Pretty much everyone that has done any email marketing will say that there is a lot more to it than just typing out a short message and sending out your posts to your subscribers. With a little understanding, most can easily follow the steps and implement a wise email marketing strategy.
First, we need to learn how to build a quality email list of niche related readers who are interested in your email updates and opportunities and will read and click on the links.
Many businesses consider email to be one of their most successful marketing avenues to reach their potential customers and is a valuable tool for any company seeking to reach its audience.
In the last post ” Email Marketing For Beginners – Important 1st Steps Video” we started with how email marketing works and finished with a video on setting up your first campaign.
In this article we’ll be covering the following topics:
- How blog broadcasting works
- Sending automatically vs manually
- Hitting the publish button
- Finding the RSS feed URL
- Tracking your results
- Let’s get started step by step Video
How blog broadcasting works
The invisible chain all starts with traffic >>> to your website blog post >>> to blog RSS feed >>> your email autoresponder >>> triggers an auto email message to your list >>> first reads your send time >>> sends email to your list.
Every WordPress website has an RSS feed, which is short for Really Simple Syndication which has certainly improved the way that users interact with article content online.
Have you seen text or image buttons on various websites inviting you to subscribe via RSS and wondered what it meant? These RSS feeds give their users the ability to simply subscribe to the free RSS feed and then read the updates from the site in what is called a “Feed Reader”.
These feeds benefit those who actually own or publish a website because website owners can get their content quickly to their readers by submitting to the various RSS directories.
What is a Feed Reader?
All Feed Readers are pretty much the same and using one makes it possible for you to quickly scan the headlines and updates of all of your favorite sites in your own RSS feed. Simply put, the feed readers purpose is to gather and display web feeds from your favorite sites in one place. By using a feed reader you can have updates and new articles from multiple sites delivered to you without having to go visit each website individually.
How do RSS Feeds work?
RSS feeds are simple text files that once submitted to feed directories, will allow subscribers to see the content in a short period of time after its updated. There are probably many, or at least a handful of sites that you regularly check on for new content and updates.
Think of the time spent checking out all of these sites and not finding anything new, only a need to come back in a few hours, the next day, or until some of the sites decide to put up something new. That’s time-consuming, and when you’re checking out numerous sites on a daily basis the RSS feed is an awesome time saver.
Usually, on most sites, there’s an orange feed icon that has become the standard for feed subscription. You can go to your favorite websites and click on the orange icon and you’ll be subscribed to that particular sites RSS feed, which will send new content to your Feed Reader. This makes it so much easier and a time saver as you can see all of your favorite sites latest posts and update entries in one place.
There are a number of different types of FR’s depending on your intended use or the way that you want to view the latest content from the sites. There are five different types of FR’s that are available for free online, including; desktop FR’s, built-in browser FR’s, email-based FR’s, web-based FR’s, and mobile feed readers.
Every blog will have an RSS feed and every blog post will have a syndication feed that will go to your autoresponder. This triggers an automated email to your list after first reading the preset sending time. At the right time, the autoresponder will be sending out your posts to those on the list. All of the autoresponders, Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse, etc., will have their own way of doing this process, all with the same end results.
Hitting the publish button – Sending automatically vs manually
Within the autoresponder, there is an opportunity to have your emails automatically sent on a specific day and time of day, or you can choose to send out your posts manually.
The only real difference between the two settings is that with the manual sending choice there’s an opportunity to tweak the message or customize it before sending out your post to your readers.
How to find the RSS Feed URL
Go to your websites blogroll and in the browser, at the end of your URL, add ” /feed” and then press “enter”.
Your RSS feed should appear on the screen. Your RSS feed URL is your website address plus: /feed.
Tracking your results
To find out who is clicking on your emails, reading them, clicking on the link, etc., here are two places that you can use to check on the email campaign results:
1. Inside the autoresponder, you’ll see all of the details and specifics.
Some of the autoresponders, Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp to name a few, have an app to download on your phone so you can have all of the information at your fingertips.
2. Google Search Console Analytics – click on Acquisition Overview, then Referral
This is to find out how many people clicked on the sent email and went to your website from the autoresponder.
