How to add free newsletters to your website*

* for like a month. I was so excited I wrote this whole post before I realized the features I like are eventually paywalled. So I made an actually-free thing instead [post coming soon]! This post may sound like a MailerLite ad but they don't pay me anything, I just like the product. I would pay for it if I had enough subscribers to justify it and I wasn't so cheap.

If you have your own website or blog, you might want to make it easy for readers to get an email every time you post something. If you use a free static site generator like Publii to publish content, you get RSS functionality built-in, which makes it easy to send newsletters. Then you can shamelessly plug signups like this!

A service like MailerLite gives you drop-in code to paste forms like that (the form above is from my own project though). RSS readers aren't cool anymore (RIP Google Reader), but MailerLite makes it easy for subscribers to get emails from an RSS feed. I chose MailerLite for my website because it has a free tier with RSS integration, while MailChimp does not. Sorry MailChimp, your superior advertising doesn't help here.

Once you've created a MailerLite account, the first thing you'll want to do is set up domain authentication. You need to do this so you can send email from your domain (eg [email protected]) instead of your random gmail/aol/yahoo account. This way, Google or whoever won't think you're spamming a thousand people.

To do this, visit MailerLite's domain authentication section, enter an email like [email protected], and MailerLite will hand-hold you through the rest of the process. It just involves logging into your DNS provider (in my case Cloudflare), then copy/pasting a couple DNS headers.

Good job, you're not a spammer anymore! If you are, please stop reading and turn yourself in to the local authorities.

Now set up a campaign by selecting New Campaign then RSS Campaign.

Pop in the link to your RSS feed, select the days and times you want to send, and make sure the New posts toggle is switched on. 

Now, once you post something new, your email subscribers will get something whenever that time rolls around.

MailerLite gives you a simple editor with lots of premade content to lay out your newsletter, but I find it best to go with a simple preview of your latest post only.

And that's it!

Your newsletter is all set up, and you can focus on publishing content and let the newsletter run itself.

Now the hard part: getting subscribers! I have no advice there, I'm just writing the kind of stuff I'd want to read.