The other day, I read a panicked forum post from a poor guy who got his email marketing account shut down without warning.
The problem was a rogue blog broadcast which had sent spam emails to his list.
What is a Blog Broadcast?
Blog broadcasts (aka RSS Campaigns / RSS-to-Email) is a feature that allows you to send your blog articles straight to the inbox of subscribers, at a frequency of your choosing.
Essentially, your email marketing provider pulls content from your blog, puts it into an email template, and then sends it out when the threshold number of articles has been reached.
It’s a great way to turn your blog into a newsletter and push content to your subscribers.
When blog broadcasts go bad
Anyhow, in this case, it looks like his website had been hacked, and his blog articles were full of links to some less than family friendly material.
And the blog broadcast dutifully swept out all of this out to his list.
He got his account back… eventually… but it’s a cautionary tale for all of us.
If you use Blog Broadcasts… do you curate them, or just allow them to send automatically?
More importantly, if your account got shut down… would you have a fresh backup of your lists to hand? Or would you be at the mercy of your email marketing provider’s goodwill?
After all, your list is the most important part of your business.
Maybe even your ENTIRE business.
So it’s vital you back it up regularly.
Ideally every day.
But tell me honestly… when was the last time you actually did it?
I know… me too :-/
It’s just such a hassle to remember to login and manually download every time, isn’t it?
That’s why I built ListLockr.
It makes an automatic, secure backup of your subscribers every day.
It’s got everything you need to save your skin (and business) if the worst happens.
The best part is you don’t have to think about it… or “do” anything.
