The key to a successful newsletter

Today was a good day for me, as i went searching for good blogs to read. A couple of great ones ended in my RSS aggregator, like Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur Journey , The University Kid (He has a Great contest there, with awards totaling more than 15.000 bucks) and Performancing.

And after reading hundreds and hundreds of quality posts, one thing stroke me: a quote from this post. Although incredibly simple, the phrase manages to coagulate the meaning of the "newsletter" concept:

"The key to a successful newsletter is making friends with your subscribers"

I couldn’t agree more. Having a big number of people subscribed to your newsletter is great. I see a lot of sites focusing on this aspect every day, but what is the real value of this list after all? Let’s say it has 10.000 active users in it. With a 40% opening rate and 25% click rate, i would get like 1000 visitors from my newsletter to the site. Are they really valuable?

Well yes, if at least 50 of those 1000 are regular readers and "online friends" with the authors. You can be sure they’ll comment on your posts, and not just for the sake of commenting, but they really have something to say, they’ll add value to your content and take your site forward. As for the other 9950? Well, they’ll read, they’ll like it or not, and they’ll leave. From a financial point of view, they will get you some money, but won’t help your site progress.

So, having a critical mass of dedicated readers allows you to create that level of engagement needed by every successful blog. And the bigger this number of fans is, the better. So, try working as hard as you can on devoting your readers. How? These articles might help you a little bit: How can you turn visitors into returning visitors and Attracting returning visitors.

Tags: blogging, newsletter, wordpress