4 Ways To Increase The Visibility Of Your Archived Emails
If you're archiving your newsletters and emails in the hope that it will get you better search traffic, you'll need ways to drive traffic to those pages. The good news is there are plenty of free services out there to help you accomplish that. Here are four tips to get maximum exposure for your archived emails and newsletters:
Use Twitter and Facebook to link back to your emails
Unlike a tweet from Twitter or a posting on Facebook, an archived version of your emails is static and likely to be indexed by search engines. You want your archived email to be listed in search engines so that people can find it in a keyword search. Two of the best ways to drive traffic to your email or HTML newsletter is to use Twitter and Facebook to draw attention. When you tout your Twitter or Facebook account via email, Build up a following on both Facebook and Twitter and once your email is out and archived, include a post that says your latest newsletter is out, posting a link back to your archived email. If you're worried that your email link is too large for Twitter's 140 character limit, just use a URL-shrinking service (you'll find tons in a search) to get it down to a more manageable size.
Use an RSS feed on your site
RSS, also known as Real Simple Syndication, is yet another way to drive traffic to your archived Web page. This gives you yet another opportunity to grab the attention of people who subscribe to your newsletter, but may not access their email when it comes out. With an RSS feed, each person who subscribes to the feed will get a notification or headline featuring your email as well as a link back to it. This way you're driving traffic to your archived page, hopefully improving its search rank.
Put an archive link in your posts on online forums and message boards
Use your signature in online forums and message boards to send people to a link to your archived email. Most forums will let you add a signature with a link to your Website, as long as you follow the rules and post something of value. If you go on message boards and simply tout your product like a used-car salesman, you are almost guaranteed to get banned. Offer some value in your forum posts that lets people see that you're knowledgeable. Once they see that, quite often they'll click on the link to your general archive or archived newsletters.
Use social bookmarking services to highlight your archived emails and newsletters
Social bookmarking services like Delicious and Digg are a great way to get visibility for your archived newsletter. With social bookmarks, you're sharing your favorite pages with a variety of people who are also friends on the same network. For instance, if you have a gardening newsletter on archive that contains ten tips on how to save your annual plants during bad weather, you can bookmark it on Delicious. Once someone does a search on Delicious for those search terms, they'll find your archived newsletter. If they like it, they'll bookmark it as well. Pay attention to protocol, however. For instance, on Delicious, it's perfectly okay to bookmark your own stuff. But on Digg, this is frowned upon. You might need to get someone else to "Digg" your archived newsletter. Each social bookmarking site is different so do your homework before you start marking your archive as a good read.
