Somewhere around 2002-2006 I published a weekly newsletter about Internet Marketing called WebPromotion-Weekly (webpromotion-weekly.com). I published each issue on the website and sent it out to the subscriber list via email every week on Mondays.

At It’s height there were just over 20,000 free subscribers. (I never charged for it).

I’m not really sure when the first official “Blog” was created on the Internet, but I know that I was producing webpromotion-weekly long before the term Blog existed. I’d like to say that makes me the worlds first blogger, but that’s nonsense because there were lots of people doing this sort of thing at the time, it’s just that no one had coined the name blogger yet.

Anyway, this newsletter was a natural extension of my other marketing products such as the Submission-Spider etc. The readers were fairly active and it was a really fun project.

I never really made any money from it directly, but it was priceless as a sort of lead generation device to sell my other products. I generally kept all the ad space in each issue for my own products.

The Beginning of the End…

Around 2006 or so, spam filters started appearing on the scenes. They weren’t very sophisticated, and neither were email users themselves. So open rates for the newsletter started to plummet. I started getting angry email from subscribers saying “WHERE’S MY ISSUE OF WPW!!”

It had inevitably been filtered by their crappy spam filters.

I saw the writing on the wall and realized that email marketing in general, and the newsletter model more broadly, was not really viable anymore.

As much as you tried to educate people on the proper use of spam filters; explain to them how to whitelist my email address so that they’d be sure to get my email…they just didn’t listen.

And then you had spam filtering start to become prevalent on the ISP side, with webhosts themselves rejecting email from domains that they saw as suspect. Apparently sending out 20,000 emails routinely was suspect.

It was an uphill fight that I just didn’t care to wage. So I stopped publishing the newsletter. Most of my Internet Marketing related products like the Submission-Spider were starting to wind down anyway with the consolidation of the search engine market.

So I pulled the plug.

Of course, then blogging became popular and I’ve since then created a number of blogs.