As Jeff helpfully alludes to, by using an RSS to email feature, the problem of people missing web content because they don’t take the independent initiative to visit your site is largely solved (for those messages at least).

Just to quickly take you through the process. Let’s say you publish an article to your blog (web content). By using RSS to email, the first few paragraphs of that article can be put automatically into a message (email content) and sent to your subscribers.

In this case, there is great value for someone to get the email and to read the web content. So that’s ONE idea for the unique web content vs. email content dilemma mentioned above. Can anyone chime in with some others?

The email campaign set up alongside your blog is slightly different than a general newsletter (where original content may be more emphasized for better results).

Subscribers are signing up specifically to receive updates when you publish articles. It’s a service to them because otherwise, they’d have to take guesses at when you’re publishing new content there. Meanwhile, you don’t have to write *both* original email and web content to get people back to your site and engaged.

Think of a commercial example in the mutual way customers and business owners get value out of newspaper circulars. Store owners don’t want to rely on customers just so happening to stop by their stores, so they advertise in different ways, including these circulars.

The customer uses the circular to get a glimpse of the products they’re interested in and the prices available. If they like what they see, they come to the store where there are lots of opportunities for a purchase of the products they were looking at and others.

Our blog update emails can essentially do the same thing as the circular. They send traffic to our websites the same way the circular sends traffic to our store — by providing a glimpse of what’s available.

Matt,

In order to send messages when your blog is updated, you will need people to sign up while viewing it. By publishing an opt in form there, readers will have an easy way to request the messages by email.

As I mentioned in a some depth in the comment I just posted above, this provides a specific but very useful service to them in that they won’t have to, by chance, stumble onto your site each time you publish an article.

By putting it in your blog’s sidebar, which appears on every page within your blog, it can really help to build a captive audience.

Whatever content is typically transmitted in your RSS feed would appear in the email messages sent to subscribers. What does appear will depend on the blogging software you’re using, and I’d recommend taking a look at your feed to see.

We use WordPress, which provides an area where we can enter an "Optional Excerpt". What we put in that box appears in the RSS feed and in our email messages, so generally we will just copy and paste in what appears above the <!–more–> tag in our original post.

Hi Shirley,

If you scroll up to the top of this article, you’ll see that we have a form published to the "sidebar", something that appears on every page of our blog.

In your own blog’s settings, you should see a place to make changes to it, and there should be some guidance in your blog application’s documentation (like this for WordPress) if you need some help.

If you’re using AWeber for your email marketing, you can just use our web form tool to create a form, and it will provide you with what you need to just copy and paste into that section.

Hope this helps!

Rob,

Great questions! As I understand it, you’re commenting on whether links should go:

A) In one direction, where the blog sends lots of links to the main site, but the main site does not link back to the blog.

or …

B) Both directions, where the main site links to the blog, which links back to the main site.

Unfortunately, since Google and other search engines tend to be proprietary, it’d be hard to really measure these things. And I am hardly an SEO expert.

I would expect that the most immediate goal of our readers would be to get people to their website, since that is where most business activity tends to take place. So, we should certainly start with a blog that links to the main site.

I might consult some SEO forums to get some expert opinion on whether or not the main site should then link back to the blog.