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Transcript of Set up an RSS Email in MailChimp – Fix Image Width

Hey there. So this is out little RSS email. Let’s take a look.

And it sized beautifully. And, as you can see, I kind of still was a little bit too large. I reduced the size of this down to seven hundred pixels, but it’s still a little bit too wide. Otherwise it looks pretty good. Really, I’m fairly happy with it. And so what I would do – and it pulled in recent posts, it pulled in, you know, the business name, the address, all this good stuff.

And so one thing I would do before I send it to my actual, you know, list of over five hundred people is I would go back into my WordPress account and I would make this a little bit smaller. And why don’t I show you exactly what that would take? Let’s go to Start A Bakery and we’re going to go to “Dashboard” and into “Posts”. “How to Write a Business Plan”. So we’re going to go here to “Edit”. And I want to see this.

Now what would be interesting to see is if I manually resized it in WordPress, if it would be smaller, because I could do custom-size and then I could drop it. Let’s take a close look at this. So if that’s seven hundred, I would be guessing it’s about a hundred, maybe three hundred. So I would want to drop this down to definitely no more than, let’s say, five hundred wide. And so if I drop this down to five hundred wide, I’m afraid that when the RSS goes out it’s not going to resize the image automatically because that’s a WordPress control. And so while I’m tempted to just, you know, drop this down to five hundred and hope for the best, I don’t think that’s going to work.

What I am going to do is I’m going to go into Photoshop. And I’m going to try to resize this so you can see everything. I’m going to go find that image and here, actually, is BizPlanBakery. That’s my resized. I’m going to go down here and find a larger version. Because that way, if you keep reducing the reduced version it kind of becomes a photocopy of a photocopy, which is no good.

So we’re going to want to go into “Image Size”. Pretty simple. And, as you can see, it’s eight hundred. Let’s drop it down to five hundred and we’ll hope for the best. If nothing else, it won’t look as bad. Let’s do a little bit of “Unsharp Mask” here, but not too much. Here, you need to see the Unsharp Mask. So, as you can see, it gets really harsh and we don’t want that. And I can soften it a little bit more. Yeah. This is kind of overkill, you don’t really need to be seeing all this. But, for some of you, it might be helpful.

So that’s it. I’m just going to go “Save for Web”. Right now it’s “JPEG – High” and I would love you to be able to – nope, it’s not going to let me do that. So this is “JPEG – High” and this will show me the sizes, as you can see. And so if I drop it down to “Medium” – I’m sorry, you can’t see that – you can see it still looks pretty good and it’s much smaller. This is really important for emails. And so now that I’m kind of doing dual-use for my images – if you drop it down to “Low” it starts to look kind of not so hot. So I’m going to leave it at “JPEG – Medium”.

It looks pretty good here, as you can see. It’s not too huge, it could be better. But I’m not aiming for perfection, I’m just wanting to get this done. And, unfortunately, you can’t see the “Save”, but I’m going to click “Save”. And then we’re going to put this here. And, when I resize things like this, I always name them the width. And so there we go, “Save”. And we’re just going to quit here.

And when I go in here, now “Replace”. “Upload”. “Select”. “Bakery Plan 500”. Not the Indy 500, but the Bakery Plan 500. And just put in full size and, if I’m a really good girl, I will add an “Alt Tag”. It really is the best practice, if you can bear it. And just “Replace”. And so it’s fine, click “Update”. And go to “View Post”. Yeah. And so it’s a little bit smaller but it will probably look much better and I want it to look good for the RSS.

Next thing I would do, now that I have fixed the image issue and I’m otherwise happy with this, is I would actually go back in and I’m going to tee this up for my real people. And let’s go to “Campaigns”. Remember, we edit this one. This is the one that it’s already spat out. This is kind of the engine and this is the product, basically. The products always end up in HTML. These are the already created emails from the RSS feed. This is what we want to edit. We have to pause it, as mentioned, which is okay. It’s loading here.

And next thing I want to do is “List”. And so now we want to send to the entire list. Little bit scary, but we’re going to do it. And that’s great. And so send to A Bakery, no personalizing of the “To” field. This is all good. Everything we’ve seen before. We don’t need to touch this at all. As you can see, it’s correct.

We can see our little posts, so our edit cap was saved. And, again, we’re just going to keep doing RSS. Or “Next”, rather. And so there’s all set to send, all is well. “Start RSS” again. “Start Campaign” again, to my now six hundred and one subscribers. Very good. Okay.

So that’s the whole process for setting up an RSS feed, testing it and then sending it out to your full list. I am a huge believer of testing things before you send them.