If you have a successful blog with a large readership, you can create an additional stream of income (and repeat visitors) by having a newsletter. Depending on the topic of your blog, you may have readers who wish to receive a newsletter that contains more in-depth information. You start by creating an email opt-in list of newsletter subscribers. This list can then be used for other marketing promotions or you can monetize your newsletter through sponsor ads.

If your blogs offer something of value to your readers, chances are they will expect your newsletter or email campaign to do the same. This is a good thing because you will attract subscribers, but if you don’t deliver you will find that many of your readers end up unsubscribing. Add value to your email correspondences in the same way you make your blogs interesting to retain and attract subscribers.

Make sure you give readers something of value in these emails and give them a reason to read them so that your advertising methods have the greatest chances of being successful. If you promise little known tips or hard to find information, you better deliver or readers will unsubscribe.

A good way to increase the number of people subscribing is to reveal extra information that can be found only in the newsletter.

One example is to conclude a blog entry in an email for subscribers only.

Readers who are eager to get the whole story and will be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter. Free incentives are also a good way to get subscribers, it doesn’t have to be something fancy. Some ideas include offering a free report or list of tips. Even the free info you give out should be useful. Don’t just offer up junk. If your free information is that good, people will come back for more.

Monetizing a newsletter or email campaign is similar to monetizing your blog. While you cannot use Adsense and other similar advertising methods, you can directly sell ad space and depending on the size of your subscriber list you can charge a hefty sum.

You can also use affiliate marketing in your newsletter, just be sure to have the bulk of your newsletter contains relevant content and not just ads or else your readers will start dropping like flies. Make sure your affiliate marketing is related to the content of your newsletter or email and that your audience will be interested in what you are promoting. Don’t overdo it. Treat your subscribers well!

You can also sell your own merchandise through your newsletter. If you have created merchandise with your blog logo or related slogans, adding a link in your news letter asking readers to check out your store or merchandise won’t hurt, just make sure it is paired with good content.

If you build up a large subscriber base, you can also use it to send other email campaigns and promotions for your merchandise, book, or affiliate products. A word of caution, however, no one likes unsolicited emails so you should be sure that you have permission to send additional emails and that they offer something of value and are not just viewed as annoyances.

Finally, over time as your readership and brand grows, you can also offer a paid version of your newsletter that contains more information than the free one.

If you decide to start a newsletter, make sure you pick an autoresponder system that is reliable and has high deliverability rates.

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The most important thing about having a blog is to establish your brand and let your readers get to know you. This applies mostly to blogs that are related to your business. As the author of the blog, you can tell your readers about yourself in the About page. Your readers will also come to know you through your style of writing and what you write about. If you have something meaningful to say, people will listen.

Get Started

If you don’t already have a blog, it’s time to take the plunge and get started. Remember Nike’s popular slogan? Just do it. You can learn along the way as you build up your first blog. There is a lot of freely available information about all aspects of maintaining and marketing a blog.

In the beginning, you can take a look at some of the popular blogs in your niche and take note of what you like about them. Basically you are trying to capture the best elements of those blogs and try to incorporate them in yours.

Blog Regularly

Even if you are not a Pulitzer prize winning author, you can still get better at writing as you practice. Try to blog as regularly as possible. If you stop for long periods between your posts, you may start to lose your readership. You can even write your posts beforehand if you know that you are going to be away on vacation. Then you can set up automatic scheduling to post to the blog.

Build a Community

As your blog readership grows, you will hopefully get more people interacting with you through the comments. Definitely install Akismet to catch most of the comment spam. Try to answer all of the valid comments quickly and you will make your readers feel that you care. Another option to think about is building a forum as part of your blog. Again, due to the problem of spam, forums require moderation and if you don’t have time to do this, you’ll have to find some volunteers or pay for help.

Another way to build a community quickly is by holding a blog contest. You can offer attractive prizes (like lots of cash!) or ask other bloggers to donate prizes in exchange for something you have to offer. You could offer to review their blog in your blog and give them a backlink. You could offer them your own product in exchange. Those are just two quick ideas.

Folks like Darren Rowse (Problogger) and Shoemoney have built their brands largely due to the popularity of their blogs. You have to find your own unique angle to it. For Problogger, it was teaching people about blogging and making money from it. For Shoemoney, a lot of initial interest was generated by showing a huge affiliate check and talking about tremendous success with ringtones.

Don’t delay, start thinking about how you can establish yourself in a crowded marketplace. The sooner you start, the better.

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