One of the best ways to add new content to your website is by blogging.
According to HubSpot, businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages.
If you leave your business website as it sits without a blog you’ll have your ten pages or whatever it might be. You might change the content on those pages occasionally, but that’s all the content your site will ever have unless you have a solid content strategy. To improve your SEO and give your visitors a reason to come back to your site publishing content regularly to a blog can make a difference.
With blogging, it’s also important to build a list of subscribers. The best way to add subscribers is with email. Another HubSpot study found that people subscribe to blogs via email 12 times more than they do with an RSS feed.
Just about every Internet user has an email address and checks their inbox regularly.
A blog can be a way to get permission to communicate with your target customers via email. A blog should be aimed at being a first introduction to a potential customer. You can answer the questions your target customer is asking in relation to their life or job.
Then with blog posts you can earn their trust and get them interested in the content on your main pages, which can sell them on your products and services.
But before we get too far into that let’s back up to blogging and email subscriptions.
Blog Subscription Automation
The great thing with getting email subscribers for your blog is that you can automate the email program.
Email providers offer this service including MailChimp. They call it RSS to Email. The way it works is that you still use your RSS feed, but you feed it to your email service provider (MailChimp) and they use it to send posts to your subscribers.
There are some important steps for getting this setup.
Blogging Schedule
Before we even get into the automation side of things we have to touch on your blogging schedule. If you don’t publish regular blog posts then the point of having an email program for your blog is moot.
I recommend setting up a weekly blogging schedule. You can do it in a simple spreadsheet. Brainstorm the titles and topics 10-12 at a time. Then you’ll have 2-3 months of content that you or someone on your team can write.
You can write the posts weekly and it should be easier because you’ll always have a topic ready to cover.
Email Setup And Schedule
Now that you’re committed to a regular blogging schedule you can setup the automated email program. The link above shows how to do that with MailChimp. It’s very similar for other email providers.
You take your RSS feed and that will send each new post to your email provide and then links to the post will be queued up to send to your subscribers.
A decision you have to make next is how often and what time you want to send the blog emails to subscribers.
A common way to do it is for the email to send right after each post is published. So if you publish the post every Monday at 8:00 AM then your subscribers will also get an email with a link to the blog post at that same time (or shortly after).
Another option is to send a monthly email. This would queue up all the weekly posts from the month and send them all as links to your subscribers once each month.
Make sure to communicate how often you’ll be mailing your subscribers when they are signing up so they know what to expect.
Email Design
The design of these emails can be basic. It could include a header with your business logo or blog logo and then have a basic text link or links that go to your blog posts.
But you can also enhance the design so it includes perhaps a photo and description. You’ll need to add these items on your blog post on your website if you want that to work.
It can increase clickthrough, but often the basic text version is a good place to start and can still be quite successful for you.
Signup Form On Your Blog
The next step is to setup the signup form on your blog. The common places for the signup form is in your sidebar next to the blog and blog posts and the bottom of each post.
Another option is to have a popup form. And you can often now adjust the popup form so that it only shows when someone is on your blog and not when they’re on the other pages on your site.
And I think you can have it show only for people that are arriving on your site for the first time.
Tracking And Managing Subscribers And Unsubscribers
In MailChimp or in whatever email service you’re using you’ll be able to track your subscribers. You can see the count go up and you can manage your subscribers.
It’s important to keep your list healthy. That means removing unsubscribers and also removing subscribers that aren’t interacting with your emails.
With most email providers you pay by subscriber. So, say, a subscriber is subscribed, but they haven’t opened an email in six months it’s safe to say they just delete your email every week. There is no value in having them on the list. Delete them and then you can keep your list efficient and your costs down.
Conclusion
A blog and an email subscriber list for the blog is one of the best ways to have a content strategy for your business. And the best part is that you can automate the email portion so your subscribers automatically receive the new blog posts.
It’s a simple step you can take to build an email list that will add value to your business.
