Circulation System

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of promotion lately about the audio version of This Normal Life on Jerusalem Post Radio. Unfortunately, as of this week, the Jerusalem Post took a decision to shut down their entire radio site.

As I understand it, JPostRadio.com was costing the Post more than they were making. The audio is still being hosted for a little while longer, so if you want to hear what we did in the last couple of months, click here now.

I really enjoyed doing the audio version – it took me back to my university days when I was an announcer on our college radio station. I played the latest New Wave (back when it was new, not now as part of those fashionable Flashback 80s lunches on alternative rock stations around the world), and I was quite active in radio theater.

So, I’d like to put it out to you, dear readers. If you have the ability to stream audio from your website or server, I would be glad to continue recording This Normal Life every week (I have the equipment at home). I would then send the resulting MP3 files to you to stream.

Alternatively, I could look into streaming the audio directly from this site. If you'd be interested in helping out with this (or for that matter with any of the other costs associated with running This Normal Life), please click the Amazon Honor System icon on the right hand side of the site where you can make a voluntary donation (hey, it’s the public television pledge drive model brought to the Internet - call us now or this site goes dark).

Seriously, JpostRadio was fun while it lasted, but it was also part of a strategy for building up the circulation for This Normal Life. In the past month, This Normal Life has also started to appear at Israel Insider and Jewsweek, two online news sources that reach tens of thousands of readers. According to SiteMeter, which tracks hits to the site, this has more than doubled the number of visitors to This Normal Life.

In addition, many of you have received an email from me inviting you to subscribe to the email version of This Normal Life. It’s completely free and many readers have written to tell me that they find it particularly convenient having the column waiting for them in their inbox. Click here to subscribe today.

The email version is what the industry calls “push” marketing, in contrast to “pull” where you have to come to the website and pull down the latest column. Receiving the column this way also makes it much easier to forward a piece that you found particularly moving to others on your email lists.

Please feel free to pass on This Normal Life as much as you like. The only thing I ask is that if you do forward it, just make sure to include the tagline with the web address (http://brianblum.blogspot.com) so that others can find This Normal Life on the web.

By the way, since I started promoting the email version, subscriptions have also doubled!

Let me take this brief opportunity to thank you all for your continuing support. Knowing that I am touching so many people around the world and providing a personal perspective of Israel that goes beyond the headlines you read in the New York Times or hear on CNN is what this is all about.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…