RE: Looking Outside of STEEM to grow your Blog #3 Collecting Email Addresses
Email list sounds like it be great to have every time there a dip in the price, a hard fork, some massive scandal, a whatever that causes anyone who is consuming and supporting you to disengage from the platform based on something out of your own control. I have in the past check in on people from leaving them comment and hoping they have something that notifies them they have a comment or chatting with people on discord. Many people that I’ve known who are no longer active on Steemit still log into discord. It’s just not a very effective way to go about it.
While I’m not quite sure if I want do an email list. I’ll add mailchimp on my list to get back around to and to look into further. With there being some free features that at least worth looking into in and trying out. Right now I want make sure I don’t have a bunch of runaway costs with no plan in how I’m able to recover operation expensive. I’m glad you talk a little about the free version giving you time to work that out. You have also give me some things I need to consider over like creating a privacy statement.
Including my twitter at the end and not make it to overwhelming is something I’ll give some thought to as I have a desire to at least grow that. I just don’t want someone to come to the bottom of my post and see a massive wall of text and links. I’m not quite sure what would be considered the “ideal” amount of space to use before a reader gets overwhelmed or has a higher chance of just skipping over it.
I’ve come across people who information section at the bottom far exceeds there blog post in length to the point it’s just overwhelming. I’ve seen some “here are my 10 community I’m in and there giant oversized logos/footers included, here are 5 cryptocurrency wallets you can support me at, here every single social media account I have ever created.” As a reader that just makes me go “eeek” and I move on before I make it to the upvote button at the bottom” Somewhere is that balance.
yes I too have seen footers and calls to actions longer than posts, and I am not suggesting that. Do have a look at @leoplaw latest post and the call to action to sign up for the newsletter
https://steemit.com/dtube/@leoplaw/8vi4vwig
Mailchimps free features are rather impressive, and there is no way I would start to advocate people spending money to get them selves up and running. I have used mailchimp for a few years now, and I was able to keep under the limit for a good long time by cleaning down my list ever so often. If someone didnt open say the last 15 newsletters, then I would send them a mail asking them if they wanted to continue receiving mails, if they didnt reply, I would remove them from my list. No point in having dead weight.
What would you do if discord closed the door over night? Not saying this will happen, but reliance on a third party is dangerous. Steemit gets a lot of traffic, we know this because steemit inc are able to monitize it with ads now. there could be a lot of people that visit your blog once, like your content but never find it again. Giving them the ability to sign up to your newsletter gives you the opportunity to capture some of the traffic steemit.com gets.