I know of a well-known website that was hacked several years ago and was consequently off-line for a while. One thing that helped to save this person’s following was the mailing list that he had developed over the previous years. Because the list was hosted externally, he was able to send a message out to let his followers know about the incident and to keep them abreast of his progress.

A similar thing could apply to authors. If an author has his or her books up on Amazon and does not have a separate mailing list, where will he be if Amazon suddenly makes algorithm changes that take his work from top results to a black hole somewhere within the bowels of the search results? A mailing list could be the thing that saves his sales by allowing him to communicate with his audience directly. By the way, unless a reader lets you know personally that she bought your book on Amazon, you will never know who bought any of your work on that platform. People who buy books on Amazon are their customers, not yours (in Amazon’s eyes).

Adding a mailing list subscription form

You can definitely add a mailing list subscription form to your site, whether your site runs on WordPress, Joomla, or some other platform. For the WordPress platform there are many plugins that can insert the form for you. Some are simple. Others are more complex. Mailing list service providers make it easy to connect your website to their systems.

I have used two different mailing list providers plus two self-hosted systems. I’ve used the Mailchimp and MailerLite services. For an author, artist, or small online business, I recommend MailerLite.

Mailchimp has recently made drastic changes in the focus of their service and no longer offers a simple mailing list service in which you pay just for subscribers and the ability to interact with them as needed. Their service seems geared more toward companies who want complete crm functionality with mail as less of a priority. Their new pricing structure has made their service less affordable than it once was.

MailerLite is affordable, has a great set of features and seems to me to be quite straight-forward with their clients. They still have a free level, which works well for some website owners who are just starting out and don’t need such advanced features as auto-resend, custom domains, and delivery by timezone. Their free level allows up to 1000 subscribers and a total of 12,000 email sent per month. Paid levels are very affordable. For example their lowest paid level allows up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails sent per month, plus their full range of mailing list features for $10,00 per month.

I mentioned that I had also self-hosted mailing list services. There are several different ones available now. Years ago I used Mojo Mail with a list of more than 1,500 subscribers. Mojo mail is now Dada Mail. I used Mojo Mail about the same time Mailchimp started and nearly a decade before MailerLite came on the scene. The self-hosted one I used most recently is Sendy.

There are two primary reasons I’ve chosen to no longer use a self-hosted system. One reason is that I find it more difficult to produce mailings that look professional. The bigger reason goes back to the primary reason I gave for having a mailing list in the first place.

Remember the story I told in paragraph two of the website owner whose site was hacked, but he was able to maintain connection with his readers because he had a mailing list? Having a mailing list system becomes much less a safety net when it is hosted on the same server that gets hacked or the web host has problems beyond their control that take your site off-line for any period of time. If the server where your mailing list is hosted goes down, so does your ability to mail your list.

For the reason I just explained, I no longer use self-hosted mailing list services. Instead, I use and recommend MailerLite. If you have more than one site, you can have one main MailerLite account, then within that account, have company accounts on different plan levels. Say you have a site with very simple mailing list needs. MailerLite’s free level might be perfect for that site. You have another site with more subscribers than the free level allows. You can have that site set up on the paid tier that it needs and still have the first site on the free tier.

You can learn more about MailerLite here. It’s the company I use on my sites.

If you need help installing a mailing list subscription form on your website, we can help.

Organize your blog writing process

The easiest way I’ve found to keep my writing organized is with Scrivener, a very affordable piece of software promoted and used primarily by authors of fiction or non-fiction books. I first “met” Scrivener several years ago when I bought it to help me with my fiction writing, but have since found that it is extremely useful for far more than book manuscripts.

To some users, Scrivener seems overwhelming because of the incredible number of features it has. But it does not have to be complicated to use. In fact, for most bloggers or freelance writers Scrivener can be a simple way to organize your writing.

Scrivener is basically set up as a system of folders. Inside those folders are the text files containing your actual writing. The folders can contain other folders and text files. That, for me, is the primary feature that makes organizing any type of writing easy.

Scrivener can be a simple way to organize your writing.

Let’s say you have a blog about bees. You might want to plan a series of articles in advance. One month you publish an article each week about a different bee species. The next month you plan to publish weekly articles about threats to the bee population. Then, the third month you publish an article each week about the art of beekeeping.

If I had that schedule ahead of me, I would start by creating a folder for species, a second for threats, and a third for beekeeping. Within each of those folders I would open a new text document and write my article.

If you were writing a very long piece of pillar content, you could have a folder for the entire article, then subfolders within it for each section of the article. Within each sub-folder would be a text file containing the writing for that section.

The versatility of Scrivener

The beauty of Scrivener is that it is so incredibly versatile in how you set it up. The scenario I just wrote about is just a tiny example of ways you could manipulate your work to suit your working style. If you are a person who finds it easier to use a card system, similar to 3 X 5 cards to organize your thoughts, you can also view your work in the corkboard mode. In either view – corkboard or file view – you can very easily rearrange your work by clicking and dragging files and folders (or cards in the cork-view mode).

Scrivener will allow you to collect your research within each project. If there is a website page that you frequently visit to gather information, you can very easily embed it in the research folder. You can then view the webpage inside Scrivener whenever you need to. You can collect images and practically any other type of research material. You can color-code your work in different ways.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with Scrivener. But using the basics I’ve described here can make your writing life much easier to organize.

I use Scrivener for my blogging. In fact, I wrote this article in Scrivener for Mac. Scrivener is also available for Windows and iOS. You can find out more about Scrivener here.

If you own a website that has no contact form or any other way to contact you (such as an email link), no Google Analytics or Google Ads, no Amazon affiliate links, no online tip jar, and no mailing list, you may be off the hook. But if you do have any of those, or any similar thing installed on your website, you almost certainly need to have a privacy policy on your site, linked in a way that is easy to find. Why?

The reason is that if you have any feature on your website that collects email addresses for any reason, you are collecting personally identifiable information. You must provide a way for people to opt of the collection of their information.

These regulations are not in place just to make life hard for small website owners. Place yourself on the other side of the fence for a second and ask yourself if you would appreciate knowing what happens to the information you type into online forms.

The rules and regulations are there to protect consumers, just like you are when you visit other sites.

You may need a privacy policy

Website owners should not overlook privacy policies even if they are very small and think they’ll never have a broad audience. There are laws in place concerning the responsibilities of website owners in Europe and many other countries. There are laws being proposed in several states that dictate a number of rules surrounding the collection of personal data belonging to anyone who is a resident of that state, regardless where the website that resident visits is based. In some cases, substantial fines exist or are being proposed.

Further, there are many owners of small websites who don’t know that Google requires a privacy policy on any site that uses Google Analytics to track their traffic. Other companies have similar rules.

If you have decided not to include a privacy policy on your website because you’ve seen some of the mile-long policies on larger websites and you think you could never write one on your nor afford to pay an attorney to write one, there are ways to have a legally acceptable and continuously updated policy on your site without breaking your bank.

Contact us if you need a privacy policy. We’re not attorneys, so we depend on Termageddon to help us with our privacy policies. Click here to see how they can help you get the policies you need to legally protect yourself and your website.