Do You Have A Blog Promotion Newsletter?

If you have a daily blog, one way to keep readers coming back to your blog each week is to promote it through a newsletter. A blog promotion newsletter can do a lot to increase your readership, your comments, and your bottom line. One happy customer has seen a huge increase in your blog readership and participation since starting her newsletter in January. Carolyn Melberg says:

Thank you!

I’ve gotten great feedback on the new format for the newsletter. People like the added value of all the articles (rather than just one per week), and the short blurbs so they can choose which ones they want to read on the blog.

Great work!
Caroline

The blog promotion newsletter is a unique product because it consists of nothing more than a link to every blog post from the past week. We include a short synopsis of each blog post, or a snippet from the blog post, in each newsletter along with the title of that post. The intent is to interest the newsletter reader in the blog and drive traffic to it. It works!

If you’ve noticed, that’s how we promote our blogs. Every week, Tuesday morning in fact, the NameCritic newsletter, “The Content Letter,” is sent out and we highlight three blog posts from each of our company blogs – SEO Service Provider, Blog Content Provider, and Article Content Provider. The readership at each blog has grown since we started doing this.

Why A Blog Promotion Newsletter Works
If you’ve been in marketing for just a short time then you’ve likely heard of a marketing funnel. Your marketing funnel is your plan for driving your customers deeper into a relationship with you. Online, the typical marketing funnel consists of offering free content or free information. Of course, not everyone will take your free offers, but by offering something free in exchange for an e-mail address or other valuable information, you ensure that you at least start a relationship with your target customer.

The next level in a marketing funnel often consists of a small purchase. After that, you may offer a larger purchase, and keep bumping your customers up a level as they learn to trust your knowledge and insight and want more benefits from your offerings. Businesses have been using the marketing funnel since the earliest of times.

Your blog promotion newsletter should be a part of that marketing funnel. You already have their e-mail address, right? What are you doing with them? Are they reading your blog? Why not?

The NameCritic Marketing Funnel
Most of our customers understand the two types of blogs: Onsite and offsite. The onsite blog is typically called a company blog and the offsite blog is called a promotional blog. They have different focuses in terms of how we communicate with customers and use SEO for your benefit. But sales usually don’t take place on either blog. What you really want to do is drive traffic to your website from your blog. The blog is a way to provide useful commentary on your business offerings and the benefits you offer, but it isn’t typically a sales tool. It’s a pre-sales tool. The website is where you close the sale.

But you still need to get your audience to your blog. Many people will subscribe to your RSS feed and read your blog daily because they follow it. Most readers, however, will not subscribe to the RSS feed because they don’t understand it. The latest figures show that only about 20% of blog readers actually subscribe to RSS feeds. That leaves 80% of your potential readers out there looking for your blog. How will they find it?

If they aren’t on your e-mail list, they’re finding your blog either through organic search, PPC if you are driving traffic that way, and social bookmarking sites. If your customers aren’t searching for you that way then they likely aren’t reading your blog. That’s why you need to use e-mail to drive your current customers and potential customers to your blog.

Everyone is using e-mail. And since everyone uses e-mail, why not communicate with your audience that way?

In a separate e-mail to us from Caroline Melberg, she had this to say:

Just thought I’d drop you a note of thanks … I’ve had a great increase in comments on my blogs, and I’ve noticed a definite increase in my search engine rankings since you started blogging for us.

The strategy we use for Caroline’s blogs are the same we use for all of our client blogs – well-optimized content, social bookmarking (an add-on service), and driving traffic to her website by writing intelligently about her service offerings. There is one additional service we provide for Caroline that some of our customers have not tried yet – we use a blog promotion newsletter that goes out to Caroline’s list once a week and promotes her blog to her current list of customers and potential customers. We didn’t build the list. Caroline did. But we use the list to promote her blog and it looks like it’s paying off. I’m not a bit surprised.

Chances are, we can do the same thing for your company or promotional blog. If you have an e-mail list that you communicate with on a regular basis, or a list that you are not using, give us a shout and learn how a blog promotion newsletter can benefit your business.