Last week I spent time with a young blogger who was completely stalled with her blog (for the purpose of this post I’ll call her Sally).
Sally’s blogging had started with a bang and had put together 3 great months of content and had started to build a readership but then it suddenly all came to a halt.
I arranged to catch up for coffee to see what had happened and see if there was a way to get her moving again and she told me a story that I’m sure many readers will find familiar.
Paralysed by Comparisons
The reason Sally started blogging was that she had been a reader of another reasonably well known blogger. She had been so inspired by this established blogger that she simply had to start her own blog – which she did.
The problem that brought Sally’s blog to a grinding halt started a few weeks after her blog began when Sally began to compare her fledgling blog with her hero’s blog.
It started innocently enough with her noticing that this others blogger’s design just seemed to flow much better than Sally’s. However in the coming days and weeks Sally started to compare other things too.
Her hero seemed to blog with more confidence, she got more comments, she had a larger Twitter following, she was more active on Pinterest, she was getting some great brands advertise on her blog, she was invited to cool events…
Once Sally started comparing she couldn’t stop. She told me that she would sit down to work on her blog and end up on her hero’s blog and social media accounts – for hours on end – comparing what they were doing.
On one hand Sally knew it wasn’t a fair comparison – she had only been blogging by this stage for a couple of months and her hero had been blogging for over 4 years… but logic was clouded out by jealousy and Sally found her blogging beginning to stall.
She started second guessing herself. She would work for days on blog posts – hoping to perfect them to the standard of her hero only to get to the point of publishing them and trashing them instead for fear of them not being up to scratch.
Days would go by between posts and then weeks. Sally’s blog began to stall… and then it died completely.
The Comparison Trap
Sally isn’t the only blogger to fall into the trap of comparing oneself with others – in fact I’ve heard this story (or variations of it) numerous times. If I’m honest, it’s something that at times I’ve struggled with too.
I remember in the early days of my own blogging comparing my style of writing with other bloggers that I admired who wrote in a much more academic, heavy style of writing. I tried to emulate this over and over again and never felt I hit the benchmark that they set.
The temptation was to give up – but luckily I found my more informal and conversational voice through experimentation and persistance.
Comparing Is Never Fair
As I chatted with Sally last week a theme emerged in our conversation – the comparisons were simply not fair.
Sally knew this on some levels but needed to hear it again.
Her hero had been blogging for years. Sally had been blogging for months.
Not only that – Sally was comparing herself to tiny snapshots of this other blogger.
She could see her hero’s Twitter follower numbers, how many comments she was getting, how many times she Pinned on Pinterest and the instagram photos of this blogger at glamorous events – but she didn’t really have the full picture of this other blogger.
She didn’t know how many hours that blogger worked, she didn’t know whether that other blogger had people working for her, she didn’t know if that other blogger was actually happy with her blog or life and she certainly didn’t see the instagrams of that other bloggers boring, dull or hard moments of life.
I’m not saying the other blogger is hiding anything or doing anything wrong – just that the comparisons Sally was making were of everything Sally knew about herself (and her insecurities) with tiny edited snapshots of the life and work another person.
Run You Own Race
Sally is a remarkable person. I’d love to tell you her real name and story because she’s overcome some amazing things in her life, has some unique perspectives to share and has an inspirational story to tell.
My encouragement to Sally (and to us all) is run her own race. Yes she’s running beside others that at times seem to be running faster or with more flare… but nobody else around her has her unique personality, set of experiences or skills.
Nobody else can blog like Sally – so the sooner she gets comfy in her own skin the better.
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Yesterday Google shared they see greater mobile than desktop search volumes in 10 countries including Japan and the United States.
3 years ago RKG shared CTR data which highlighted how mobile search ads were getting over double the CTR as desktop search ads.
The basic formula: less screen real estate = higher proportion of user clicks on ads.
Google made a big deal of their “mobilepocalypse” update to scare other webmasters into making their sites mobile friendly. Part of the goal of making sites “mobile friendly” is to ensure it isn’t too ad dense (which in turn lowers accidental ad clicks & lowers monetization). Not only does Google have an “ad heavy” relevancy algorithm which demotes ad heavy sites, but they also explicitly claim even using a moderate sized ad unit on mobile devices above the fold is against their policy guidelines:
Is placing a 300×250 ad unit on top of a high-end mobile optimized page considered a policy violation?
Yes, this would be considered a policy violation as it falls under our ad placement policies for site layout that pushes content below the fold. This implementation would take up too much space on a mobile optimized site’s first view screen with ads and provides a poor experience to users. Always try to think of the users experience on your site – this will help ensure that users continue to visit.
So if you make your site mobile friendly you can’t run Google ads above the fold unless you are a large enough publisher that the guidelines don’t actually matter.
If you spend the extra money to make your site mobile friendly, you then must also go out of your way to lower your income.
What is the goal of the above sort of scenario? Defunding content publishers to ensure most the ad revenues flow to Google.
If you do X, you are a spammer. If Google does X, they are improving the user experience.
@aaronwall they will personally do everything they penalize others for doing; penalties are just another way to weaken the market.— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) May 5, 2015
The above sort of contrast is something noticed by non-SEOs. The WSJ article about Google’s new ad units had a user response stating:
With this strategy, Google has made the mistake of an egregious use of precious mobile screen space in search results. This entails much extra fingering/scrolling to acquire useful results and bypass often not-needed coincident advertising. Perhaps a moneymaker by brute force; not a good idea for utility’s sake.
That content displacement with ads is both against Google’s guidelines and algorithmically targeted for demotion – unless you are Google.
Facebook and Google accounted for a majority of mobile ad market growth worldwide last year. Combined, the two companies saw net mobile ad revenues increase by $6.92 billion, claiming 75.2% of the additional $9.2 billion that went toward mobile in 2013.
…and the smaller the screen size the more partners are squeezed out of the ecosystem…
The high-intent, high-value search traffic is siphoned off by ads.
What does that leave for the rest of the ecosystem?
It is hard to build a sustainable business when you have to rely almost exclusively on traffic with no commercial intent.
One of the few areas that works well is perhaps with evergreen content which has little cost of maintenance, but even many of those pockets of opportunity are disappearing due to the combination of the Panda algorithm and Google’s scrape-n-displace knowledge graph.
At The New York Times, for instance, more than half its digital audience comes from mobile, yet just 10% of its digital-ad revenue is attributed to these devices.
Why do news sites get so much mobile search traffic? A lot of it is navigational & beyond that most of it is on informational search queries which are hard to monetize (and thus have few search ads) and hard to structure into the knowledge graph (because they are about news items which only just recently happened).
If you look at the organic search traffic breakdown in your analytics account & you run a site which isn’t a news site you will likely see a far lower share of search traffic from mobile. Websites outside of the news vertical typically see far less mobile traffic. This goes back to Google dominating the mobile search interface with ads.
Mobile search ecosystem breakdown
traffic with commercial intent = heavy ads
limited commercial intent but easy answer = knowledge graph
limited commercial intent & hard to answer = traffic flows to news sites
As Google continues to gut the broader web publishing ecosystem, they can afford to throw a few hundred million in “innovation” bribery kickback slush funds. That will earn them some praise in the short term with some of the bigger publishers, but it will make those publishers more beholden to Google. And it is even worse for smaller publishers. It means the smaller publishers are not only competing against algorithmic brand bias, confirmation bias expressed in the remote rater documents, & wholesale result set displacement, but some of their bigger publishing competitors are also subsidized directly by Google.
One of the keys to success in digital marketing is to ensure that the right hand is always talking to the left. This means that if you’ve spent time building a beautiful WordPress site and regularly write high-quality content for it, you’ll want those efforts shared across other marketing platforms.
Social media is one of the more obvious choices as it’s (typically) free to use and doesn’t take much effort to write a 140-character message and hit “Send.”
But email is another one of those marketing arms that should stay closely connected to everything you do.
Newsletters can be as simple as this one from Cooking Light–a rundown of time-sensitive recipes and related blog content.
Of course, as a web developer, email marketing might not be something in your wheelhouse.
But just because it’s your job to create websites for your clients doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to enhance it through other marketing strategies.
The same goes for your own professional website.
As a WordPress developer or designer, your website is a reflection of the work you do and would greatly benefit from increased exposure through email.
In general, email marketing is a term used for communications shared between you and email subscribers with the main goal of converting them into paid customers.
These types of emails are the equivalent of a landing page on your website.
In other words, sell, sell, sell.
A newsletter, on the other hand, is a type of email marketing; however, it’s more reminiscent of a blog as the goal is to establish trust and develop a relationship with email subscribers by delivering added value.
WPMU DEV shows you that newsletters don’t always need to be about you in order to be read-worthy.
In this article, I want to focus on the newsletter arm of email marketing.
Much of what you’d need to do to create a newsletter is similar to the work you do to build a website, so this is a logical choice for dipping your toes into email marketing (at least to start).
I’ll discuss the power of email, how it can be used to promote your site, and break out some of the best newsletter plugins you can use in WordPress to create and send newsletters.
Why Your WordPress Site Needs a Newsletter
There’s a lot that goes into executing an email marketing campaign and I don’t necessarily believe it’s something you need to be fluent in as a WordPress professional.
This newsletter from Thrillist is the typical newsletter I see (just a link to recent blog posts) and it’s super easy to create!
In a report from Radicati, they predicted that there will be over 3 billion email users around the world by 2020 and that the number of emails sent every day will average about 257 billion.
While that statistic basically says that there’s a lot of noise generated by email, it also demonstrates the huge opportunity available to business owners to reach a new audience, stay connected to them, and, hopefully, make more money through a newsletter.
Don’t believe me?
According to HubSpot, 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.
As well as this, more than 50% of U.S. respondents check their personal email account over 10 times a day and prefer to receive updates from brands
81% of retail marketers surveyed by WBR Digital said that email marketing improved customer acquisition rates while 80% said it helped improve customer retention.
I always look forward to these GameStop newsletters every week. There’s nothing much to them, but I know there’ll be a special offer for me.
Want some more reasons as to why your WordPress site and business need a newsletter?
Here you go:
It’s quite similar to building and managing a website, so this may be one of the easier marketing methods for a web developer to get involved in. All you basically need is an email service provider and email hosting for your domain.
It gives you something to do with all those email subscribers who eagerly signed up to receive communications from you.
Email subscribers won’t all be paying customers, which makes this a great tool for providing customers and prospects alike with valuable information that may help you convert consumers that were on the fence about converting, upsell current customers, or generate recurring revenue.
It can increase the visibility of your brand by regularly staying top-of-mind with a predictable and noteworthy newsletter.
It’s cost-effective. Even if you decide to send a newsletter out every week, the hard part is done; you’ve already designed it. All you need is to plug in content—and you likely already have content to draw from on your site (i.e. your blog).
It can be used for a variety of purposes. You can share news about your company, promote recent blog posts from your site, announce new products or services, give subscribers access to special offers, and more.
If you have segmented subscriber lists (based on geography, demographics, on-site behavior, etc.), you can send personalized newsletters.
It’s another great source of data for your business. You can learn a lot about what your audience wants by studying the analytics—how many people opened it, which device did they use, which links received the most clicks, etc.
At the end of the day, a newsletter is yet another means by which you can reach your audience, and I’d argue it’s a lot easier to do than social media and definitely much cheaper than paid search marketing.
If you’re not using newsletters to stay in touch with current clients, convert interested prospects, and improve your business’s reputation right now, think about those potential growth and revenue generating) opportunities you’re missing out on.
7 Newsletter Plugins You Can Use within WordPress
The work you do within WordPress to build quality websites is incredibly important.
However, visiting a website and digging around it requires work from your visitors—and that’s not always the ideal experience.
Once you’ve made that first contact, wouldn’t it be nice to give visitors a chance to sign up for a free newsletter where you take control of the relationship for a while?
Yes, this means there’s more work for you to do, though probably not as much as you’d expect.
WordPress, of course, has a number of plugins available to help users integrate newsletters into their website.
Usually, however, when people talk about these plugins, they’re referring to email subscription forms that connect the subscribers to you, and their data to your newsletter platform. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Popups and contact forms will take care of automating the subscription process.
What you need now is a tool that will streamline the process of actually creating and sending newsletters to your email subscribers.
While you could use a third-party platform to do so, there are cheaper WordPress plugin alternatives that allow you to do all the work within WordPress.
Here are 7 plugins to consider:
HubSpot
HubSpot’s WordPress plugin makes it super easy for you to create, personalize, and optimize your marketing emails. The drag-and-drop editor allows you to quickly draft email campaigns with a professional design and optimized for any screen size. And if you’re running low on inspiration, you can get easily get started with one of the many goal-based templates available.
HubSpot’s email marketing software comes bundled with a free, powerful CRM where you can store all of your contact’s information and use it to personalize your emails to look like it was tailor-made for each and every one of your recipients. The built-in A/B tests and analytics will allow you to measure and maximize the impact of your outreach.
Email Subscribers & Newsletters
This free WordPress plugin is actually quite comprehensive. Not only does it enable you to add subscription boxes to your site, but it also gives you two options for sending newsletters. The first is a simple automation of sending out notifications to subscribers when a new blog publishes. The second is a more customized approach to designing and sending newsletters from WordPress.
MailPoet
There is a free version of this plugin as well as a premium one available. While I normally would recommend the premium plugin, the free MailPoet seems like it would be more than enough for a small business owner or marketer to use when starting out. It comes with 70 themes, a drag-and-drop builder, built-in analytics, automated messages, and is responsive. The only difference I see between the two versions is the number of subscribers you can send to (either less than or more than 2,000) and the amount of analytics insights available.
Mailster
This premium newsletter plugin is perfect whether you’re a developer trying to quickly get your own newsletter out the door or you want to give your clients a tool that’s easy enough to use on their own. With a drag-and-drop builder, live template editing, and full newsletter campaign management within WordPress, this one is worth every penny.
The Newsletter Plugin
While this seems at first glance like your typical newsletter plugin, I think my favorite thing about this one is all the different ways it enables users to capture newsletter subscribers. Rather than rely on newsletter-specific subscription forms, it also adds a subscription checkbox to other contact forms (in case those leads missed the newsletter form or just don’t want to sign up twice). It also imports all previously registered users into your newsletter subscriber list.
SendPress
What makes this plugin really stand out from the pack is the fact that there are no restrictions put on how many newsletters subscribers you can have (something that can become quite frustrating after a while—both within and outside of WordPress). Other than that, this is simply a reliable newsletter plugin you can use to build cleanly-designed newsletters and schedule out at the most optimal times for your subscribers.
Newsletters
Another full-featured WordPress plugin, this one from Tribulant will cover all your bases. Newsletter templates are provided. You can manage your various mailing lists and review the statistics on each within WordPress. You can create a variety of subscription forms both for your site as well as off-site. And much, much more. One thing to be aware of is that the limit for subscribers is pretty low (500) with the free plugin, so if you intend on having a much larger list of subscribers, you’ll want to invest in the premium one.
Wrapping Up
As a consumer, think about how many newsletters you receive from your favorite brands.
Unless you’re swamped at work and trying to keep your eyes off of the growing list of emails in your inbox, you likely get excited to see the latest newsletter from them, right?
Who knows what this next one contains?
Maybe it’s a list of their most popular blogs from the week. Maybe it’s a special deal on that computer monitor you wanted to buy.
Or maybe there are just silly pictures of puppies they sent to lighten the mood on your Monday morning.
Sometimes the newsletters I subscribe to surprise me with random reminders/surprises like this one from PetSmart.
As a receiver of newsletters, you know what sort of lure they have over you as a consumer.
As a sender of newsletters, however, think about what you’d be able to do with those extra touch points with your consumer base.
They obviously want to hear from you as they willingly subscribed to your newsletter, right?
So why not make the most of their entrusting you with their email address and start sending them a valuable newsletter every week or every month?
Last week I spent time with a young blogger who was completely stalled with her blog (for the purpose of this post I’ll call her Sally).
