Newsletter as a Traffic Getting Strategy?

[Aida]

Paul,
Based on your experience, do you find newsletters have helped you attract a significant amount of traffic to your websites?
(I have mixed feelings about newsletters - some are excellent, but some are on the verge of being spam, and I find myself ceasing to visit some of the websites I used to really like due to poor newsletter quality.)

[paulpiotrowski]

I don't publish an active newsletter. To me, newsletters are kind of obsolete due to Blogs. I mean, usually people published newsletters as a way of telling people "Hey, here's what's new." and that was valuable, but if you're going to have a Blog, then why do you need a newsletter as well? Why not just put the content of your newsletter on the Blog?

So what I do instead is I have an email list where people subscribe to my "newsletter / email list" and then I have AWeber automatically send an email to people every time I write 3-5 Blog posts just sending them a recap of my latest 3-5 posts.

This helps people to re-connect to the latest content on my Blog, and also gives me a chance to communicate with my list whenever I have something else of value besides my Blog content to share with them.

I think the only time I'd probably do an official "Newsletter" is in a niche I wasn't doing a Blog or if it was a paid newsletter with premium content.