Here's a simple and effective way to increase traffic to your website without spending any additional money: archive your email newsletter at your website. When you publish an email newsletter, some people will receive it and some people won't. Even if an employer firewall or spam filter doesn't prevent delivery, it's still tough for people to actually read all of their email. This sometimes results in deletion of your newsletter, even when someone really does wants to read it.
But if you archive your newsletters at your site, your readers know that, even if they can't read your newsletter when you publish it, they can visit your site anytime and enjoy the content when it's convenient for them.
It's easy to archive your newsletter at your site. Just create a folder for newsletters. Then, each time you publish, cut and paste the content into a page in that folder and save it with a name that makes sense — usually the date works well. You may have to reformat it a bit to fit your website, but if you do that each time you publish, you eventually have living, breathing archival media content that you can refer to over and over again to drive new traffic to your site.
I've been archiving my newsletter since January 2000 and I get fresh visits to my website through the newsletter archives every week. The content I include is evergreen, relevant and never becomes outdated, no matter how much time passes. This is great for my readers because they have a lot of fun stuff to read. It's great for me because everything old can become new again once in a while. It also naturally creates an area of the site that anyone can use to see the rich history of my business over the years.
I use archived content to optimize my website over and over again. Anyone can do this, why not you?
Question: Do you archive, or have you considered archiving, your newsletter? Why or why not?
