This is the 3rd of 4 posts on how we doubled our blog newsletter subscribers. Be sure to read the other ones on putting signup forms in posts and creating a subscribe page.

Today’s tip is applicable to email marketing in general, but deserves bloggers’ attention because not all bloggers are experienced email marketers, and they’re more likely to miss this idea.

Plus, it’s so obvious that you might overlook it.

If getting more readers without spending on paid traffic or doing some SEO appeals to you, you’ll appreciate today’s tip – because this tactic gets you subscribers without relying on Google.

Blog Newsletter Grower #3: Get Readers To Share Your Newsletter With Others

Your blog targets a certain group of people with a similar need or interest… right?

And even if you only have a handful of subscribers, each one probably knows at least one or two other people who share that need or interest… right?

So… ask your current subscribers to share your blog!

When they expose your blog to others in your target market, you’re likely to get new subscribers – who then share your blog with other people in your target market…

The ensuing “snowball effect” can bring you an avalanche of subscribers:

36.5% of our active web subscribers come directly from links in our emails!

That Snowball Starts With a Single Snowflake

Some word of mouth phenomena are completely unexpected and organic.

But most of the time, it helps to give people a little nudge.

To the right, you can see a section that we insert into each issue of our blog newsletter. (Click it to see where it sits in our emails).

It gently encourages readers to pass the email along to someone they think would benefit from it.

When someone gets the forwarded email, they can read the article as if they were a subscriber, and they have the option to subscribe via the link in the email.

The subscribe link goes to our blog’s subscribe page – another reason that you need to create a subscribe page for your blog.

Why Use Simple Email Forwarding?

Some of you might wonder why we encourage people to forward the email directly, rather than use a “send to friend” function.

A few reasons to encourage forwarding:

• It’s easier – people know how to use email. There’s little chance for confusion compared to “send to friend” forms.

  (Don’t believe this? Check out what social network GoodReads had to say about why they use forwarding instead of “send to friend”)

• It’s more accurate – most email programs will auto-suggest contacts as you type them, saving time and reducing misspellings.
• It’s more likely to be opened – your subscriber’s email address is in the “from” line of the forward.

  What do you open first, emails from people you know or emails from 3rd-party services?

Next Up: Taking Your Blog Growth Offline (That’s a Good Thing)

Believe it or not, not all blog newsletter marketing happens online.

In the final post in this 4-part series, you’ll learn how we gain readers offline, and discover a few ways that you can, too!

Until then, start encouraging your readers to share your newsletter!

RSS Subscribers: know any bloggers who could use some more subscribers? Send them a link to this post and encourage them to subscribe by email or RSS!

This is post #2 of 4 in an ongoing series on how we doubled the number of people on our blog newsletter. You may want to start with the first post before reading this one.

In Part 1 of our discussion of blog newsletters I suggested you “think of your blog posts like sales letters for your blog, with each new subscriber as a successful conversion.”

Today, let’s continue that discussion, and highlight another tactic that is an especially easy “win” for anyone with some Internet or email marketing experience.

Blog Newsletter Grower #2: Create a Dedicated Subscribe Page

If your blog’s posts are like little sales letters for your blog, your blog’s subscribe page is even more of one.

Your blog does have a subscribe page, right?

You’ll notice that many successful bloggers do, and with good reason – it gives you a great opportunity to “sell” people on the value of your blog.

How Will People Get To This Page?

Some people will get there from another post or page of your blog (provided you give them the opportunity).

Link to your subscribe page from near the signup form in your sidebar. That way, people who aren’t sure if they want to subscribe can see why they should before taking the plunge.

Others will get there from links in:

• Guest posts you write for other blogs
• Comments you leave on other blogs
• Your blog newsletter itself(we’ll talk more about this in a later post)

Also, if you’re not going to put a subscribe form at the end of a post, put a byline with a link to your subscribe page. This can be an effective alternative to the embedded form, and it’s far subtler.

Why Bother?

<obvious>Well, because you can get a lot of subscribers that way.</obvious>

All kidding aside, here’s a stat to chew on:

Our own subscribe page is responsible for over 30% of our active web subscribers.

Could you justify throwing away 30% of your subscribers? I sure can’t. But if we didn’t have our subscribe page, we could be doing exactly that.

If you’re swayed less by statistics and more by what other successful bloggers are doing, check out these subscribe page examples from popular blogs:

• Problogger
• DoshDosh
• Copyblogger – Brian actually has 2 subscribe pages (the first offers RSS & email, and the other is dedicated specifically to email)
• Chris Garrett – Chris throws in a freebie for subscribing… a good Internet marketing strategy that not enough bloggers use.
• Tim Ferriss – I like Tim’s use of a list to sell you on subscribing. We do something similar at the moment on our own subscribe page, but he’s much more concise.

While not all these guys use AWeber to deliver their blog newsletters (although they should ), they clearly know a thing or two about building successful communities.

Next Up: A Simple Way to Get More People TO Your Subscribe Page

The 3rd post in this series will discuss a tactic you can use to drive people to your subscribe page – without doing any SEO or running any advertising campaigns!

If you’re not already subscribed to our blog newsletter, you can get signed up below. That way, when the next post comes out, you’ll be the first to know!

Until then, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to create your own subscribe page and get it linked up on your blog. The next tactic is far more effective if you have a subscribe page in place, so get started on yours today!

RSS Subscribers: know any bloggers who would benefit from these blog newsletter tips?

Share this post with them and encourage them to subscribe by email or RSS.

Bloggers: are you taking advantage of every opportunity to get more subscribers?

As you’re no doubt aware, subscribers are an essential element of a successful blog. They read more, comment more and return to your blog more than more passive visitors do.

So it’s in your best interest to encourage people to become subscribers.

One way to do this is by offering an RSS feed. Another way that many successful bloggers advocate, is the blog newsletter.

Well, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, right?

Over the next few posts, we’ll share four tactics we’ve found effective in growing our own blog newsletter. In fact, they’re responsible for over 50% of our blog newsletter subscribers!

Blog Newsletter Grower #1: Offer Subscribe Options At The End of Posts

The idea behind this is that if someone reads to the end of an article (especially if it’s a long/detailed on), s/he must have been particularly interested/impressed with the content.

So why not see if s/he wants more like it?

Additionally, if you’re writing a series of posts on a topic, someone reading an early post in that series may want to be notified when the next post in that series is online.

How Many Readers Can This Get You?

We’ve been experimenting with signup forms placed at the end of posts for a while now (example: our recent post on increasing opt-in rates via social proof – click the image at left to see that signup form).

What have we found?

Over 24% of web signups to our blog newsletter come from forms at the end of posts.

And we don’t even do it for every post! In 2+ years and 100+ posts on this blog, we’ve done this only a handful of times. And many of the posts we’ve done it on are nowhere near the main page of the blog anymore, yet the signups keep coming in.

Think of your blog posts like sales letters for your blog, with each new subscriber as a successful conversion.

Your sales letter won’t be effective if you don’t tell people what to do, right?

Ask for the subscribe!

Next Up: The Single Page Of Our Blog That Brings In Over 30% Of Our Subscribers

Adding this page to our blog was almost a no-brainer – so much so that we forgot to do it at first!

But once we did, wow… did it ever start bringing in the subscribers.

I’ll introduce you to that post soon. Until then, try out putting a signup form in your post itself. You might be surprised at the results…

RSS Subscribers: Know any bloggers (or anyone else) who could benefit from today’s post and more blog newsletter tips like it?

Encourage them to subscribe by email or RSS.

Thanks for reading and sharing!

Justin

In the comments of a post discussing our recent FeedBurner integration, Mike Hill asked a great question about email subscription options:

The scheduling would be more useful if it can be setup by the subscriber, not by me as the publisher. Is that a possibility with any subscription services on email?

To me, this would be far more useful to my readers than me picking when to get it. I’d even consider subscribing some of my blogs on email instead of RSS if this was available.

View this comment on the original post

While creating a signup form that gives subscribers an unlimited number of frequency options would be tough to pull off without making the form look awkward and intimidating, it’s easy to offer them a couple of different options.

All it takes is a little HTML know-how and a few minutes to set up an extra list or 2.

First, Create 2 Lists

In this example, we’re going to give our blog’s email subscribers the option to sign up for daily emails, or weekly ones.

First, let’s create lists for each of those subscriptions. I’ve named mine blog-daily and blog-weekly. You’ll need to choose different names, but you’ll probably want to follow a similar naming scheme.

(Need to learn how to create a list? See the Getting Started section of our Knowledge Base.)

Next, Set Up 2 Blog Broadcasts

Now, you need to create 2 nearly identical Blog Broadcasts (one in each list).

The only difference? You’ll schedule emails for your daily list to be sent daily, and the ones for your weekly list to be sent weekly.

Daily Posts (list blog-daily)

Weekly Posts (list blog-weekly)

Now, Set Up Your Web Form

Create a web form in one of the lists. It doesn’t matter which one, because we’re going to edit the HTML to let our readers pick which list to subscribe to.

Need help creating a web form? We’ve got a Knowledge Base entry on that, too.

Once you’ve created/saved your form, get the HTML for it:

Note that we use the HTML in the lower box, not the JavaScript in the upper box.

We’re going to let our subscribers choose daily or weekly posts from a radio button.

Find the line of HTML in the form for the box where subscribers put their Email Address:

Just beneath it, paste the following:

Replace my sample listnames (blog-daily and blog-weekly) with your daily and weekly lists.

Finally, delete this line of HTML from your form:

and publish the form to your site. You’ll get something like this:

Whenever subscribers fill out the form, they choose how often they want to hear from you, and the form adds them to the appropriate list (in this case, to get daily emails or weekly ones).

What If I Have a Message I Want to Send Everyone?

No problem — just create a broadcast and use our send to multiple lists feature to get in touch with all of your blog’s email subscribers.

RSS Subscribers: discuss this post or share it with others.

Fresh on the heels of the advanced rss to email scheduling options released last week come two new enhancements to help bloggers send email newsletters.

With these features, you’ll be able to take greater advantage of the social proof that Feedburner’s subscriber counts provide, and more easily track what actions your email subscribers take when they get your newsletter.

AWeber Now Reports Email Subscriber Counts to Feedburner

We now report how many email subscribers your blog has to FeedBurner.

So if you have a little chicklet on your blog like this:

showing how many people subscribe to your blog, and you collect email subscribers via AWeber, you’ll see that subscriber count jump as Feedburner counts your email subscribers along with your RSS ones — just use your FeedBurner URL when setting up your Blog Broadcast!

I recently mentioned in passing to a blogger that we would be rolling this out soon, and like the blogosphere got excited even before this went live…

Some of you have noticed the jump in your subscriber counts already and wondered when we were going to say something about this integration.

Well, the cat’s officially out of the bag now — we’ve even put out a press release announcing the integration.

If you’re not already using your Feedburner URL to create your Blog Broadcasts, you may want to switch to take advantage of this reporting!

If you do this, keep in mind that Blog Broadcaster may think it’s a whole new feed (since you’re putting in a new feed URL). So if you’re currently sending your emails automatically, switch over to manually reviewing them for a bit. See our Knowledge Base for details.

Enable Click Tracking for All Blog Broadcasts

Many users — bloggers or not — take advantage of our click tracking tool to track subscriber activity and gauge the effectiveness of their messages.

Up until now, bloggers wanting to do this for their Blog Broadcasts had to turn click tracking on for individual issues of their email newsletters. This is totally doable, of course, but it’s not ideal.

So we made it better yesterday. Now, it’s easy to turn on Click Tracking automatically for all messages created by your Blog Broadcast!

You can either turn on Click Tracking while editing your Blog Broadcast settings:

Or you can turn it on from the main Blog Broadcast page of your account:

Bloggers: Grow Your Readership by Offering an Email Newsletter

Offering readers of your blog the ability to subscribe via email, rather than limiting your subscribe options to RSS only, is a great way…

Convert RSS to Email Newsletters: Helpful Resources

To learn more about how you can use AWeber to engage more blog readers, check out our Knowledge Base:

A lot of you have asked about this one, so I’m really excited to show it off!

Many bloggers send email newsletters to their subscribers to keep them up-to-date on the latest posts.

While bloggers have embraced our Blog Broadcast tool, they’ve pointed out a couple of things they’d like to see us add to make it even more powerful.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we’ve answered by far the most popular feature request for this tool: advanced scheduling features.

Let me show you how it works with a short video.

Scheduling Your Blog’s Email Newsletter: What You Can Do

Used to be, you chose how many posts you wanted to appear in each email, and whenever there were that many new posts, we sent your newsletter.

Some of you said you’d rather send once per day, or per week, regardless of however many new posts you’d made. Others said you wanted to send at a certain time of day, regardless of what time you were posting new content.

Makes sense to us.

You can now:

Schedule which day/s of the week — or which dates of the month — you want to send your email newsletter

Choose what time of day you want your blog readers to get your email

Want to send on Tuesdays and Fridays? Or on the 15th and 31st of the month? No problem! You can choose up to 4 frequencies per blog.

With these new scheduling options, you can tailor your blog’s email newsletter to reach your subscribers as frequently as you want.

See The New Scheduling Options In Action

In this short video, I show you how to easily customize when you send your blog’s newsletter:

RSS Subscribers: Click to watch the video.

Pretty cool, no?

This is just one of a number of enhancements we’ll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…

Quick post today for those of you who are running blogs yourselves.

(Not yet using a blog to grow your business? Learn more about how blogging and email marketing go hand-in-hand.)

Today I came across a list of 16 ways to expand your blog’s reach.

I’m particularly fond of strategy #6 Establish an Email Newsletter:

Newsletters are great for monetization and are an easy way to keep certain readers (those not familiar with RSS) close to your weblog. When combined with landing pages, they work better alongside PPC advertising when it comes to capturing leads.

but the author lists plenty of other good ideas, too. Definitely worth a read.

Want to learn more about blogs? Check out the recording of our live video seminar on business blogging.

Want to know more about blogging and how you can use it to boost your business? Do you have some free time this Thursday?

Our Education Team has been blogging for some time now and would like to share their experiences and knowledge on building successful blogs with your business’ goals in mind during a free, live video session.

Sit down with them for a discussion of business blogging, plus a walk through on how to easily set one up and use email and RSS to build a regular readership.

Blogging To Boost Your Marketing Results

Thursday, November 1, 2007

12:00 – 1:00PM ET

Not on Eastern Time? Click Here.
What does this seminar cover?

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

More…By integrating your AWeber account with popular blogging platform Blogger, you can:

* Convert occasional blog visitors to subscribers
* Notify subscribers when you’ve posted new content
* Drive your subscribers back to your blog

Integrating AWeber with Blogger – Step By Step

Blogs are a great, easy way to publish information in a timely
manner. As a result, their popularity has skyrocketed.

However, to make blogs a really useful tool, you have to get
people to come back and read regularly.