List Building: Blogs and More

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

Getting your subscribers to pass your messages on to others is one way to grow your list, but it’s certainly not the only one.

Some other list-building tactics (some free, some not):

Blog

Blogging is an increasingly popular means of communicating with your current and potential customers and helps establish you as an authority in your niche. It also helps you to add search engine-friendly content to your site, increasing your online visibility.

You can incorporate a blog directly into your site using software such as Wordpress, or if you prefer a hosted solution, you can go to Blogger or Typepad and set up an account.

As Marc discussed in a previous post, you can add an AWeber web form to your blog and use our Feed Broadcaster to notify your blog subscribers when you’ve posted new content.

Signature Files

Add a link to your website to the signature that you include in outgoing email. Every time you reply to a message, you subtly raise awareness of your site and/or list.

For example, I might add the following to the end of my signature file to get more traffic to our blog:

———————————————————————-
Learn How-to Improve Your Email Marketing
AWeber Blog: http://www.aweber.com/blog
———————————————————————-

When someone reads an email from me, the tagline gets their attention (who doesn’t want to improve their email marketing?) and the link makes it easy for them to visit our blog.

Paid Advertising

The most popular online example of this is Google’s Adwords program, but there are certainly others as well.

The bad news: yes, it costs money to advertise. The good news: programs like Adwords let you control your costs, so if the paid advertising route isn’t for you, you’re not committed to a large investment.

These aren’t the only ways to grow your list, but they’re ones that any website owner can take advantage of.

————————————————————————————-
Resources:
Wordpress - free blog software: http://wordpress.org
Blogger - free blog hosting: http://www.blogger.com
Typepad - paid blog hosting: http://www.typepad.com
Adwords - pay-per-click advertising: http://adwords.google.com
————————————————————————————-

Print This Post

5 Responses

David G
December 12th, 2006 at 6:23 pm

We use Wordpress as our blogging engine & it integrates seamlessly with Aweber’s RSS functionality.

It’s a great solution (well, they both are!)
Gobala Krishnan
December 14th, 2006 at 3:51 am

Thanks Justin, I use the Feed Broadcaster instead of Feedburner or Feedblitz as it gives me complete control over the mailing list. Perhaps I should add this to a future version of my book on Wordpress and Adsense
Glenda Watson Hyatt
December 14th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

Interesting. I’m creating a new blog and was considering adding Feedblitz, but if I can accomplish the same thing with Aweber and have access to the list, that is even better. I’ll need to look into how to do that. I’m still learning!
AnnaLaura Brown
December 16th, 2006 at 8:55 am

great helpful information thanks
Ranjitha
July 20th, 2007 at 7:33 am

Thanks for the useful & helpful information on building a list.