This guest post is by John Trayhorn of the ECHO Affiliate Blog.
This post describes a problem that affects almost all bloggers, and almost certainly affects you. Implement these changes, and you should see page views, revenues and social sharing soar.
How it begins
You start off a great blog.
To start with almost nobody reads it. Hey, it takes time to build up an audience. (If you’ve just started, don’t give up—longevity is one of the keys to a successful blog!)
As time passes, you slowly gain an audience. When you publish a new blog post, you get a surge of readers.
But:
- Most of those readers will never see your old blog posts.
- Despite your increasing popularity, many people who do visit your blog and like it will miss many of your new blog posts.
- The readers never see your blog organised into a logical and coherent sequence.
There’s a solution.
What’s more, it’s easy to implement, has huge benefits and doesn’t take a lot of your time.
The solution to the problem
I first found the solution when I ran an Adsense website.
I noticed that most of the revenue came from our articles about jobs. We were already using an autoresponder website to send out our newsletters. But to maximise revenue, we needed to do something more.
Email blogging, done right
You may well have heard of autoresponders, or use one yourself, but hang on in with me—there’s more to it than sending out a few emails when you write a new blog post, or have something to sell.
Instead, you send out an email about every post you have ever written.
Not at the same time, of course. If you have an old blog with a lot of posts, the process could be spread out over years! And don’t include the post in the email—the aim is to get the reader back to your blog.
Instead, explain how each blog post will create value to your reader, and then include a link with a call to action back to the post. Remember to use a fantastic headline and to test these over time, so you get more and more opens—and more and more clickthroughs.
In my case, I took all our jobs articles, organised them into a logical sequence, emailed users about them over a couple of months, and watched our Adsense revenue explode from a few few hundred dollars to a peak of just under $3000.
You can see an example of one of our autoresponder emails here:
As I found out later, this approach works even better if you have a high-value product to sell.
Benefits for you, benefits for your readers
Think of this:
- Everyone you sign up gets to see every great post you have ever written (if any have bombed, you should cut them out of the email sequence—if not your blog).
- A one-off visitor can be turned into a person who visits your blog multiple times over the years using this technique.
What’s more, an increase in regular visitors leads into other benefits, such as:
- more social sharing
- more links
- more comments
- more revenue
- and the much greater relationship you get with long-term readers.
This approach does require a change of emphasis on your blog. If you use this technique, your primary goal should be to get readers to sign up, not just to read.
You will also need to create a clear benefit to signing up, such as a free guide, an email course or, if you are selling a product, discount codes. (An email course can be as simple as your existing blog posts organised into a more logical sequence.)
Don’t think you are being selfish, either. There are clear benefits to the reader, who gets an organized sequence of free blog posts about a topic they’re interested in.
Have you used autoresponders to get traffic to your old posts? Tell us how it worked in the comments.
You can read more tips like this on the ECHO Affiliate Blog. And, of course, make sure you sign up so you get all of our fantastic tips via auto-responder!
