Just in case you missed it, having lots of RSS subscribers, at least the kind that reads your blog in a feed reader, is no longer the most important thing for a blog.  RSS readers are difficult to monetize (make money from), and the advent of Google Adsense for Feeds didn´t change that.  If you really want to make money from your blog, you need to offer an email newsletter.

Most top bloggers now offer the option of subscribing to a newsletter. Even blog designs have started to reflect this reality. Most blog designs now offer the option to subscribe to the newsletter in the header of the blog. BlogStorm, Yaro, John Chow and Cow are just a few of the blogs that feature the emails newsletter subscription option prominently.  Even if you don´t find the opt-in form in the header you will find it somewhere on the sidebar.

Email newsletters on blogs went mainstream in October of 2008, when veteran problogger Darren Rowse talked about the success he has having on his blog with the Aweber pop-up.

He revealed how the Aweber pop-up he introduced had increased his subscriber rate by 10x. After this most top blogs started offering the email newsletter option.

A week after Darren posted the information on his blog had also set-up the email newsletter on my blog, with the number of email subscribers increasing 20 to 25 a day.

I could do a very long hub explaining why your blog needs an email newsletter, but instead I will list the top two reasons:

1. When a new visitor reaches your blog and subscribes to your RSS feed, he will have access to everything you publish from here on. But what about all the great content you have already published? At most a new reader will see a few of those posts. An email newsletter changes all this. With very little additional work, you can set up an autoresponder sequence with some of the best content on your blog, and have it sent out to these new readers at a rate that you see fit. Not only can you send out newsletters with your best content, but you can also promote certain affiliate programs that you covered before on your blog. Not only will you make more money, but you will get a flow of constant visitors to you blog by linking to posts in your email newsletter. The beauty of all of this is that it takes very little additional work, and as your subscriber base grows, so does the number of daily emails that get sent out.
2. Imagine that for whatever reason you stop posting to your blog. If all you have is RSS readers, as soon as you stop writing these readers stop receiving your posts. On the other hand, your email newsletter gets sent out anyway to all the people of your autoresponder sequence. And even if you get new subscribers, those will start from the first newsletter in your autoresponder. On the other hand, any new regular RSS reader you get won´t ever receive a post from you unless you write a new one.

These are just two of the reasons to set-up an email newsletter for your blog, but they should be enough to convince your.  

If you are looking for an email newsletter service, I recommend Aweber, but you can also read my Aweber vs. GetResponse review and pick the one that best suits your needs.

If the subject of email marketing is of interest to you, I recommend you read about email marketing solutions and a review of Atomic Mail Sender for sending mass emails.