The best method for long term promotion of your blog or website is through email, and if you publish new content on a regular basis a big email list is sure to generate impressive results. The traditional approach for businesses has been to combine a simple but attractively designed website while focusing on email campaigns.
In fact many of the better email services were designed primarily for campaigns where the content may or may not have been posted to the website. As a blogger your needs are a little different as the content will be published primary for your web page. Email will serve less as the medium and more the method of attraction.
For this reason you may choose to distribute only summaries with links to your blog articles. This approach serves to increase the number of visitors on your page, and is important if you monetize with advertising or want to foster discussion through commentary.
If however your goal is to sell a product or service then it may be preferable to send along the entire article in the email messages. Given that a certain percentage of recipients will just read the message and not follow a link sending the entire message ensures that it will be read by more people.
Distributing your blog via email is easier than ever by attaching your RSS Feed to a free provider like Google Feedburner. The real selling point here is that Feedburner is totally free, handles the work of distributing the emails, manages the opt-in confirmations, and even attaches their own postal address in the message footer in order to comply with federal regulations.
A novice who attempts to setup their own email server or tries to use a conventional email program is likely to spend hours only to see their messages dumped into spam buckets. A service like Feedburner is especially important for a blog or website managed from Costa Rica because your message gets a U.S. based postal address and since it comes from a U.S. based server there is no need to worry about getting in hot water with RACSA for doing mass mailings.
There are a few other free RSS to email services, and Feedbiltz is one of the more popular one among bloggers in Costa Rica. The problem is that Feedblitz is ad supported and you won’t get a cut of the ad revenue. It does have the advantage of working in real time, but waiting until an established delivery time with Feedburner isn’t going to make any difference in the long term.
A really nice looking service is Mailchimp and while it’s free for the first 500 subscribers you might run into some problems setting up the account from an IP address in Costa Rica. You will also have to provide your own postal address, and the service is a little complicated to setup.
Mailchimp however is very powerful, comes with some really attractive templates and if you are selling a product or service then it may be worth the extra time and effort.
There are other mail services out there, but keep in mind most of them were designed for people who are marketing a product or service to an existing customer list. As a blogger your needs are different and the key question is will the service distribute directly from your blog’s RSS Feed. You want this because it makes your life easy.
Starting from scratch with a new blog, Google Feedburner is the way to go. It’s free, easy to setup and well it’s free. You have access to the opt in email list, so you can always go somewhere else once your blog gets off the ground, and if you publish on a regular basis you will get off the ground with Feedburner.
