How to Add a Newsletter to Your Blog or Website

Last week, I argued that authors should maintain newsletters, so they can email their fans when they have new books out or have other fun news they want to share. A couple of folks said, “Ok. How?”

So, here’s a little more of the how-to on starting a newsletter and including a signup form on your site. It’ll be different depending on who you go with and where you host your blog (if you want to install it on a blog), so I’ll keep things basic.

Sign up with a newsletter service

There are free ones out there that are perfectly fine if you’re just getting started (they can get you pretty darned far, actually!), though the tradeoff is that you’ll usually have advertising or something like inserted at the end of your newsletters. For an indie on a budget, that’s probably not going to be a problem.

I’ll mention the provider I use first and then another one I’ve heard authors recommend (mine costs money, but the other one has a free option that’s available for those with less than 1,000 subscribers).

The service I use is Aweber, and the main reason was that I already had an account there because of the day job. They’re the gold standard when it comes to mailing list providers, but they’re pricy at $15 a month and offer more services than we generally need as authors (Examples include click tracking, the option to host multiple newsletters, and the ability to create series of scheduled “broadcasts” that can go out automatically to a new subscriber at intervals. They also have a huge selection of video webinars to educate you on marketing with newsletters).

If you know right away that you’ll quickly reach 1,000 subscribers, or if you have multiple pen names and want to easily manage newsletter lists for each under one account, you might check into Aweber.

If not, here’s another option:

YMLP (Your Mailing List Provider) has a free level that might very well do everything you need. As I said, you can have up to 1,000 subscribers and send up to 25 emails a month. For many authors, that may be plenty. (I’m not anywhere near 1,000 subscribers yet myself, though I hope to be by this time next year!).

Add a form to your site/blog

Both of the services I mentioned have form-creation wizards. You can pick out a background and what fields you want people to enter (name and email should be sufficient), and it’ll give you a snippet of code to place on your site.

How to insert that code will vary, depending on your blog platform, but for WordPress, I created a new “text” widget, pasted the code into it, and added it to my sidebar (I’ve done this on Blogger and Typepad, too, so I imagine it’s possible everywhere).

How do you get people to sign up for your newsletter?

The cool thing about being an author is that people searching for your website are probably already fans. They’ve read your books, and they’re interested in learning more about you or perhaps when the next book comes out. You shouldn’t have to sell them too hard on your newsletter.

That said, you can do the tried-and-true internet marketer’s method of acquiring newsletter subscribers: give something away for free to folks who sign up. Perhaps a short story or some kind of special fans-only extra? It’s up to you.

I ran a contest when I first started up my newsletter, though I’ve had more success just by making the form prominent on the “book news” page of my site as well as including it in the side bar (whenever I get around to having a pro design this site, I’ll definitely make sure the newsletter form ends up “above the fold” on all the pages). I also added a signup to the Facebook fan page I built a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had a couple of new subscribers come in from there.

That’s all there is to starting a newsletter. It’s much easier than formatting an ebook or editing your manuscript or any of the other things you’ve done as an author!