Content is King. A Newsletter is Content!
SEOs know that every item of content is an opportunity to increase your rank for a particular keyword (or keywords).
Email marketers know that staying in touch with prospects and customers with a newsletter is a prime ingredient for successful lead conversion and mutually profitable business relationships.
Creating content takes time and money. Why do it for your site and your newsletter when you can kill two birds with one stone?
The Power of RSS
RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) enables you to create content on your site and have it automatically distributed as a newsletter to your email list. If your site is in WordPress, it has an RSS “feed” of content built into WordPress core functionality. Creating an RSS campaign on your email service provider distributes your content automatically from this feed.
Providers like AWeber, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and others have RSS capability. MailChimp is particularly WordPress-friendly in email form design and plugin integration, and free for up to 2000 emails/month. Constant Contact, the most advertised of the email services out there today, cannot use RSS automatically. Although it is possible to pull content into a Constant Contact newsletter from RSS, it works only by hand. Constant Contact’s social media publishing feature also competes with your own website, creating duplicate content on your external accounts.
If your site is static html (not dynamic like WordPress..think “old-style!”), Constant Contact can perform some useful social functions for you, even though your content is not originating from your site. If your site is WordPress, you’ve got a great opportunity to maximize your SEO with your newsletter using a more modern feature set from another provider – and make your site the write once-publish everywhere root of your content marketing strategy.
Newsletter Design
Most newsletter publishers use consistent design from edition to edition, ensured by using templates set up in your email service provider account. The way an RSS campaign works, the content you specify is pulled into a chosen space in your layout while the other elements remain constant week to week.
Dates can be specified by RSS tags in the content, so your subject and header can update with the date of publication automatically, along with your specified content.
One thing to consider, if your email list has a lot of Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013 desktop users – these subscribers are going to be seeing a different layout than you might prefer, or than you see on your blog.
See this article for problems presented by these clients, reasons, and workarounds.
Hub and Spoke SEO
Your site should be the hub of your content wheel, with spokes going out to various social media platforms, including your email list. It’s possible to automate the distribution of your content out to all of your social media pages, too – using Social Network Auto Poster (“SNAP”).
Although many social media platforms, including email providers, have external broadcast capability of their own, sharing only from your website out to your various social media accounts has many advantages, and eliminates the danger of multiple reposts of duplicate content.
Link Building
Getting links to your site is an important aspect of SEO. Posting from your site out to social media creates links back to your site, which are followed by search engines in many instances (exceptions include your Facebook profile – but Facebook page links are followed). The most powerful links come from your Google+ page, and from shares of your content from other media such as Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, and other sites. References from authoritative sites of related content are particularly powerful.
People other than newsletter recipients are unlikely to see your content if it exists only in inboxes and newsletter archive pages on your email server. The wider your distribution is, the better it is for SEO.
Your newsletter is a valuable resource. Make sure it works for you on your own site!
Write once, publish many
Write it, post it on your blog, and let automation take care of the rest. Schedule automatic distribution to your email list and all of your social media pages using an RSS template and Social Networks Auto Poster.
Let us set it up for you! We can migrate your list from Constant Contact and set you up in the provider of your choice (although we recommend MailChimp for lists of less than 2000).
What does it cost?
If you can invest the time to set these up, it’s well worth the investment in your own time.
If you’d rather run your business and let us help you, please use our site form for a quote!