Why Having A Newsletter On Your Blog Is Vital
Having lots of RSS readers is no longer the most important thing for a blog. RSS readers are difficult to monetize (make money from), and the advent of Google Adsense for Feeds didn´t change that. If you really want to make money from your blog, you need to offer an email newsletter.
Blog newsletters
Most bloggers now offer a subscription to some form of blog newsletter as their main option. Blog designs also reflect the importance of capturing readers emails. Most blog headers now display the option to subscribe to the newsletter right in the header. Some of the most important blogs on the internet, like BlogStorm, John Chow, and Yaho offer blog emails newsletters to their readers. You can usually find the opt-in form in the header, sidebar, or even as some type of a pop-up.
Email newsletters take the leap
Email newsletters on blogs became even more popular when in October of 2008 veteran problogger Darren Rowse talked about his success with the Aweber pop-up on his photography blog.
He revealed how the Aweber pop-up he introduced had increased his subscriber rate by 10x. After this most top blogs started offering the email newsletter option.
A week after Darren posted the information on his blog had also set-up the email newsletter on my blog, with the number of email subscribers increasing 20 to 25 a day.
Why should you have an email newsletter?
I could mention many reasons for offering an email newsletter, but I will focus on the two most important ones:
1. RSS readers are only notified of any new items you publish. But what about all the information you published in the past? At most a new reader will see a few of those posts. You can chage all this just by offering an email newsletter. After setting up your blog newsletter, you can easily set-up an autoresponder that sends out your best content to your new readers. Not only can you send out newsletters with your best content, but you can also promote certain affiliate programs that you covered before on your blog. By doing this you will get a constant flow of visitors to your old posts and at the same time make additional revenue. As your subscriber base grows, so will the number of emails that get sent out. All this while the amount of time required stays the same.
2. Imagine that for whatever reason you stop posting to your blog. As soon as you stop updating your blog your RSS readers will also stop receiving updates. On the other hand, your autoresponder sequence will keep sending out emails to your newsletter subscribers. And even if you get new subscribers, those will start from the first newsletter in your autoresponder. Contrast this to RSS readers that will only get futher updates if you write more content.
These are two of the strongest reasons to set-up a newsletter for your blogs.
If you would like to setup a newsletter on your blog I recommend you read my Aweber vs GetResponse autoresponders review and pick the one best suited for your needs.
