publications (such as CIO, CSO Online, HelpNet Security, The Enterprisers Project, insideBIGDATA, SearchSecurity,…). We include those articles in a newsletter which is sent to our 30k+ subscribers.

We track which articles are clicked on and we pick the 20 to 25 most clicked on articles (“crowd selected”) to become the basis of our IT Newsletter as A Service.

The selected articles are placed into named sections. The newsletter is built from those core sections. Not every section has articles every week. Here is the current list of sections:

Subscribers will receive a weekly email from the email address of the sales rep who has them as a subscriber.

People can become subscribers of an individual Rep:

1. because the Rep added them through our web tool or
2. by filling in a registration form provided to them by the Rep

Each subscriber has a profile which they can modify. A link to manage that profile is included in every newsletter sent to them. That link will log them in to their profile automatically, therefore they should not share their newsletter. Similarly, a link to unsubscribe is also included in every newsletter.

Subscribers can opt-out of specific sections in their profile or by clicking on the “turn this section off” or “disable” links in the sections they don’t want.

The subscriber’s profile is used to deliver a tailored newsletter and web site experience. If a subscriber disables or opt-out of a specific section, then they will not see it.

The Personal Rep Edition includes:

• delivery of weekly Enterprise IT Newsletter to Rep’s contacts
• web tool for managing contacts
• a unique URL with
  • web version of articles with links to source material
  • registration form
  • archives
  • profile management
• per Rep banner with picture, logo and contact information for newsletter and website
• up to 250 subscribers included (add $25 for 2500 more)
• optional service to upload a spreadsheet of subscribers
• optional service to scan business cards into a spreadsheet that can be uploaded
• no contract – month-to-month service
• $30 per month

Purchase

Sign up buy this service for $30 per month here

Here’s a quick summary of what the Managed Enterprise IT Newsletter As A Service costs.

• For one sales rep, with up to 500 contacts, about $33/week
• For five sales reps, with team features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep, about $13/week per rep ($285/month)
  

Let’s break that down. These are the main components:

• Content for main newsletter (52 weekly issues)
  • ~80-100 articles/week
  • selected from 150+ mainstream IT publications (e.g. CIO, eWeek, Computerworld, Network World, CSO, ComputerWeekly, Dark Reading,How-To Geek, Information Management, ZDNet, CNET, ITProPortal, etc.)
  • No vendor or product articles. Nothing controversial or political
  • Each subscriber can choose which sections are included in their copy of the newsletter which will be send by the “sender account”
• Content for Enterprise Newsletter As A Service
  • The most clicked on ~20-25 articles from main newsletter
  • Slightly expanded
  • “crowd-selected”
• Sender account
  • name + contact info, picture, logo as newsletter as website banner
  • web-based account to manage sender’s own subscribers
  • per-sender subscription request form
• Website and team edition
  • sender can move contacts to other team members
  • unique URL for website
  • add DNS record to make website appear under sender’s domain
  • newsletter and website layout tailoring
  • ability to add content to team edition
    • that content will be included in newsletters sent to each team members’ subscribers

Details

Susan Friesen writes in “Business 2 Business“, “‘I don’t want to annoy people,’

That’s one of many excuses I hear from clients when I ask them about sending out consistent email newsletters to their followers.

Are you guilty of thinking this way too? Well stop it!

When someone comes to your website and enters their name and email address to sign up for your newsletter, they are literally putting their hand up and saying, ‘yes, I want to hear more from you!’…”

I produce two Enterprise IT Newsletters. The first, “IT News and Events“, has a wide ranging collection of articles – about 100 each week – that are placed into 40+ sections. The articles are curated from 155+ sources.

You can register, for free, and have the same experience as all the tens of thousands of other subscribers:

• start of week email with just the sections enabled in your profile that have articles
• end of week email with list of most clicked on articles, sorted by popularity
• website where you can update your profile, view the current issue, see what’s most popular

The website for that newsletter is https://it.it-news-and-events.info

Here’s how the start of week email looks for my subscribers:

Here’s how the website looks for my subscribers:

The registration link is at the top of the page. It requires an opt-in.

The publishing system keeps track of which articles are clicked on the most and I produce a second newsletter, “IT News“, created from the 20 to 24 most popular articles. That newsletter is the basis of my “Enterprise IT Newsletter as A Service.”

You can register, for free, and experience that newsletter like the customers of the sales teams who use my managed newsletter service:

• start of week email with just the sections enabled in your profile
• website where you can update your profile, view the current issue, see what’s most popular

Here’s how the start of week email looks for my subscribers:

The website for that newsletter is https://itnews.it-news-and-events.info

The registration link is at the top of the page. It requires an opt-in.

The “Enterprise IT Newsletter As A Service” offering includes:

• an account with which you can add/delete/modify/import/export your own subscribers
• automatic, weekly delivery of a custom newsletter to each of your subscribers
• your picture, logo and contact information will be included at the top of each email and in the website
• a unique, private URL for a registration form that your can give to potential subscribers. People who subscribe with that link become your your subscribers and will receive the weekly email with the custom newsletter from your address

Background

After Oracle bought Sun, I pivoted and now publish for a general IT audience.

Over those years, I have grown the subscriber base of my newsletters to over 40k people worldwide. Many of those people have been subscribers for many years and their careers have advanced. I can think of one Solaris SysAdmin who eventually became the CIO of his organization.

Mine is a very attractive audience of senior IT professionals and I am now exploring ways to generate revenue without loosing them. My publications have always avoided advertising. I have instead developed a model of tracking the behavior of the crowd to select the most popular articles. I offer a managed IT newsletter service with those most popular articles.

My publishing technology has some very nice features. In particular, each subscriber is able to control which sections are included in their newsletter. So a reader who is not interested in IoT can disable the IoT section.

That allows me to roll out new sections, enabled by default, and the audience can disable the ones they don’t want. This year I have launched new sections including: Blockchain, ERP, CRM, BI, Compliance.

The new product I am working on is a form of what’s called Native Advertising. I can create a section for a vendor and place articles in that section from that vendor. I do this already for Red Hat. Whenever they issue a press release, I process that into an article in the Red Hat News section. Those articles look and feel like the rest of the publication and each reader can stop unwanted sections from appearing in future newsletters sent to them.

You can see the Red Hat News section on this web site: https://redhat.it-news-and-events.info

You will see how the  Red Hat News is a first class sections and the articles look like the articles in the rest of the publication.

I now want to offer sponsored news sections to other companies.

A side effect of having a sponsored news section for your firm going out to my global audience, is that I can also spin up a custom publication for you (like the Red Hat one above). You can add your contacts and they will get a weekly newsletter with your news section plus the crowd selected articles.

For those organization who sell their product or service through resellers (or channel partners), I can produce a customer newsletter for each reseller with the organization’s News section.

If you are interested in this new service, please let me know.

johnj@itnewsandevents.com

IT Professionals need to keep up-to-date with many aspects of the Information Technology field. There are so many news sources and they vary so much in value from insightful to self-serving fluff pieces. IT professionals are expected to do more with less so they have a limited amount of time to devote to this task.

Potential users of our managed IT Newsletter service want to be in front of their IT Professional contacts but want to be relevant so that those contacts don’t ignore or forget them. Examples include: sales professionals (hardware, software, services), event promoters, recruiters, professional associations, publishers.

Our managed service is appealing because, once it is configured and running, our customers don’t have to do anything to keep it running and our article selection process keeps the content relevant and of interest to their IT Professional contacts.

“IT News and Events”,  https://it.it-news-and-events.info,  (“IT”)  is a general IT newsletter with ~80 articles each week curated from hundreds of IT publications. We avoid articles that are fluff pieces, or are vendor or product specific. We look for articles that provide insight or value. This publication has a worldwide audience of 40,000+ senior IT professionals.

https://itnews.it-news-and-events.info

This publication, (“ITNews”),  is made from the top 20 or so most clicked on articles from the main newsletter. It is the basis of the managed IT Newsletter as a Service offering.

Here are a couple of vendor-specific editions. They are made from vendor news sections plus the top 20 or so most clicked on articles from the main newsletter.

• https://redhat.it-news-and-events.info
• https://cisco.it-news-and-events.info
• https://ibm.it-news-and-events.info

The vendor news sections are clearly labelled as such. They are usually made from press releases or blogs from that vendor.

Each “Newsletter” is a custom publication that is made from a set of sections. The publication owner chooses which sections are included in their publication and in what order they should appear. The publication may also have a section that is unique to that publication. That allows a publication owner to submit content that will only appear in their publication.

A custom publication may also have a unique URL and, through the use of DNS, may be made to appear as a sub-domain of the customer. E.g. Doc Solutions’ newsletter appears under doc-solutions.info and under our domain:

• http://doc-solutions.it-news-and-events.info
• https://itnews.doc-solutions.info

Each publication can have one or more sender (typically sales and marketing personnel ) and they each have their own subscribers.

Subscribers can be added one-at-a-time or imported from a spreadsheet with a web-based tool that we provide for managing subscriptions. Each publication has it’s own subscription form so that new subscribers can add themselves. Once new subscribers opt-in, they will receive the newsletter from the publication owner who has the option of transferring subscribers to different sender of the same publication. A marketing person may own the publication and they may transfer new subscribers to different sales people based on their coverage model.

Each sender also has a unique subscription form which they can use to add new contacts or give to their contacts to self register.

We also offer a value-add service where a sender can mail us physical business cards which we will scan, verify, add under the sender’s account and send a message asking the new contact to opt in. We return the cards and email a spreadsheet of the new contacts to the owner of the cards.

Each subscriber has a profile and can choose which sections are included in their copy of the newsletter. The subscriber’s profile customizes the newsletter and website.

The sender’s picture, logo and contact information are included in the banner at the top of the newsletter and each page of the newsletter site.

Of course, subscribers can also opt-out at any time

IT Newsletters As A Service and Managed IT Newsletter Service
https://itnewsandevents.com