We all know that blogging plays a key role in the success of your business, but that’s only true if people are actively reading it. That means it should be easy to find your blog from your landing page, it should have a cohesive theme, embrace SEO standards, and generally be relevant to the needs of your customers – don’t pitch your content above or below their experience or understanding.
What happens, though, if you’re doing all of these things right and you still have low blog readership? Is there a way to increase how many people read your content that you aren’t taking advantage of?
The Solution You Need
The answer is yes, and it’s called email syndication. Though you may not know the name, we’ve all seen it – emails the contain the opening text of a blog and invite the reader to click through and read the rest. This is a simpler strategy than syndicating out, in which you work with other sites to republish your content. Though that kind of “create less, promote more” strategy is effective, it requires a lot of time and energy, unlike email syndication.
How It Works
If you’re interested in trying out email syndication, all you need to do is connect your blog to an RSS email syndication widget. This simple tool will then send your posts out to a pre-set list at reasonable intervals, meaning if you post a lot, your readers won’t be swamped by messages. You don’t want to drive potential readers to unsubscribe because they’re alerted about your blog too often; that would defeat the purpose.
In general, it’s best not to include an entire blog post in your emails because that can actually reduce your blog traffic. Rather, you want to offer an intriguing bite, a teaser, that encourages readers to follow the link to more content. Give them a great headline and a few interesting sentences and then take them to the blog. This is how you boost conversions.
Next Steps
The fact of the matter is that blogs are the new ad spot; they’re inexpensive, message driven, and when they’re done right they also provide a service to the reader. Keep that in mind when embracing email syndication – this is about advertising, not just building traffic. You need those blog posts to result in a clear call to action that sells products. If you can combine those features, you’ve got a recipe for success.
What comes next? Once you take on email syndication, you should see conversions increase, but that doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels. Maybe the next step is text syndication of your best posts, since text messages yield faster, more consistent responses as a marketing tool. You need to always be one step ahead of the customer if you’re going to succeed. Get started with email syndication, but don’t stop there.
