Are you looking for blogging efficiencies? Have you ever thought about using your blog in conjunction with email marketing efforts? If not, you should! Email is still a very viable marketing mechanism. Most likely your clients are using email as a daily method of contact. Using your existing sphere of influence is a great way to introduce your blog to your current clients AND keep them educated.

• Have you been sending emails which answer questions that might benefit a larger audience?
• Do you send out email newsletters to your client base?
• Do you send special promotions or educational marketing messages via email?

All of these things can be done more efficiently using a combination of email and blogging. When you add content to a blog, that content becomes available in real-time for anyone viewing the website (yes! a blog is really just a real-time website) online. It also becomes available for search engine spiders to crawl and index. If you want to become an authority in the search engine index for any subject matter, you must offer timely and relevant content for regular digestion. Using an email/blog combination to communicate is an effective way to meet your marketing needs while at the same time offering great content for the search engines to digest and index. Approach the three scenarios above first in your blog and then introduce them through your email campaign. This gives you the opportunity to have a conversation you might have only had with one individual - with many!

Creating a Newsletter:

1. Let’s assume you offer a regular monthly email newsletter to your client base. How would you achieve a blog/email combination in this case? Follow these easy steps:
2. Create each story you would have offered up in your newsletter as a separate blog post
3. Make sure you create comprehensive articles that offer education and value
4. In each section of your email newsletter, take a good paragraph from each of your blog articles and use them as section teasers
5. At the bottom of each teaser paragraph (or newsletter section), make sure to include a link to "read more" that directs the reader to go to the appropriate article on your blog

By doing this you achieve three things: your newsletter will look clean and concise, you’ve introduced your current clients to your blog hopefully peaking their interest to read more, AND you’ve created an opportunity for your content to get spidered and indexed in the search engines!

Use a Blog Post to Communicate a Message to One Person Which May Have Value For Many:

Let’s use Realtors as a good example for this. They have client to client conversations every day through email. Why not take these educational conversations to the web? Create a blog post answering the question and making it suitable for general education. Then send an email to your client saying, "you’ve inspired me to write a blog post. Please visit the following link for an answer to your question". Perhaps with a more personal and targeted message, but you get the idea! Once again you are getting more bang for your buck with here - your content is serving multiple purposes and working harder for you.

Most people are blogging everyday - they just don’t realize it! A blog can be a very valuable online marketing tool - help yourself with time saving efficiencies.

Email Tip:
For regular e-mail newsletters and promos there are some incredible new tools that help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Check out www.constantcontact.com!

UPDATE: www.feedblitz.com now offers an email newsletter service that builds itself from your blog posts - it’s free and easy, check it out!

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