One of the most important thing for the success of a blog is its regular readers. That is user who regularly read your new posts on your blog. Building an email list of your readers will help you very much in building your regular readers. When ever you publish a new article on your blog an email is sent to the users in your email list. So if your email list has a 1000 users then you have a chance of getting 1000 views for your blog post which is very helpful.
Importance of Email List
The importance of email marketing is its reach. Compared to social media sites a user is more likely to read the emails daily which makes it a higher conversion rate method. Getting the email address helps you figure out who your readers are. It also help in maintaining your readership because it does not depend on other things like organic traffic or referral traffic. The traffic you are getting on your blog may decrease anytime, but building your email list overcomes this limitation as the content is delivered right into the inbox of your user or customer. As the user himself gives you the email address it shows his willingness and interest in reading your content. So you get the chance of sending the content into the inbox of your potential customer. Here I will show you two methods by which you can create your free email subscription for your blog.
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is a web feed management service provided by Google, which will help you create custom RSS feed and provide management tools to bloggers. You have the option to create an email subscription for your RSS feed which you can use to create your email list. When a user subscribes to your RSS feed using email, he will get an email with the content of your post whenever a new post is added or an existing post is updated on your blog.
You can visit http://www.feedburner.com/ and create you free account for using the service. After logging in you can enter the URL of you blog feed in the space provided.
Then click the next button. In the next page enter the feed title and feed address.
After creating your feed burner feed go to the feed management section. You will see the below screen. Now click on the ‘Publicize’ tab and click on the Email Subscriptions menu, you will see the below screen.
You can click on the ‘Activate’ button to activate email subscription for your feed. You can integrate it with your blog using the HTML form generated on feedburner or if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform then you can use any of the popular plugins available for integrating it with WordPress.
MailChimp
Another popular email marketing tool available is MailChimp. MailChimp offers a free plan with a limitation of Up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. So if you have 2000 subscribers then you can send only six emails in a month. MailChimp is a good tool with features like creating templates for your email, create forms and free reports and data insight. If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform then you can easily integrate MailChimp with your blog using any of the popular plugins available for creating the email subscription.
So you can use these tools to create a targeted audience for your blog, which is helpful in increasing the reach of your blog.
