Greater than 7 minutes, my friend!

If I was to describe The Open Mic in two words, I’d say it’s a blogging platform.

Why? Well, of all the features we have here, publishing and/or reading stories is probably your favorite part of The Open Mic experience.

We made it super easy to publish and read stories.

Sure, we’re nowhere near the neat interface of Medium, but who cares?

We have slightly different goals here.

While Medium tries serving mega-publishers, The Open Mic is all about bringing value to the community.

We’re trying to build a knowledge temple, a place where you could go for inspiration and new ideas.

A place where you have the voice and the support of a strong community.

That’s why when I was building The Open Mic my number one concern was to make sure people actually read the stories that are being published here.

It’s quite a challenge I must say.

Because we all read in a million different ways.

We even discover stories and articles differently and through different channels.

You can find something interesting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, news websites, you might be using Feedly or Pocket – variations are endless here.

My personal favorite?

Email.

I spend about 30% of my time in my inbox.

For me it makes sense to receive interesting content right here, in the place where it all connects.

I even have a separate folder called “Reading List” for all the blogs and newsletters that I’m subscribed to.

It’s super easy and efficient: it helps me separate all the news and updates from client work and other important emails (like conversations with colleagues or developers).

Here’s what it looks like:

This is my reading list with all the news and blogs that I follow.

It doesn’t have all the emails though, I often delete emails after reading them and only leave those that have practical tips or interesting stuff that I want to revisit later.

It’s not ideal, but it works for me.

New post notifications on The Open Mic

With The Open Mic being a blogging platform it kind of makes sense to offer some sort of new post notifications for our readers.

And actually we already had something like that.

Those of you who have been with us from very beginning probably received an invite to try email notifications for new posts.

The problem was: you’ve been receiving notifications about each and every post.

And with Open Mic growing bigger and bigger each and every day, this kind of functionality became quite annoying.

I mean, who wants to receive several emails a day about new posts?

It’s frustrating and annoying, to say the least.

That’s why I decided to develop something that will be much better and more efficient.

Introducing The Open Mic Daily and Weekly

I freaking love Mailchimp.

The user experience and functionality are absolutely mind-blowing.

But the best part is: they have lots and lots of features that many people don’t realize exist.

I was looking for a solution that could create Daily or Weekly digests for The Open Mic readers and this is how I discovered RSS-driven Mailchimp campaigns.

The idea is simple: Mailchimp can automagically send emails when we have new content in our RSS feed.

As an active Mailchimp user I can control everything: the time of the send, the design of an email, and much much more.

Plus the majority of our registered members are already on our Mailchimp list.

So I decided to start a little experiment a week ago.

For about a week now, all our members have been receiving Daily Digests from The Open Mic.

Those digests included a nicely formatted list of all the articles that have been published today.

I’ve also added an ability to switch from Daily to Weekly digests for those people who don’t want to receive emails every day.

Here’s what it looks like:

This is just a fragment of an actual email. See the full example here.

So this is it.

This is how we’ll be notifying you about all new stories on The Open Mic from now on.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Have you seen new awesome daily and weekly digests on The Open Mic?” quote=”Have you seen new awesome daily and weekly digests on The Open Mic?”]

What does it mean for authors and for readers?

My personal favorite thing about The Open Mic is how dedicated we’re to making sure people actually read the stories you publish here.

We’ve gone at some crazy lengths here, and the new Daily and Weekly Digests are a great addition.

I know the pain of writing and promoting your own blog.

It’s a constant struggle. You can’t just publish something and expect people to find it somehow.

The Open Mic tries to solve that puzzle by offering an unprecedented variety of self-promotion possibilities.

Right know, all you really have to do is focus on writing a compelling story and we’ll do the rest.

When you publish a story we:

1. Automatically share it across all of our social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus (around 2,000 followers combined).
2. Automatically add it to our new Daily and Weekly Digest and send it to our subscribers (around 1,106 people on our Daily Digest and 31 folks on a Weekly Digest)
3. We automatically send push notifications to 495 people who opted in to receive push notifications on The Open Mic.
4. We might also feature it and make it our Post of The Day.

All of that seems like an insanity (taking into an account that The Open Mic is a free platform), but I just want to help our amazing authors and make their lives a little bit easier.

And same goes for our awesome readers, of course!

The Open Mic Daily and Weekly were designed with readers in mind.

First of all, it reduces the clatter in your inbox. No more multiple emails over the course of the day!

The format of these emails makes it super easy to skim through it and identify the names of the authors and the topics.

All you have to do is click on the stories you like and read them on The Open Mic.

Or you can save this email to your Reading List like I do and read it later 😉

Ok, I can see you have some questions, so let me try answering some of them.

So… I’ll receive one email every day?

It depends.

This is why I love Mailchimp so much.

Mailchimp will keep an eye on our RSS feed and if nobody had published anything over the past 24 hours, you won’t receive an email.

It all depends on how active our authors will be.

On top of that you’ll be able to switch from Daily to Weekly digests very easily.

It sounds awesome, Dmitry, but I’m not registered on The Open Mic, can I still subscribe to The Open Mic Daily?

Ok, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it yet, but being an Open Mic member doesn’t cost a penny. Not now, not ever. 🙂

This is a free project and by joining you’ll have access to a whole bunch of awesome features: gorgeous profiles, private messages, ability to publish articles and leave comments and much more!

We’re building a supper inspiring and supportive community where our only goal is to empower each other and move this profession forward.

But if you don’t want to be a part of it you can still signup for our newsletter. Just click the tiny button below and follow the instructions.

Hop on our list

What about other blogs? Can I add feeds from other translation blogs to my digest?

Good question!

Right now, we’re trying to focus on promoting stories published on The Open Mic.

However, I’d love to promote other translation blogs too, I’m just not sure how to do it effectively and in a meaningful way.

Meanwhile you can actually invite other bloggers you follow to publish or re-publish their articles on The Open Mic.

I designed The Open Mic in such a way that all the credit and SEO juice goes back to the original blog.

Actually many of our active contributors have personal blogs and use The Open Mic as medium for gaining extra visibility.

They seem pretty happy with it 🙂

So if you’re a blogger, who’re not on The Open Mic yet, give it a try, you’ll love it.

Here’s a great article that explains how republishing works on The Open Mic and what benefits it gives you.

So yeah, if you know bloggers who’re not on The Open Mic, invite them to join.

It’s a great place to be, plus, if they start publishing, all of you will receive these handy digests, so everyone wins 🙂

Plus we’ll get a little bit closer to our goal of building an ultimate knowledge temple for all the translators out there.

Don’t you want to be a part of it?

Hey Dmitry! I hate to say this, but I couldn’t care less about your digests. Can I get my hands on all the feeds of all the authors instead?

It’s funny you asked this because I was anticipating something like this.

Just for you I’ve created a comprehensive and regularly updated list of all our awesome authors with links to their posts and RSS feeds (feel free to add them to your Feedly or any other RSS reader of your choice).

Just click the magic button below.

Click me. I'm a magic button.

Dmitry, aren’t you loosing a ton of money by using Mailchimp?

Busted!

But, what can I say? I just love creating something awesome for the community and sometimes someone has to pay.

Mailchimp is a great tool and it really simplifies email communication for me.

The more our audience grows, the more I’ll pay, but I’ll also keep an eye on activity level and occasionally remove subscribers who’re not opening any campaigns.

So if you’re receiving emails from us please open them, read them, click on links or unsubscribe.

No hard feelings if you unsubscribe, in fact you’ll be doing me a favor because I’ll stop paying for you once you unsubscribe 🙂

Right now we have 1,100+ active subscribers and this list keeps growing every day.

I’m currently paying 20 USD per month and it will only go up, but I don’t care as long as it helps me promote great awesome stories that our amazing community creates.

It probably doesn’t make sense, but if The Open Mic was about making sense and smart business decisions it would probably didn’t exist. 🙂

Let me know what you think about this new functionality in the comments below.

Do you like it, do you hate it?

Any kind of feedback is always welcome here.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Check out new awesome daily and weekly digests by The Open Mic. You’ll love them!” quote=”Check out new awesome daily and weekly digests by The Open Mic. You’ll love them!”]