You have probably seen the people talking about setting up a mailing list or an autoresponder system for your blog, right? In fact, the I’ve seen every established Internet marketer and blogger say they wish they had started collecting emails immediately when they started out. I mean, every. single. one.
So there must be something to that, right? If you’re offering an email subscription option to your blog via FeedBurner’s RSS to email option, your blog posts will be automatically send to your readers. This is great (I use it too). But what if you want to send special newsletters for your readers and not just the latest posts you put on your blog? Nope, sending the mails manually is not good, so you need a system for it.
They say you should sign-up for Aweber, which costs $1 for the first month and then $19 a month (or little less if you pay for the full year) and the price will go up as your list gets larger. You’re just starting out, you don’t have a large following on your blog yet, and paying 19 bucks a month doesn’t sound so tempting. So what do you do? Well, you bite the bullet and sign-up for a service and start collecting emails. or you get…
Free Email Newsletter
You can go for the FREE option with Google Friend Connect and use that to deliver email newsletters to your readers. No, it’s not an autoresponder system, like AWeber, but it IS a mailing list – FREE mailing list.
And as a bonus, the Google Friend Connect has other features like creating interest polls for your readers, something you might want to do anyway. There are several gadgets available, like ratings and reviews, recommendations, targeted content for your readers, and others which you can use to get your readers involved with the blog. It even connects to the comment systems in WordPress, Drupal and phpBB.
However, because the Friend Connect is not an autoresponder system, so you do have to send out the newsletters manually as an broadcast to current subscribers, and the new subscribers won’t get the same sequence of emails as those who joined earlier, so it’s not suitable for setting up a eCourse delivered via mail for example. For something even better, you will also want a…
Free Email Marketing and Email List Manager
In the end, you should get a “real” mailing list, if you’re looking to make money online. And even if you don’t, an proper email newsletter service or autoresponder can be a great addition to any website or blog.
If you’re ready to pay for a service like AWeber, go ahead, but I recommend that you sign-up for MailChimp which is free up to 500 subscribers (and 3000 mails a month ~ 6 mails to a list of 500 a month, which is plenty). They don’t ask for credit card details and force you to upgrade from their forever free plan if you don’t want to, so it’s 0% risk free.
Account creation couldn’t be simpler.
- Go to MailChimp
- Hit “Sign up for free”
- Enter your email address, desired username and password
- Go to your email
- Open the confirmation mail from MailChimp
- Hit “Activate my account”
- Done
If you sign-up to MailChimp through my affiliate link AND decide to upgrade to paying option along the line (which you don’t have to do, if you don’t want to), I will get 30 monkey credits, which I can use to send bananas to my list. I won’t get any money and buy myself a fancy tree house in the jungle, but you’ll get a great autoresponder system. Seriously, no monkey business.
If bananas is not your thing, you can go set up the friend connect and start building your community right out of the gates, also for free. Or you can get both! And even if you already have a mailing list and autoresponder system up and running, you should still check Google Friend Connect out if you could use some of the features.
How to Add the Google Friend Connect
- Go to Google Friend Connect
- If you have or start a free blog at Blogger, your site is automatically included in the Friend Connect, so you can go in there right now and check your settings.
- Sign in with your Google account
- Look for a green plus icon and text:
Add new site - Hit it
- Fill in the “Tell us about your website”
- Website name
- Website URL
- Language for the Widgets
- Hit Continue
- Your site has been added.
You can then create a Members -widget for your blog if you want. For the newsletter, check the Newsletters -link and enable the newsletter sign-up when someone joins your site and generate a newsletter sign-up like the one you see on my sidebar on the right.
Was This Useful to You?
How did you like them apples (or bananas even)? If you liked this tip, go ahead and join my site via Google Friend Connect. Move your eyes to my blogs sidebar on the right (come visit the site if you’re reading this elsewhere) and look for Community, and the gadget with “join this site” -button. While at it make sure you select the checkbox to “sign up for our newsletter”.
Why? Because I might throw in some exclusive content & latest mon(k)ey making secret in there one day and you don’t get it because you didn’t signed-up for the newsletter. It’s definitely not as exclusive as Jordan Cooper’s super awesome mega exclusive E-Mail Blog newsletter as just anyone CAN sign-up, but it sure is cool.
p.s. I just added the friend connect in here , so you can be among the first ones in! Just don’t forget to signup for the newsletter when joining.
