How To Build A Successful Newsletter
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Define Your Goals for the Newsletter
This is perhaps the most important thing that I’ll say in this post because virtually everything else flows from this.
What do you want to achieve with this email newsletter? Is it about:
- driving traffic to your blog?
- developing community among your readers?
- building a list to ’sell’ to?
- reinforcing your brand?
- making money from advertising sold in the newsletter?
- Something else?
When you subscribe to a few different bloggers newsletters it becomes quite evident that different bloggers are taking quite different approaches. For example Chris Brogan’s newsletter is much more about providing his subscribers with lots of new original content (it is well worth subscribing to if you’re into social media and building online communities). He explores a theme each week. On the other hand my photography newsletter is more about highlighting key articles and discussions on my blog and forums from the last week.
The reason our newsletters are so different is that we have different goals.
My main goal is simply to drive traffic back to my blog. I find that many of my readers are not using RSS (quite a few do but there is a sizable proportion of them that have never heard of it) and so my newsletter is a way of hooking these readers into ’subscribing’ and reminding them to check out fresh content each week.
Chris on the other hand seems to be using his newsletter to give his most committed readers something extra. This builds and reinforces his brand, builds community and gives those of us who subscribe a feeling of being on the inside of what he’s thinking (scary as that might sound).
So work hard on defining what you want to achieve with your newsletter. It can have numerous goals (for example I use mine to drive affiliate sales from time to time and to build a sense of community) but keep your primary goal as the main focus.
Problogger explains how to write a successful newsletter. Read his full article here.
