If you’re a blog owner who’s regularly putting up fresh content and has been doing it for some time, you probably have a base of regular readers that visit your site all the time and even comment frequently.
Because of this, maybe you’ve also been thinking of collecting a more solidly established group of fans by turning some of your site readers into email subscribers that get your best content right to their inboxes on a periodic basis.
Luckily, doing this isn’t very hard and if your blog’s niche happens to be related to a sales or business oriented niche instead of something that’s pure entertainment - though an email campaign can work fine with either - then you can also eventually create sales offers and start monetizing your monthly visitors in a way that’s not easily possible if you leave them as regular site visitors.
Now, we’re going to assume you already have a blog online, have readers regularly visiting it and are frequently posting new content. That being the case, let’s go over the process of turning blog content into a monthly email newsletter and eventually creating a potential sales list from your reader base.
Set up Opt-In subscription
To start everything we’re going to do off, you first need a list of subscribers that you’ve gleaned from your overall reader base. You can create this by setting up a section on all of your website content and other pages that give readers the option of handing over their email address in order to receive content directly to their inboxes.
A good and unobtrusive place for your opt-in box is one of the sidebars on your site, preferably on the right side since it will likely attract more attention.
Make the opt-in offer highly visible but don’t go overboard with constant pushiness; although you can use a program like PopUp Domination to create one time (per visit) popup based email opt-in offers that, although annoying to some, have a higher average conversion rate of 2 to 5% over the typical .75 to 2% you’ll likely get for a sidebar opt-in.
Read this post for additional conversion tips: Email List Building: A 3 Step Working Strategy To Build Email List FAST
Offer an Enticing Bonus in Exchange for Email Addresses
The bottom line is that your readers, just like anyone, respond best when they have incentives to do so. Simply asking for email addresses won’t motivate them to hand over their valuable email addresses regardless of how much they like your content - after all, they can always just come to the site itself for more of the same thing. Thus, you need to include a bonus of some kind and make it worth their time.
On the one hand, this can be a special offer of some kind, maybe a free report or ebook and on the other hand you could also offer something constant and exclusive like unique email only content from your site or, if you’re selling something, regular discounts on products and services.
Whichever you offer, be sure to include mention of the fact that you will be sending them regular content from your site and that you will not under any circumstances give away your readers’ emails to any third parties for any reason.
As a final note regarding opt-in, make sure that your opt-in process requires email verification through a clickable link in an initial message you send them.
Also, bear in mind that the conversion rates mentioned in the first step above depend more than anything on what kind of motivation you provide for getting an address, you can make them fairly high if you really strike a nerve of desire because you gauged your audience well.
Sending off Regular Emails
Now that we’ve covered the extremely important process of getting people to actually give over their email addresses, let’s look at the mechanics of emailing your posts off to your viewers and giving them their content along with any additional specials you offered as part of your opt-in bonus.
Use and Post-To-Email Service
The entire process of actually sending out your blog posts as email subscription messages will be much, much simpler if you just use a pre-built email marketing software package to take care of it instead of doing everything from scratch by yourself.
This applies especially if your email subscriber list is long and you’ve got a lot of dynamic content to deliver.
Some great services that can be found online include the well-known (amongst email marketers) Aweber, GetResponse and a more bare-bones but very effective service known as FeedBlitz, which depends on scanning your blog’s RSS feed for all the content it’s going to send out to your subscribers.
The great thing about all of these is that they let you set up your mailing service, mark off certain sending parameters, choose from numerous email message templates and start sending off emails in an almost totally automated way. Like we said, much easier than doing it all yourself, much, much easier.
Pick your Email Template
Whichever email marketing system you use, you’ll have a choice of templates presented to you. Choose the one that best fits the nature of your content and the kind of reader base you have.
A good option is the typical two column email format that gives a wider left-hand column loaded with content and also includes a narrower right-hand area for additional promotions, discounts, sales offers and anything else you’d like to sell or promote.
Don’t lose sight of this promotion aspect. Email marketing takes some time to set up and by taking advantage of its high sales conversion rates, you can really turn your existing sales up a notch or start a sales campaign from scratch on top of your existing free newsletter service.
Set Out Emailing Frequency
Finally, as part of the process behind your email marketing system, set out some mailing frequency parameters for your messages. If you’re offering exclusive content that’s only available to your subscribers, you might want to limit how often you send it and maybe send a richly filled message every couple of weeks or more.
On the other hand, if your blog is updated daily with new posts, you really should limit how many of those you mail monthly since receiving such a flood directly to their inbox is likely to cause your subscribers to list you as a spammer or simply unsubscribe; they may like your site content a lot, but having their email inbox flooded daily can really kill their enthusiasm.
The bottom line you must always keep in mind is this: never fail to provide value. Any email you send as part of your monthly newsletter should be something that really delivers valuable content, updates or offers to your niche followers.
Options for a WordPress Blog
Aweber and other software like it can be used with almost any type of WordPress based blog that was set up through the popular CMS software.
However, if you want to save money, the WP software itself is also connected to a dazzling array of utility plugins that can offer their own mailing systems wither for free or much cheaper than the more comprehensive services listed above.
Some good examples include:
Wysija Newsletters, which is free and very extensive, available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wysija-newsletters/
WP Autoresponder And Newsletter Plugin, which is a more bare-bones program but also great for a basic email subscription campaign, especially since it too is free. Available at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-responder-email-autoresponder-and-newsletter-plugin/
ALO EasyMail Newsletter. This email marketing plugin is also free, a bit basic but great for most ordinary campaigns: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alo-easymail/
There are also other email marketing plugins available and new ones almost certainly emerging every now and then. All of them can be downloaded directly from your WordPress dashboard and set up very quickly.
Michael Klein has been writing about affordable email marketing for companies like Reachmail for more than a decade. When not writing, Michael is generally working on his golf game or practicing his jazz guitar at home.
