AdSense Traffic Tip: Start a newsletter/ezine

Running a blog can obviously be a profitable endeavour, either directly or as a way to drive more traffic to your site. Despite what you might think, though, the number of people who regularly read blogs are dwarfed by the number of people who only read email. Think of the people in your circle of friends and family who use a computer. I bet they all have email access — that's often the reason some older people get on the Internet in the first place. But how many read blogs? (For similar reasons, I decided to write my AdSense book as a printed book, not an e-book, so that I could reach a larger audience than I could by focusing my efforts solely online.)

Another way to drive traffic is to create a newsletter, sometimes called an “e-zine” or “ezine” (both are short for “electronic magazine”) in industry parlance. A newsletter is basically a longish email that you compose and send out at regular intervals to the subscribers on your list. In each newsletter is at least one link back to your site so that readers can go and get more information about the material mentioned in the newsletter or its author (you). Readers can easily forward the newsletters they get to friends, who may then discover your site that way.

Note that your blog and your newsletter can be related. You can distribute some (but probably not all) of the same content on both. You'll have to think about what's best for your audience, how much overlap there is between the people reading the two.

To get started with a newsletter you don't need much, really. If you're already blogging regularly it's not a big deal. What's harder to do, though, is to stay in compliance with all the anti-spam laws and to get people to subscribe and unsubscribe from the mailing lists you maintain. That's why almost every book that talks about this subject recommends that you use a professional mailing list service to run the lists for you. After my initial experience with getting people to sign up to my mailing list with Google Groups, I'd have to agree — a professional service is the better way to go. (The two top providers seems to be GetResponse and AWeber, by the way. At least they're the ones that every book mentions. Though their affiliate programs may skew those results, of course.)

You can even use one of those subscribe-by-email services for blogs to make it even simpler, but I think a conventional newsletter works better.

So I'm going to be moving my mailing list shortly, watch here for the details, and put some more effort into my “non-blog” marketing.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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