Building up a long term base of subscribers to your site is a key aspect of continued success.
If each of your posts is being pushed out to 1000s of readers then you have a massive head start over your competition. This article, which forms part of our series on 29 debates bloggers have about blogging, discusses the best ways to do this.
What is an RSS Feed?
An RSS news feed allows your readers to subscribe to your content using a “feed reader” – a good free reader cab be found here. As readers surf the net and come across sites they are interested in following they can add the RSS feed to their reader.
All future posts are then delivered to the reader and can be read at the subscribers leisure.
If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to our feed now.
Email Subscription List
Another way to keep in touch with your readers is by building up a mailing list. Simply convince everyone passing through your site to hand over their email address and then you can start sending them messages.
There is no doubt that email lists can generate large amounts of income. The commercial website that I worked for employed a whole team to manage a list of way over a million subscribers. They would coordinate mail outs with ongoing events, target emails and different groups, and seek out special exclusive offers just for the subscribers. And when this went right the return on investment was very impressive.
There are some bloggers who swear by building an email list, and there is no doubt that if done well this can be a great way to make money online. These bloggers will even sell you a course all about how to make the most out of such an email list.
I’ll save you some money:
- Set up your site to collect as many emails addresses as possible. Ideally make it impossible for the reader to do anything until they’ve handed out the email address.
- Start spamming emailing your mailing list with a set of automated mails:
- Start with a simple “hi” email to build up some trust, make it look like you care even if the mail was sent automatically by some software
- A week later the automated mailing system will send out the first sales message
- Subsequent emails will all try to squeeze more and more from the poor soul who signed up
It’s not a difficult thing to get set up and there are many companies out there who can manage mailing list subscriptions and automate emails to be sent out at set intervals to your new subscribers. Each new person will get the same set of mails one after the other according to a set schedule. The hard part is building up a decent list in the first place.
What the people selling you these systems won’t tell you is that this technique only works if you have something to sell – normally a course on making money online! And maybe you want to try that? Well good luck to you but I’m afraid Blogercise offers a different route. We are all about building something you can be proud of and not hard sales messages.
Best of Both Worlds
There is no doubt that email is a great form of communication. It delivers content right into a readers inbox at a time when they are receptive to reading messages. There is a great way to connect with your readers using RSS feeds, but have that feed emailed out to your readers at regular intervals.
Check out the free service: Feedburner
Feedburner is a Google owned service that allows you to “burn” an RSS feed so that they can enhance it with a number of features. One of those is the ability to have your feed emailed out to your readers.
The great thing about this is that is allows you to reach the many readers who do not use RSS feed readers, or in many cases, the readers who have never even heard of such things. However, most Internet users do have an email address these days and so you can access them in this way!