Set up a mailing list today

All the marketing/promotion advice sites point in the direction of setting up your own newsletter. How hard can that be? 

I wish I had threepence for each time I say those words - and live to regret it.

Start at the beginning: find an email marketing provider. To do that read up about it. 

Mailchimp and MailLite come out at the top of the charts with MailLite being recommended by the short course I was following. I started the process of signing up and got to the end where they wanted an email address that was linked to my website.

Now I don't have a website as such, only blogs, and this blog is hosted by Blogger. It doesn't seem to be possible to create an email address linked to it. No way to get around it - short of either paying lots of money or completely transferring my blog to a different host.

As my income from writing is rather less than Mr Micawber's, spending money can't really be justified* so I tried Mailchimp instead. 

Here it's creating the account that is the easy bit. After that I've been going around in circles.

Probably some of my problems stem from the fact that when I read technical stuff I bleep over words I don't understand (most of them) and leap straight in, willy nilly. Forget the 'some'; all of my problems could be resolved if I didn't fall for all these headlines that say, 'A Quick and Easy Method to Set up a Mailing List Today!'

What the headline doesn't say is that you have to have a teeny bit of expertise and understanding to grasp the point.

So I've stopped to blog and make a cup of tea. A very British answer to every problem.

*  Could I argue that you have to speculate to accumulate?