In an earlier post about Aweber, reader Mathea asked a most interesting question.

How do people add the last 4 or 5 blog posts to their emails automagically?

I love that question because it really made me pause, think and figure out a solution. The only down side is, she didn’t say what tool the sender uses. Since we were discussing Aweber, that’s what I’ll assume in this answer.

You must first know that Aweber doesn’t actually support this. Well, not in the manner most of us think it should. You cannot assign a global snippet to pull in the latest content from your blog. However, you can do this in a roundabout way that is somewhat automatic.

This is how I’d do it.

First, add the feed to Aweber using the Blog Broadcast feature.

You’d enter the feed, select your template or create a new template as usual. In the template, you will want to leave space for your regular weekly message.

Make sure the merge codes to grab content from your RSS feed is somewhere in your template.

Next comes the 2nd, actually the most important box. Send automatically. I’d make sure it is NOT checked.

This is why it is important. If you check it, Aweber will send out your email each time the other criteria are met. You will not get a chance to add your personal weekly message. By not sending automatically, Aweber automatically creates broadcast messages for you with the latest posts (but doesn’t send).

When you’re ready to send your message, simply select the last message automatically created for you.

This message will have all your latest blog post titles, links and description if you programmed it to. All you need to do is edit your weekly message or promo into the message, change the subject line, check and queue for sending.

There may be a small – perhaps negligible issue doing things this way. If you are a prolific blogger, you may end up with a lot of messages automatically created for you. The number depends on your frequency setting. I really don’t see a big deal about this. Just delete the ones you won’t be using.

What If You Don’t Want To Add A Message?

This method works great if you want to manually enter some kind of message to the email in addition to the latest blog posts. If you just want to send your blog posts without a personal message, just set it up using a template you like and check the send automatically box. This makes your emails 100% hands free.

Why Not Copy And Paste?

Simple. Why do extra work when you don’t have to? Copy and paste is fine and really doesn’t add that much more time, but I like the idea of templates and this is a way of working from a template (with some variable content).

And that’s it. I hope that helps you create some great emails.