The blog broadcast feature found in Aweber is a great way to create ready to send email newsletters to update your readers on what is happening with your blog. The blog broadcast allows Aweber to take the contents of your RSS feed and turn it into a newsletter that summarizes the past few days or posts that were written on your blog.
When Aweber first released this tool, their thinking was that it would be a way for you to get email subscribers back to your blog to read your post, comment on it and take any other actions you wanted after getting to your site. So they designed the broadcasts to include partial blog posts and not full posts.
While partial posts have worked well for many, some users may want a way to include full blog posts directly in the emails. This would be useful for bloggers who don’t update often. Because blog Broadcast waits for a set number of posts before sending, readers could be waiting a long time between broadcast.
For example, if you write one post a week and don’t send a broadcast until you have ten posts, your newsletter subscribers will have to wait ten weeks for each email. You can cut the number of posts between emails to increase the mail out frequency but then the newsletter won’t look like it has much content since all the posts are short summaries.
By sending a full post blog broadcast, you can cut the number of posts shown in each email, increase the frequency of the mail outs, and maintain the look and feel of a full-blown newsletter. Here’s how to do it.
Use The {!rss_item_content} Tag
While editing your blog broadcast template, if you want to include full posts and not partial posts, simply replace the {!rss_item_description} tag with {!rss_item_content}.
{!rss_item_content} will merge the full HTML and images from your posts into your blog newsletter.
How To Do An Aweber Blog Broadcast
Creating an automated blog broadcast with Aweber is very easy. Here’s a video showing the step by step. Just sub in the {!rss_item_content} tag if you want to display full blog posts.