Starting a newsletter that can grab your audience is one of the crucial elements of owning a blog. Yes, there’s social media and if you get a good following on there, it can be a huge win. However, by starting a newsletter, you can retain your audience in a much more personal way and from quite early on.
Below are ten great reasons why you should look into starting a newsletter for your blog and promoting it wherever you can.
1. It keeps your audience coming back
The number one reason you should start a newsletter from early on is to keep your audience coming back. Whenever you send out an email, you are directly notifying your audience of new content on your blog. If you didn’t do this, they would either have to get your website onto an RSS feed (not really used these days) or they’d have to just regularly check your website of their own accord.
2. It allows you to interact with your audience more directly
Your blog posts are there to inform – that’s why people read them. They want the latest book review or the interesting blogging tips – they’re not there to read about how nice your weekend was. But once you’ve got them on your newsletter subscription list, you can instantly become more personable. In fact, writing in a more engaging way and talking about more culturally relevant and topical things can keep your audience reading your emails. Don’t put in too much fluff though as it’s not all about you, it’s about your content.
3. It allows your personality to shine through
As mentioned above – this is your chance to show that the book review they’ve just read may be very professional and to the point but you are actually a fairly casual and fun person. Let your personality come out in your newsletter. Let your readers know about how busy your week has been around your blog. Let your audience read about how it’s been hot near you and you’re loving that. This is your chance to get them to engage with you more. If you seem more like a human being, people will want to speak to you like a human being and will grow a greater want to engage with your content.
4. It gives you a chance to promote the posts YOU want
Another huge thing is the fact a newsletter allows you to promote the articles you want people to see. You may be sitting there saying… “I want them to read all of them!” But what I mean here is: maybe one of your articles isn’t doing well, this may be because it’s not the most interesting read but it also may be simply because it missed everyone’s social media feeds or didn’t appear on Google this time. Don’t be disheartened – simply promote it in your newsletter as a great read. You can also use the newsletter to promote any digital content you’re selling.
5. You can attach free goodies to keep people subscribed
Keeping people coming back may mean sometimes offering them free things. These free things don’t have to be physical products and a lot of the time cost nothing upfront. For example, I have a shop that offers digital products at the moment. I don’t charge a lot for these as you’re essentially getting a PDF that you still have to go and print yourself. But the designs are unique so I feel like I have a right to charge.
However, in your newsletter, you could create something digital and free to keep people interested. Then if that person uses it and their friend asks where they got it from, they can say from your newsletter, and boom, you have a new subscriber.
6. You can use it as a way to promote affiliate links
Affiliate marketing is when you sign up to a singular company or multiple company’s affiliate programmes to promote their products. When you then link to these products via the unique link the company gives you, you’ll receive a small amount of commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Why not slip a few of these into your emails too?
7. It gives you another avenue to promote your social media channels
Building up a big social media following, like anything that requires an audience, will help you massively in 1. Gaining an audience but also 2. Keeping your audience. If they follow you on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or join your Facebook page, you then have direct access to their feed to notify them of your latest posts. Pop your social media pages at the end of every post. It’ll definitely be worth it.
8. It gives your audience a chance to read your articles in their own time
People are busy, we know this. We’re living in a time when everyone is busier than they’ve ever been before. But we also live in a time when it’s easier than ever to get into people’s evening plans. If you plant a newsletter in their inbox, then when they get home and finally check their personal emails to see if their Amazon package has been shipped yet, they’ll see your newsletter and be in a great position to read it. Alternatively, they may have their emails on notification, see your newsletter come in at work, and mark it to be read when they get home.
9. You can better measure who your audience is
With newsletters you get to see the person’s email address, you get to see their first name sometimes and this gives you a better sense of the actual person you’re speaking to. This then leads to the next point.
10. You can use it to better optimise your article titles
You can see which links were clicked most and then use these statistics to better produce your content in the future. If your article that offers 50 things to note when starting (and running) a blog is getting better views than your review of The Way of Kings then you know these sorts of articles are the sort of thing you want to be posting more of.
Summary
I hope these tips above have convinced you to create a newsletter. Throughout the article, I’ve linked to my social media pages, shop, some of my articles and even my newsletter. If you’d like to back through and click on any of them, that would be most appreciated. If not, here are some quick links:
