If you are a business owner like me, and you are running your business on the Internet, you are probably as frustrated as I am that sending just about ANY e-mail out to your customers opens you up to accusations of SPAM.

The truth of the matter is, irresponsible users have made it impossible for legitimate users to use email for business purposes.  Until now.

While I won't be able to provide a solution that will empty your email box of all the dreaded spam.  The solution I am about to propose will 1) allow you to stay in communication with your customers, 2) ensure you are only contacting customers that really want your information, 3) eliminate the need to manage subscription list, 4) improve your conversion rate, and 5) avoid any SPAM complaints you might otherwise have recieved.

The solution to the SPAM problem is a technology called RSS.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  But, what it does is a whole lot more important than what the letters stand for.  Here's how it works.

You create your newsletter and put it on your web site using a blog editor.  This will make your newletter not only available to your subscribers, but you can also allow the search engines to index the page.  By doing something you were going to do anyhow, you've just added more content to your web site and made your web site more valuable to your future clients as well as increasing the possibility that other people will find your web site when they look for the content you produced in your newsletter.  Maybe you're already posting a copy of the newsletter to your web site and you already are realizing this benefit.  Still, using the old method, you generally had to create the web page and the newsletter.  Now both get done at the same time.

But, just because you've posted your newsletter to the web site doesn't mean that your visitors are going to remember to come read it every time you create a new article.  This is where RSS comes in.

Most blog editors also support RSS.  When you create the newsletter in the blog editor, the article becomes available on the web site AND via the RSS feed.  Basically an XML file that another tool, called an aggregator, can read.  In order for your customers to subscribe, they use an aggregator and add your RSS feed to their aggregator.  If they don't want to get your newsletter, they unsubscribe.  They have complete control.

So, now the two sides are in place.  You add an article and as soon as it is posted, the people who have subscribed to the RSS feed start reading it.  You are communicating with your customers again.  Furthermore, you are reasonably sure that the people who are reading really want to read your article.

Now, you might be a bit nervous that you've just reduced your readership.  After all, if you have 1000 subscribers now, moving to an RSS system could reduce your subscriptions in half.  You may never really know how many subscribers you have on RSS.  But, with RSS, what you will be able to track is how many people read the article.  The best we can do with e-mail newsletters these days is track how many people opened the email and that generally requires embedding an image which more and more e-mail clients are disabling by default.  So, would you rather know how many people actually read your article, or how many people recieved your article?  Personally, I'd rather know how many people actually spent the time to read the article.  Once I know that, I can better calculate the conversion rate of any responses I ask for in the newsletter.

If you are currently managing a newsletter, you know that one of the main adminstrative task for you is making sure there are no duplicate emails, removing bounced emails, subscribing new readers.  If you are lucky, you have software that will do most of this work for you.  But even with the software, there is always a certain level of administration that will be required for a newsletter that goes out by email.  If you use a blog editor to create your newsletter, the only task you have to worry about is writing the article.  The reader is responsible for subscribing or unsubscribing.

Finally, since your newsletter is no longer going out via email, you can't be accused of SPAM.