Are you looking for more ways to bring traffic to your site and work less?
You’ve heard that an email program can help do just that, but maybe you’re looking for the first step.
There are a few different ways you can setup an email program, but in this post I’m going to focus on the bare minimum that will require some work up front, but will be entirely automatic from then on.
I’ll also include some details later on in the post about how you can do more with your program as time goes on.
Let’s get into it.
First Requirement: Fresh Content
In order for this email program to work you’re going to need fresh content. You can determine the frequency of the content and the emails. If you think you’re going to struggle with the content part I would suggest starting with one item per month or even one item per quarter.
The best way to do it is with blog posts. The reason is you’ll need an RSS feed for the automation to work. An RSS feed is a way for software to pull in your latest posts and publish them somewhere (your emails).
Focus on the common questions your customers ask. Come up with 12 questions. Plan to write 12 posts providing the answers to those questions. That’s an entire year’s worth of posts if you publish one per month.
And you can throw in a few extra ones by providing your insight into the latest industry news.
Step 1 – Signup For An Email Provider (MailChimp, Aweber, etc.)
Next, signup for either MailChimp or Aweber. They have different styles, but offer pretty much the same thing, which is an email service.
You can create all kinds of emails and mail them to various lists and segments of lists.
Step 2 – Create A Template
Once you signup for an email service you’ll be able to create a template. In Aweber, you’re looking for Blog Broadcast and in MailChimp you’re looking for RSS-To-Email.
There are a variety of stock templates for your email design. You can use and tweak those on your own or you can have a designer (Sarah Lynn Design, wink wink) create a customer email template that fits better with your brand image.
Step 3 – Add Your RSS Feed
Next, add the RSS feed from your website or blog to the email setup. The links above show how to do this for MailChimp and Aweber.
The RSS feed will pull in information from your blog to create the email. You can do it a couple different ways. You can pull in an image from the post, the title and link those two items to the post’s URL.
You can also pull in just the title and link that to the post.
Step 4 – Test
Create this setup with only you and a maybe a few others that can help you test. You want to make sure the email looks good in your inbox. Also, if you’ve had a blog setup for some time the first email might include all of your blog posts up to this point. You don’t want to send that one to everybody on your email list.
But once you’re past the initial stage you can add your regular list to the blog broadcast.
Step 5 – Analyze The Results And Tweak
The surprising thing for me was that a very basic email with text links does very well compared to a more visual email with images and descriptions of the articles.
I would start out basic and see how the results are. Then test doing a more detailed, one-time email and see if the results are better. If they are, you can experiment with a different template for your broadcast.
Next Steps: Curated Content, Sales Emails, etc.
Once you have your automated email setup you can really leave it alone. The emails will send out every week or month using your blog posts. It will work and you won’t have to change a thing if you don’t want.
But as you get more people on your list you might want to send more emails. This is where you can do things like curated content and sales emails.
Curated content would be you hand picking articles and content from around the web and sending them to your subscribers along with a few of your own thoughts.
And sales emails would be promoting your products.
That’s it! Now go get started on that email program!
Photo by: Mark Fischer
