What’s the one downside of email newsletters?

Once you’ve sent them out, they’re gone into the ether. Everyone who subscribes after that moment won’t receive it, the search engines can’t index it, and there’s no additional return on investment.

So how do you maximize your results for your email newsletter? Read on:

• Archive your newsletters at your Web site. It amazes me that not everyone does this. Take the same article you’re sending out and post it in a newsletter archive section of your Web site. Now this article is a page that can be read by future visitors and archived by the search engines, giving you more search engine visibility on keyphrases that you are targeting.

  Bonus Tip: Feel free to change the title if necessary. Since your email subject line doesn’t need to concern itself with search engine optimization you may have ignored SEO in crafting it. Your archived version should have an article title (header) and a page title that is keyword rich, putting your best keyword phrases up front.

• Link to your archived article from your home page. If you’re publishing an email newsletter once a month, that’s new content that the search engines can index. However, if the links are buried deep within your Web site, the search engines may never look for it. Put a link on your home page that links directly to the article.

  Bonus Tip: Don’t use "click here" or "read our new newsletter" as the hyperlink. Instead, use that keyword rich title as the hyperlink, i.e., The Secret to a Web Site That Sells. Since search engines give weight to the words in a hyperlink–aka anchor text–it will help you at the search engines.

• Link to all articles on your site from all articles. All of these intra-site links will also help you with search engine optimization, as well as let visitors easily find other articles at your site, establishing your expertise and showing just how smart you really are. Check out our article Six Blogging Myths That Are Holding You Back as an example if you’re not sure what I’m talking about.

  Bonus Tip: Depending on the number of articles you have, you might also organize them by "related articles," rather than just by date as we have.

• Blog it. You do have a blog, don’t you? The day you publish your email newsletter you should blog "around" the topic and link to the archived page on your site, again, using the keyword-rich title as the hyperlink.

  Bonus Tip: Remind blog readers that to avoid missing any future issues of your email newsletter they should subscribe now, and link to where they can subscribe, or include the subscribe box right within the blog post if possible.

  Bonus-Bonus Tip: If you use email bait–a giveaway to entice Web site visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter–mention it here as well. Like our free article The 11 Commandments of Writing Web Copy for the Non-Copywriter.

If you have any other ideas on how to maximize your email newsletter, let me know! If you don’t have an email newsletter yet, contact us or sign up for a free trial account at Constant Contact.

Rich Brooks
Email Marketing Expert