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!
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it’s very useful article, thnaks scoop.it !
Glad to hear you found this useful! We’ll keep creating stuff like this for you to use. 🙂
You make this more difficult that necessary. All Mailchimp newsletter have their own shareable unique url
Hi Erwin! Thanks so much for the feedback. Unfortunately, because the HTML is custom, there is no MailChimp link auto-created in the current product offering. We’re working on fixing that! 🙂
i tried this and if this is easy to do them i’m a blathering idiot. i’m not easily confused when it comes to doing anything on a computer but i have no clue what was done if anything that joined anything anywhere. better directions please. why was weebly needed to be made? i don’t see where that was used or maybe i didnt get that far seeing how the mailchimp integration was confounding.
Hi there! Thanks for your feedback and I’m so sorry you found this difficult — I’d be happy to jump on a quick Skype call with you to discuss if you’d like. Email me: clair@scoop.it. As far as your weebly account, it comes into play in step 10. Its the public-facing aspect of this product hack. Again, happy to jump on a Skype call to explain, just get in touch!
Thanks Clair, very usefull but only a temporary workaround. I noticed 2 problems one minor and a major one. The minor is that your “letter” comes out as 675px width and mailchimp suggests not to exceed the 600px. The major is that this is not automated. I have to do it manually every single time. For example, I would love to see 10 of my scoops to go directly to my specified mailing list once a week or so. In my opinion, you should work towards this direction.
Thanks
Hi Antonios, i am with you on the second problem. Would be great if the draft would allways show the last n-th items every time you call it.
Love it, it provided me with the right tool to engage my tweeter and linked in contyact after creating a blog yesterday good way to attract traffic to it.
This is avery good post …….. thanks