Carol Bentley

Sometimes stopping a subscription is the right thing to do. If the information offered is not useful to you, or it doesn’t supply valuable insights to what you need to know then making that decision should be your choice - and your choice alone.

Which is why you have complete control over the notification emails from this blog website. In every email notice you receive there is an unsubscribe option. If you use it you get a chance to say why you are leaving the group, which is good feedback for me as the host.

One gentleman did that when he dropped out last Friday. His reason? “Too many emails”

I wasn’t sure if he meant he was generally getting too many emails or if he was specifically referring to the emails about this blog.

Either way I totally understand how he feels and I’m sure you do too! Does cancelling his subscription mean he will miss out on the future posts? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Keeping in the loop without emails

So what do you do if you want to know about the posts made so you can choose what to read, but you don’t want the daily email?

You can use the RSS feed in the bottom right panel. If you are not familiar with RSS feeds you can read about them here. It can feed each new post through to your desktop without sending emails.

Disadvantages of Subscribing

In the early days of this blog I was undecided about how frequently I should post; daily, couple of times a week, weekly or even monthly. Although my subscriber numbers at that point were quite low - were you one of them? - I asked those readers what they would like to see. The feedback I had was very positive and the content of most of the messages was similar to Gail’s comment:

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in blogging every day as long as the content is useful and informative to the readers! With your blog, every post so far has had something worthwhile in it!”

(Gail is still a subscriber, thanks for sticking with me Gail )

So I went with the majority opinion and I’ve continued the daily blog since - of course that means you get a daily email. Actually it’s only sent out on weekdays, I take the weekend off However, I appreciate for some it may be too much with all the other emails bombarding their inbox.

Disadvantages of RSS Only

On the surface there may not seem to be any real disadvantage to using an RSS feed to get your notifications. You can still see when a new post goes up and choose whether or not to read it.

Where you do lose out with an RSS feed is accessing any private posts I make. Why? Because these are password protected. And the password is only released to the email subscribers.

“So what? Will I really miss anything by not being able to read the private posts?” you might be thinking.

Well, actually, yes!

I’ve only used the private post once so far when I shared a birthday gift. But there are more in the pipeline. They will include more valuable information, sometimes in the form of a free report or audio or video and the only way you can get it is with the password supplied in the post notification email.

What do you do?

It’s a dilemma isn’t it?

If you don’t subscribe you don’t get the extra goodies I gift from time to time.

If you do subscribe you get a daily email when a post is published.

The good news is - it’s purely your choice. And it’s instantaneous - subscribe and you are immediately ‘in the loop’. Unsubscribe and you never get another email about posts on this blog again.

I hope you choose to stay subscribed, but I fully understand and respect your decision if you decide to use the RSS feed instead.

~ Carol Bentley

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Date: Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 10:45 am | Category: General | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.
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