I’ve been listening to all the feedback from our awesome community about our newest service offering, the MailChimp Newsletter integration feature, and have been hearing that many people would like the option of sharing the newsletter with their social audiences. This would require hosting the completed newsletter somewhere online with a public link to share. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t exist within Scoop.it yet (not to say it won’t shortly), but I’ve concocted a little work-around for everyone who wants to share their newsletter this way. It requires an extra tool, but its all free and pretty easy to do, and the end result is great.
We’ll be using a simple web-page creation tool called Weebly for the posting, and we’ll be using MailChimp to format the HTML for online display. We won’t actually send anything through MailChimp using this process, so no worries if it isn’t your email client of choice or you haven’t built a list yet. The most complicated thing in the process is a simple copy and paste, so don’t be afraid!
Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients:
1 Scoop.it Topic Page
1 Free Weebly Account
1 Free MailChimp Account
Copy + Paste Functionality
Directions:
1. Create a MailChimp account, if you don’t have one already. If you do, skip to #2.
2. Create a free Weebly account with a sub-domain that makes sense for your topic. For instance, if your topic is “Bicycle Culture,” an appropriate sub-domain would be “bicycleculturenewsletter.weebly.com.”
3. Once you’ve created your accounts, connect your Scoop.it account to your MailChimp account by creating a newsletter via the Scoop.it MailChimp integration. Do this by clicking “Topics” -> [What topic you'd like to make into a newsletter], -> “Manage” -> “Create Newsletter” -> “Connect,” under the “Export to MailChimp” heading. This will redirect you to MailChimp.
4. Enter your MailChimp credentials.
5. Once you’ve connected your account to MailChimp, you will see the “Create a Newsletter” screen again. Edit the newsletter using the left-hand editing tools as you see fit. When you are happy with your newsletter’s content, click “Create a MailChimp Campaign Draft” and fill in the appropriate information. Click “Create.”
6. A success pop-up will be visible telling you your campaign was successfully transferred MailChimp. Click on “See it.”
7. Select your new campaign from the campaign list. Select “Edit” from the options below your campaign.
8. You’ll then see a list of options, select “Edit” on the “HTML Email” shaded row.
9. MailChimp will display the HTML code for the email. Select all the code, and right click, click “select all,” and then right click, select “copy.”
10. Go to Weebly.com. Sign in and click “add site” and then click “edit.” In the top “elements” menu, click “Custom HTML.” Paste the HTML code you copied from MailChimp into this box. You can also add elements to the newsletter this way as well, but that’s up to you! If you’d like to hide the header at the top, just hit the little gear on the top right corner and select “Hide Header.” Make sure to edit the built in social sharing elements!
11. Click publish and click on the link. It will display your public-facing newsletter with link that you can share anywhere. Here’s the test I did: http://mailchimpnewsletter.weebly.com/
I know that might seem complex, but its actually pretty easy! It will take about 15 minutes and you can simply edit the HTML code of your Weebly site for each new newsletter you create, which means you can drive traffic and build a following around a single link.
I’d love to see your public newsletters. Publish them in the comments and I’ll tweet out the best ones!