Free Email Newsletter Service
How To Increase Traffic To Your Website
Free Email Newsletter Service and its considerable advantages! Some thoughts on the daily ‘hullabaloo game’ we are playing along with when passionate writing meets the ‘theoretical – framework – managing’ SEO, keywords, meta tags and so on.We do our very best to answer to the SEO requirements in order to make our posts rank worthy and going conform with almighty Google claims.
Before you start thinking, oh no …another blogging expert on ‘how to increase traffic on your blog’, no worries! I am the last and least person to tell anybody how to manage a website. I am sure, I know a lot less about all this than many others in this huge blogosphere. I listen more to my gut instincts rather than to any ‘How To’s’, thank god we are all different individuals and we all have our very own personal style and intention. I started blogging for fun and I am working hard on keeping my blogging priorities in the fun department rather than stressing myself out on all that blogging stuff. I want fun in blogging! Thus, I am anything but an expert on anything.
Anyhow, we all keep learning and improving by doing, and we slowly keep finding out more and more. Today I would like to share my thoughts about the free email newsletter service we provide for our readers.We appreciate our audience and give them a nice ‘Freebie’ or ‘Goody’ for subscribing …fair and nice touch! They may download some kind of e-book for free, a guide to enhance beauty looks or how to get a dream body… self-improvement tips, DIY guides …. we all know about these nice little gestures (It’s nice to be nice!)
We do all this to build up a crowd of followers, some for business reasons others for ‘vanity fair feelings’, we all want to be ‘en vogue’ and successful (why ‘pulling our pants down’ in virtual public otherwise?) so far so good. But, have you ever really looked at the newsletters we receive or the ones we send out?
A few days ago, I started wondering … of course, as a ‘Greenhorn Blogger’ you watch what others do, you absorb all information you can get in order to become excellent in what you are doing, without questioning a thing!?
Let’s have a look at our free email newsletter services. How great to gain new subscribers, I am always delighted to find notifications about new subscribers. Doesn’t that mean, somebody randomly must have visited your blog and obviously liked it that much that it made them follow your invitation to subscribe?! Amazing …. target achieved! That’s what we want our audience to do. So, from now on our new dear loyal follower won’t miss out any of our unique pieces of written art anymore, woohoo.
But wait a minute, look at your lovely created newsletter email. The whole article appears nicely formatted, inclusive all the photos you have chosen, resized and customised … all inclusive newsletter email service straight to your subscriber’s inbox.
Now my question … why should any of our subscribers ever go back to our website if we are sending them the whole lot delivered by email??? How much does this service do for your website traffic rating? Do you not drive your subscribers OFF your site that way?
Is that not like inviting a friend for coffee, but I send that coffee (after adding some nice sweets, of course, that’s the Freebies!) to your home … in the manner of speaking ‘Free Delivery’! How nice and convenient is that for our dear reader, and no need at all to leave the house (going online) to get their coffee and the goodies.
As I said, these are my personal thoughts on this issue. I might be completely wrong but if I bother my common senses, it does make me wonder! I would be happy to hear/read your opinions and strategies of your way of dealing with free email newsletter service, how do you handle this? Do you limit the email to an excerpt of your post? Have you ever thought of this at all? And again, I know I am repeating myself, I am not giving any advice for anybody …who am I telling YOU?!
Did you know, that you can change the settings of your newsletter plugin at all?
If you go to Settings > Reading < in your dashboard, you can change your feed settings to “Summary”. Once you saved your changes, all subscription emails will only include an excerpt of your post, with a link to continue reading on the site! If your feed settings are set to “Full Post”, you can split the content of each one of your blog posts in 2 parts thanks to the “More Tag”
Everything that is above the “More Tag” will appear on your home page and in the subscription emails followed by a link inviting users to click to continue reading; everything that is below that tag will only appear on the post’s page.
Read more here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/
I have found this short video on how to make WordPress show the summary of a post using the ‘Reading settings’ and the ‘Read More Tag’ on blog posts:
I am almost sure, many of you blogging experienced writer will now think …” what’s the NEW thing she is telling us ” … as you knew about this long before I found out. But I have received lots of exactly these ‘full post newsletters’ myself recently, so I hope, I could maybe give some good advice to my “Greenhorn Blogging Buddies” for a change! Thanks a lot for reading, I would be really happy to read your thoughts about handling the ‘newsletter issue’, feel free to leave a comment.
Thanks a lot for your time!
Klaudia
Another brilliant source for blogging tips and all that … RDS Global Marketing
I think the purpose of your blog is so important in making these kinds of decisions. As a Life Coach, I want to build relations with people so that they sign up for coaching. I send a full mailing to their inbox once every two weeks. But like you say, Claudia, it comes at the expense of click ‘throughs’ to my website. Sadly, Google and I don’t have the same values about what’s important! At the end of the day, it really comes down to finding a balance that works for you.
I’ve not looked into using newsletters for my blog, to be honest I don’t actually read many that I’m subscribed to and end up unsubscribing from them. But this article has made me rethink, I like the idea of having a small excerpt from a post in a newsletter so maybe I’ll look into it! Great post
I just started using WP lately and still adjusting to its interface and my blog has just started earning subscribers but like Robert, I haven’t sent out emails yet.
I actually love the idea of sending personalised message to your newsletter subsribers. It gives a summary of your blog per month for instance and I guess readers would appreciate it more that way.
True Jessica , this sounds much nicer . I will look into this , how to and so on . Thanks a lot for reading and suggesting , much appreciated !
A nice recommendation of not just emailing the content of any post. Will perhaps consider this when my subscription reaches to a certain number. I also love how you explain everything. Very thoughftul of you to share this to your readers.
I’m just starting my newsletter even though I don’t know much about it. I have a few subscribers, but I just need to find the time to write the newsletter. I feel like I have a hard time keeping up with my job and blog as it is. But I agree that it’s pointless to email the content of a post. Give just a little taste and let them find the rest!
When I began using WP, I already altered the reader settings to avoid a lengthy homepage. I am still yet to decide about Newsletters. I must admit, I do open some but more often than not, I just send them to trash.
I have yet to use newsletters on my site. I do not like the idea of offering something for free just so people should sign up. Anyway, I did have a plugin to collect emails and that’s all I am doing, and I have not send emails yet. I think I should start doing this when I hit somewhere around 400-600 uniques per day. Otherwise, I still need to prioritize my time.
great point. I am going to look into that eventhough I don’t have wordpress.