Using Blog Articles To Build a Newsletter

I started by sending out an email each week and included a link out to a single post on my blog that provided more details of the show or shows I had selected for that week. This worked fairly well with one of my first emails receiving a 23% click-through rate. After the first couple of releases, I decided to tweak the format and instead of a single post for the entire newsletter, I created an individual post for each show selected. By doing so, I went from having a single generic post title like “Hip2besquare Concert Newsletter Volume 2” to more specific titles such as “Phoenix with Wavves opening @ Agganis Arena – Monday”.

This process forced me to create a new post for each line item in my newsletter. A lot of the content had already been created so all I had to do was spice it up. What occurred next was a nice side effect of my initial intention which was only purely to give my readers another format to learn more about the shows I selected. The very next day I continued to see traffic from organic search rise and rise until I reached a point where I had tripled the amount of traffic I typically receive on a daily basis from organic search.

The big winner out of the bunch was the post I created for the Phoenix show happening that week at the Boston University venue – Agganis Arena. A number of visitors found me because they were looking to see who the opener was and what time the show was starting.

A few key ingredients for why this was successful:

1. The newsletter dealt with timely events (i.e. upcoming concerts in the area)
2. I used local search terms in my page title, header and in the body of my content (basic on-page SEO elements)
3. I was already posting to my blog on a regular basis

This third point is critical because this determines how often the search engines come back to your site to index any new articles. If I wasn’t posting regularly, this article about Phoenix playing at Agganis may not have been picked up till after the show took place.

So dust off those old or existing newsletters and see what you can come away with for blog posts. Share with us any successes you’ve experienced with leveraging newsletter content for your blog.