Hooking up Your Blogs and Emails

Lately, I’ve gotten a few questions about how to include a Constant Contact sign-up (or Join My List) link on a blog. Since encouraging blog readers to become email subscribers as a way to expand your reach is a smart idea, that’s a good question! However, there are certainly other ways you can integrate your blog and your email newsletters as well. Let me show you how to take it a step further.

Use Your Blog to Get Subscribers

There are a couple ways to go about putting your Join My List link onto your blog or into individual posts. The most direct way is to grab the URL for your link and paste it wherever you'd like it to go. Most blog hosts (i.e., WordPress, Blogger, etc.) make it easy to add links to other websites, but all of them are slightly different, so you’ll want to find out how your specific platform allows you to do this.

On the other hand, if you want something a little more than the usual link, you can also see if there’s an app that allows you to add a button or form to your blog. The Constant Contact MarketPlace has a huge listing of apps and solutions. Just head there and either search by your current blogging platform or search everything by clicking “List Building Apps".



You may be surprised at all the integration options you find.

Use Your Emails to Get Blog Readers

It doesn’t end there, though. You can also take advantage of all of the great blog content you write by using it in your newsletters and driving traffic back to your blog. Here’s how you can re-purpose your posts:

1. Get into the block where you want to showcase things.
2. Put your cursor where you want your post to start.
3. Click Blog Content in your left-hand navigation.
   
   
4. Paste in your Feed/RSS URL and click Retrieve.
5. Select which posts you want to insert and how much of the content you want to display (we suggest just a paragraph or two), and then click Insert.

Once you have that great content showing off how awesome your blog is, you can point everyone back to the source by adding a link to it. Just go back to your left-hand menu bar and click Visit Blog. Select an image for your button, add the URL for your blog, and you’re good to go.



With a little bit of effort, you’ve now got your blog and your emails complementing each other in a way that helps you show off your best and brightest insights to your customers, clients, and newsletter readers.

For more information on how you can complement your emails with other social media, check out these resources.

FAQ 4187: The Social Share bar and Like button
FAQ 2620: Adding a Join My List text link to my Facebook profile
FAQ 5010: WordPress Join My Mailing List application
Constant Commentary: Blog Posts: The Windows into Your Company’s Soul

Contributed by: Jaime McCall, Knowledge Base Writer, Constant Contact