How Do You Expand Your Blog Reach? (HINT: Email)

3 Forms of Blog-related Email [Chart]

What blogger doesn’t want to expand their blog audience? While it’s not sexy, my one word answer is email. Before you skip off to another article, bear in mind that to entice people to read your content you must offer them options regarding when they want to read, where they want to read it, and what format and/or device they use to read. To this end, email, the number one activity on smartphones, is a great option because your audience always has access and uses email to consume content as a filler activity in spare, otherwise wasted time.

While I’d love to give you a magic formula to build your audience, the truth is that you don’t want visitors to come once, stay less than ten seconds, and never return because this doesn’t build a sustainable traffic model. Email is the perfect answer for this. It avoids the one-hit-wonder syndrome by creating an on-going content distribution channel.

3 Blog-related ways to use email

Blog-related emails come in three different varieties. Choose the one that aligns best with your goals.

  1. Deliver blog posts. Distribute your blog content through an alternative channel as it’s published. A third party product like Feedburner can handle emailings as well as RSS feeds.
  2. Publish a newsletter. If your goal is to build relationships with potential customers, use an email newsletter to provide an alternative communications vehicle for readers and prospects. Since this type of emailing does more than just distribute your blog posts, include original content that’s targeted to your email audience as well as links to your blog posts and other interesting articles from around the web. Integral to this initiative is building your house file of email addresses.
  3. Sell your products, particularly information-based offerings. If your goal is to engage prospects and get them actively involved in your purchase funnel, you need to create a series of related emails that are sent in sequence after an initial trigger event. These communications are created so that they relate to each other and are delivered in a timed fashion from the point customers sign up. There are related sales funnel pages and analytics needed to help hone your offer.

At a minimum, offer blog visitors the option of registering for your content via email and make sure that the registration buttons on your blog stand out and have a strong call-to-action. Remember that some readers may use your emailings as a way to get back to your blog as well as a tickler that they liked your content.

Do you have any other suggestions that you’d add to this list? If so, what are they?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen


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