Why All Bloggers Need to Build a Mailing List

Starting your blog can take some work, from deciding on a name, choosing a good design, to writing your content. But the area where I find new bloggers most difficult is attract (and retain) readers on their blog.

Driving traffic to your blog is a must if you want to build a good following, which will not only lead to a popular blog but also a blog with the potential to make a lot of money.

There are different ways to do this, but the most effective one I’ve found is ask your readers to sign up for your mailing list at the very beginning of your blog. Without a doubt, having an email subscriber list is The fastest way to increase your readership and profits.

First, let’s briefly discuss some of the reasons why email is often overlooked by both beginners and experienced bloggers.

Why is Email Ignored?

The truth is that most people don’t consider email “interesting” these days. Email has been around since the early days of the Internet, so at this point many people consider it boring or even outdated.

The trend now is all about social media promotion. Whether you’re promoting your new posts via Twitter or sharing content on Facebook, these strategies are often the same as how we should promote our blogs. In fact, sometimes it seems that social media is the best way for us to gain an advertising advantage.

I’m definitely not here to talk to you about promoting your blog on social media, but to tell you to make sure you’re focusing more on where your readers are. more easily accessible. And where exactly is that? In their email inbox!

The simple fact is that although social media platforms have varying levels of user adoption, none of them will catch up with email. How can I be so confident in this? Simply because these platforms still prompt new users to sign up with an email account.

So if social media users have email and there are millions of other people who use email but not social media, there’s a reason you’re missing out on a lot of potential readers if you spend more time on them. for a social media strategy rather than an email strategy.

What are the benefits of an email list?

Email represents one of the easiest and most direct ways to reach the people most interested in your content. After all, if they visit your blog and opt-in to receive emails from you then you can be sure they want to hear more from you!

The main reason email is so powerful is how personal it is. Your readers will receive each email as a note directly from you, which really helps build a relationship between your blog and your readers.

Even better, it allows you to have an extremely high-converting way to drive traffic to your blog, by reaching a self-selected audience of your most interested readers.

Whether you’re trying to drive traffic to a new article or promote your own product or service, email allows you to engage your audience directly. You spend a lot of time creating high-quality blog content, so you want to make sure that your most interested readers are viewing it.

So how do you build your email subscriber list?

Building an Email Subscriber List: Frequently Asked Questions

Whenever I talk to bloggers about building their email subscriber lists, a few questions often come up. Those questions typically focus on the two questions listed below.

I’ll answer each question, so read on to find out which email list management tool I recommend as well as some of my tips on how to build your email list.

Which tool should I use to manage my email list?

There are many tools designed to help you manage your email subscriber list, but after trying all the most popular tools, I recommend Constant Contact.

Constant Contact is the most user-friendly email tool, and the best part is that you don’t have to sacrifice any functionality to get that easy-to-use interface.

Besides they offer a free trial without a credit card, there are a few reasons I recommend Constant Contact:

Easy to use

The most common feedback I hear from other bloggers about Constant Contact is simple: It’s simple.

As a blogger, your main focus is on creating great content, so you want an email tool that delivers results without making things more complicated than necessary.
Constant Contact is now specially designed for beginners to be able to get up and run in almost no time.

As soon as you sign up, you’ll be prompted to dive in and start designing your first email. While there are a lot of cool features, the basic ones are easy to use, and if you need help at any time, there are text and video tutorials as well as live support to solve the problem. answer all your questions.

custom

Constant Contact allows for an incredible level of customization in all your emails. This feature is the one I’ve heard most often, and it’s easy to see why.

From within Constant Contact’s slick setup, you can choose exactly who to target with each email, whether you want to send it to your entire list of subscribers or a specific subset. You can also choose from a number of pre-made templates to take care of the design work for you.

All this easy customization saves you more time creating outstanding content that attracts your readers, while still being able to promote yourself to your readers with easy-to-read, professional emails. designed to look good on desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms.

analysis

Creating beautiful-looking emails is all well and good, but how do you measure whether they’re really impacting your blog? Constant Contact offers some of the most complete analytics available anywhere designed to help you do exactly that.

These analytics will help you track everything from how many people actually open your emails to how many people click on links in your emails. You can even try sending two different emails, one each to half of your subscribers, to see which gets opened more often.

Analytics is an easy way for you to take a more sophisticated approach to your email marketing, thereby dramatically increasing your return on investment for every email you send.

How do I start building my email list?

Now that you understand the importance of building your email list, and how using Constant Contact can help you manage and use it to its fullest extent, you may be wondering exactly where to start. How to start building your list.

First, check out my step-by-step guide on how to use Constant Contact with your WordPress blog. That will show you all the details on how to actually collect email addresses and send emails.

Besides that, the most important tip is to prioritize building your list. There are two basic rules to follow here:

1. Make sure to put the form where people enter their email address in a visible location on your blog, ideally somewhere at the top of your blog’s sidebar menu.

2. Give people a good reason to sign up. One of the best ways to do this is by offering exclusive content. For example, if you have a recipe blog, offer to send them some exclusive recipes not found on your blog in exchange for signing up.

Typically, a blog’s email list will only contain summaries and reminders of the content that regular visitors will know. While those serve their purpose, creating exclusive content will help you sign up and retain as many email subscribers as possible.

What now?

1. Sign up for a free trial account at Constant Contact.

2. Use my step-by-step guide to get your email list up and running.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions!