Back Issues

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MailOut Manager Help

Back Issues

Back issues are a way to provide visitors to your site with concrete evidence of what you deliver in your newsletter.

Click Yes if you want to save this issue as a back issue on your site. When you do this, Solo Build It! (SBI!) will turn this issue into a back issue, and will also create/update a page that links to all of your back issues for this newsletter. Let's discuss these two pages...

1) Traffic-cop page -- this is the page that lists all your back issues to date, providing a link to each of them. It's created the first time you save an issue as a back issue. It's updated each time you save a subsequent new issue as a back issue, with a link to that particular issue.

To expose visitors to your back issues, provide links to your traffic-cop page. How? You'll find the link to this page in your Link Selector tools (after you save your first back issue). The link is called...

Traffic-Cop Back Issue Page, followed by the "name of your newsletter."

Note: Sometimes, you might only want your subscribers and not site visitors to see back issues (for example, certain customer lists). In that case, do not provide links to your traffic-cop page on your site.

There are two ways to provide links to the traffic-cop page in an issue of your newsletter...

a) Use the Text Link Block in MailBuilder.

b) MailBuilder automatically adds a link to your traffic-cop page (if there is one), at the end of each issue of your newsletter.

Special Note: To send a subscriber or site visitor directly to a specific back issue, visit that page by clicking on its direct link on the "traffic-cop" page. Next, copy and paste its URL directly into the Link Selector for easy access. Insert accordingly!

If you ever need the URL itself (e.g., sending a friend to the back issue page via an email link), go to the Link Selector and do a search for "back issues" (without the quotes). That will take you immediately to the listings for all back issues. Highlight and copy the URL of the one you want, then paste it wherever you need it.


When you click Yes to save an issue as a back issue, not only does MailBuilder update the traffic-cop page, it also creates...

2) The Back Issue Page -- this page is saved as a web page when you click on the Yes radio button as your Back Issue choice. It appears as the HTML version of your email. Remember, this is a great way to show people the quality of the material you publish -- so it's a strong tool for convincing a visitor to subscribe.

Note: SBI! does add this back issue page to your XML sitemap, which lets the search engines know the page exists. And occasionally, the page will even score well for your keywords. But SBI! does not track or rank this page, because the point of this page is content for humans, not for the engines.

If you think a topic in your newsletter deserves the full content page treatment, use BlockBuilder to reformat your content. More information on this appears in the main help window by clicking on the question mark at the top of the MailBuilder page.