This is a guest post by Daniel Cassady from BenchmarkEmail.com
How’s that blog going? Good, you say? Same here. Of course, I could use some more readers, but then again, who couldn’t, right?
Does this sound familiar?
If you’re a blogger – especially one that is trying to make money with your blog, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent your fair share of time trying to figure out how to lure new readers to your blog, and with varying amounts of success.
Most people tend to move toward social media sites like Facebook and Twitter when they want to increase their readership, and they are right to do so. The world of social media, if you didn’t already know, is growing by leaps and bounds every year, and with smartphones and tablets with built-in social media apps becoming as common as the rhinovirus, you can be sure that the influence social media has over the decisions people make will only grow stronger.
Then, of course, there is old reliable – email marketing. Not too long ago, email marketing was considered a passé tool for promoting and marketing. But, take a look at your inbox. Email marketing is back and in a huge way. Groupon and Living Social are two perfect examples of email marketing at it’s most successful.
So what does this mean for you, the blogger looking to hit it big?
It means that if you want to make the most of your promoting buck (an odd choice of words, I know since both social media sites and email cost little to nothing), then wouldn’t it make sense to combine the promoting power of social media and email marketing?
Of course it would. And here are a few ways to do just that.
Share-Worthy Content
This first tip is pretty simple. People are more apt to share exciting, fun content like videos or podcasts than run of the mill blog posts or price lists. Think about it this way. What are you more likely to forward to a friend, a photo ad or a funny video? If you keep your content in your emails interesting and engaging, the higher the odds of your content being shared on social media sites.
Encourage The Sharing Mood
As much as you would like them to, people don’t generally pass on promotional emails to their friends with excitement. Maybe once in a while, a blog post or coupon will be so fantastic that the person may share it with a friend or two, but that doesn’t really build your brand in any significant way.
Now – if you simply add social sharing buttons to your emails, that’s a whole different story. By adding these social sharing buttons, you’re inviting you’re readers to share your content with all of their contacts with one swift click of a button.
Start An Archive
So, you have a backlog of promotional email that you’ve sent, all of which have social sharing links attached. Now what? Do you just let these past emails dissipate into the ether until they’re forgotten? No way! Those emails still have a lot of life in them. You just have to know how to coax it out.
Start an archive on your website of all the past emails that you’ve sent and put those emails to work. The great thing about archiving your emails is that you increase the odds of someone finding your blog via a random web search because you’ll have that many more pages on your website. More website hits means more visitors.
Develop A Sense Of Community
In the same way that there are bloggers just like you out there who want to build an audience, there are social sharing communities all over the web that are looking to help bloggers do just that. It’s a beautiful concept. A group of like-minded bloggers and business folk upload their emails and newsletters to one specific site, making them available to every member of the communities audience because it’s a shared site. Minimal work, maximum payoff.
The Mobile Solution
I mentioned mobile devices at the beginning of this article and how they seem to be everywhere these days. A great way to combine your emails with social media is to optimize your emails for viewing on mobile devices. There was a time when people only checked their email at work or at home. These days, people check their email in line at the ATM or waiting for their meal at a restaurant.
Make your emails mobile friendly, don’t forget those handy social sharing buttons, and you’re sure to see a spike in your email views.
Promote Yourself
For my last tip, I’m gonna go a bit old school. Every time you send out a new email, get on Twitter and let your followers know. Log into Facebook and plaster it on your wall. With all the work you are going to put in trying to use other people’s social networks, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got a social network as well. Don’t forget to use it.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• combine social media sites • commentluvsocial networks • app that combines all social media
While social media is the current hype right now, we should however not forget that email marketing is also a very powerful too. By having a sign-up form to capture emails, we are able to build relationships with our subscribers and then follow up by promoting whatever offers or products we might have.
Email marketing and Social media are undoubtedly the two most efficient ways to share content and get costumers.Combining them both will surely give more great results, but it might not work out in perfect way as the email filters mark these mails as spam, which have several links in those.
I’ve found that offering some type of free report or audio on Facebook (of course they have to opt-in to get it) has been a great way to get more subscribers. You could also create a Facebook event and have a free tele-seminar (again, they have to opt-in to get the call-in information) and invite your followers to join in.
Thanks @lavindra. I have never thought of using audio on FB as an incentive to increase subscribers. Such a simple, yet effective tactic.
Social Media marketing is taking an overhand in Internet Marketing Thats true. But we shouldn’t forget the conventional methods as newsletter and forum commenting and blog commenting which reveals your knowledge as well as depth.
Check me if I am wrong?
Adding to what Daniel said, it is also important that you practice a lot of ethical marketing tactics to overcome the spam folders in the user inbox. You may have to be specially trained with the type of words that you use and specification of images and videos and links that you use while sending out an email. And another tip is the type of promotion that you do. For example you may offer something for free on your social media page and request your users to like your facebook page! On the facebook page you may request to subscribe an email alert of your blog and sign up for the contest. Hope this would help!
Fantastic post! I had almost forgotten how powerful email promotion really is.
By combining the the reliability of email and vast network of social media, the promotion of our business could really boost up. I have learnt many good trick for promoting my blog and my business.
Thanks Daniel
The conversion rates is much higher with the social media as it becomes much easier to find and target the potential customers.
Social Networking is one of the coolest way in Internet Marketing.You need to make a product viral rather then making your strategy viral.It’s your product which needs to be viral rather then your persuasion style and strategies
This was such a great reminder of the ever-powerful email. When I think about social media and email, I first think of just sharing them on FB, Twitter etc – especially with that feature built into Aweber. But I love the idea of putting archives on my site or sharing them in communities. Any recommendations of good communities where people share their email newsletters?
– Sharyn
Email marketing is very much effective even in the times of social media platforms. At any rate, what is important is not so much the platform itself than the proposition contained in the actual message. While Facebook decides who gets to read your messages, email marketing can be much more targeted, although it does require much more effort to manage and grow.