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True or False: Many marketers report that their blog is the most popular entry point for online visitors.

The answer is: true! A MarketingSherpa study has found this to be a new trend!

Which means if you haven’t started working your blog into your email marketing campaign, it’s time to start! Fortunately, AWeber helps make this easier for you with the blog broadcast feature.

If you’re ready to set up a powerful tool to improve your email marketing efforts, we’ve got you covered on how to do it and how it helps.

How Blog Integration Helps You

The blog broadcast feature makes it easy for you to reap the benefits of integrating your blog with email marketing. Here are some of the benefits:

• Increase sign ups

  If you’re getting a lot of traffic to your blog, that’s another opportunity to ask visitors to join your mailing list! Whether your blog is your website or just a part of it, you want to have a form available for potential subscribers to enter their information. If you’re using WordPress, we’ve got an app for that!

  You might also want to set up an email subscription just for your blog posts, in case that’s all some subscribers want. This can be done by creating a separate list that’s dedicated to blog post emails, rather than having one list for all emails. It’s good to offer options for receiving your emails, so subscribers aren’t just locked into one thing.

• Increase interaction with your site

  Your blog content gives your subscribers more to interact with. You can set up the blog broadcast to include a “Read More” link to get subscribers to click through to the website in order to see the rest of the post.

• Communicate a more personal tone

  Your blog can read as if you’re addressing a friend, so a blog broadcast can give your company the chance to set a more friendly tone.

  Opening up to your subscribers and connecting with them on a more personal level can help build subscriber loyalty.

• Provide more content for your emails

  The blog broadcast will allow you to send regular broadcasts to your subscribers. However, even if you don’t use the blog broadcast tool you can still integrate with your blog.

  You can simply link to a blog post (or a few posts) in your regular email newsletter. This way you’re still able to share more valuable content with your subscribers.

How to Set Up a Blog Broadcast

The blog broadcast will take content from your blog and automatically create that content in an email newsletter.

The way it does this is by checking your blog’s RSS feed. When you have a new post, the blog broadcast tool will pick it up and create a broadcast message for it. You can set your message to send at a certain time or after a certain number of posts.

You can also choose a template for your blog posts to appear in. The RSS variables will automatically pull your blog post (the dynamic content), but you can also set up your own text in the template that will be pulled in every time until you change it (the static content).

What Integrating with Your Blog Can Look Like

Here’s an example of AWeber customer Steven Aitchison’s blog:

Notice he has the sign up form on the right for interested visitors. You can also see his most recent post. This post was picked up by the blog broadcast tool and changed into an email:

Already Using Your Blog with Email Marketing?

Let us know if you’re already using your blog and how it has helped you!

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One of the most important components of any email marketing campaign is of course, the web form. Without a way to sign up to your list, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone to send email to. That being the case, you want to make sure that your web forms are getting people to sign [...]