What email should I use for my blog?

My friend Vicky just started blogging. 

You know starting a blog is as simple as signing up for a social media account. 

And what do you need to sign up for a blog? 

An email address.

So just like everybody else, Vicky innocently signed up for a blogging service with her personal email address. 

And this is where things got overwhelming for her to the point that she sent me an email wanting to fix the mess she got herself into.

Her problem?

She is getting promotional emails every day from various blog services. So many emails that she can’t keep up and missing the important emails from her friends.

The solution?

Have a different email address just for your blog.

It’s as simple as that, but most of us don’t know what happens when we sign up for a blogging service using our personal email address.

So the question before you start a blog is,

What email should I use for my blog? You should create a separate Gmail account just to use for your blogging-related work. Gmail is free and lets you use all the free Google services to grow your blog. Use this email address whenever you sign up for blog-related services and newsletters so that all the spam and promotions go to this email inbox, leaving your main inbox clean.

The overall goal of blogging is to automate most of our tasks and keep the headache minimal. Having a dedicated email address will let you have that. In this article, I will help you pick and set up a different email address for your blog. I will also share what happens to your email inbox once you start blogging (what kinds of emails you will get), and a few tips to rock email management. Finally, I will share all the free Google tools that come with Gmail you should use to manage and grow your blog.

How to create a separate email for your blog?

You are free to use whichever email service you are currently using, but for blogging, I highly recommend you use Gmail. It’s a free email service from Google that unlocks tons of free tools you can use. 

Other than the tools, Gmail is secure and filters out a lot of spam and harmful emails. Once you start your blog and sign up for a couple of your favorite blogs, you will start to receive lots of such emails. Gmail can help you stop a lot of these unwanted emails automatically.

To create an email for your blog, go to Gmail, and follow the steps:

When picking up the email address, make it the same name as your blog name.

I have a Gmail account called blogkori [at] gmail [dot] com 

Now your name may not be available, so in that case, you can use a modifier to get your desired email address. Like when I was coming up with a personal email for other things I added the word “online” at the end of my name to make this email address: tamalanwaronline [at] gmail [dot] com 

Why does it matter?

Just like your blog name, the email address name shows the trust that it’s a legit identity and not a spammer.

When you contact other bloggers or services with [email protected], you will be highly trusted as opposed to mailing from [email protected] 

You are free to use your blog name or your personal name when making a separate email address. Just make sure you are using this Gmail address only for your blog related stuff to have separation of concerns. 

Setting a strong password is MANDATORY

Oftentimes we use the same password we use to signing up for all other social media accounts. It’s okay when you are just signing up for something quickly, but when you are creating an email account for your blog, you must incorporate a strong password.

This is because some hackers might find your password and log into your blog email address. With access to that email, they can potentially hack your entire blog.

We are building blogs as a way to build passive income, so you cannot just leave the keys hanging on the door do you?

A strong and secure password looks like this:

Now you must be thinking, how on earth you would make one and let alone remember that?

And what if you forget that password and get locked out of your own account?

The answer is,

You don’t have to remember this password, you can use a tool to do it for you.

There are password managers out there that allow you to create strong passwords and fill it for you.

A password manager I am using for years is called LastPass.

Sign up for a LastPass account and install their browser extension. I am using Google Chrome and I have the chrome browser extension.

You just have to create and remember one strong master password to log in to LastPass. The service will hold all of the other passwords you save. 

I suggest you write the master password down to a diary or something.

Now that, the security is covered, it’s time you should finish the setup and continue creating an email account for your blog.

Your new Gmail inbox:

What kind of emails do you receive when you start blogging?

A variety of emails. 

First of all, when you sign up for a hosting service such as Bluehost, you are going to be on their email marketing list. They will start sending you promotional emails informing you on how to build your website. Now what they call “helpful” may be annoying to many because they will send one email every day and it will overwhelm you, just like it did to Vicky.

The same goes for all the other related services you will sign up for your blog.

All these services will start bombarding your email inbox with newsletters, promotional emails, special offers, and deals. At the root of their messaging, 99% of them want to sell you something one way or another. 

Now after the promotional emails, there is another kind of email.

The notification emails

Once you start a blog, you will start receiving email notifications from your blog. After setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog, you will start getting lots of spam emails. The sheer amount of spam a WordPress site gets can put off anyone.

This is why I recommend you do these steps after setting up a blog to reduce the number of annoying emails coming from your blog.

But since you are going to have a separate email inbox for your blog, all these notification emails will be confined to this little box you can check once a week.

The newsletter emails

You will often find email sign up boxes from your favorite bloggers. Many of these bloggers offer a free PDF report you can download, but for that, you will have to enter your email.

What happens next?

Most of these bloggers have an email newsletter sequence that will send automated messages to your inbox.

Unfortunately, the majority of these so-called email newsletters are crap and it will waste your energy because you did not ask to join their email newsletter in the first place, you were only downloading their free giveaway.

For this very reason, you should enter your blog email when you have to download a free report or signing up for a mailing list. 

Once your blog becomes popular, you will start to receive another type of emails from interested parties,

The marketing inquiry emails

When you have a contact page (that you should definitely have), you will start receiving marketing inquiry emails. 

So what are marketing inquiries?

These are people from various digital marketing companies and other fellow bloggers who want to get some promotional opportunities.

A common inquiry email is when someone asks you to check out and link to their blog posts. 

They will send the same email to hundreds of bloggers in the hope that one or two bloggers will comply.

In fact, this is the exact approach SEO bloggers like Brian Dean and Neil Patel are using. In their end, it’s called email outreach; at our end, it’s called begging and spamming the email inbox.

When you have a contact page or public contact info out there, you will start receiving a bunch of those. Some of these emails can lead to profitable deals so I don’t recommend you fully discount them. When you have a dedicated blog email address, you can control these kinds of emails and it’s always better to use precaution.

Tips for reducing email spam

As mentioned throughout this article, you should have a separate email address for your blog and never expose your work or personal email to your blogging audience. This will keep most of your sanity intact. However, your blog email address is still at risk of getting bombarded with spam so you should take other measures.

Use a contact form

The best way to hide your email address is to use a contact form plugin. Use the Contact Form 7 plugin along with the ReCaptcha robot verification. This way your email will not be exposed and you will also not get any automated spam emails.

Don’t type out your email in your page

These comment spammers will use automated programs to load up blogs and collect emails. If you really have to have your email listed on your page, don’t write it like this: [email protected] -this way the email scrapping software will check for the at @ symbol and detect it as an email address.

If possible, use an image of your email address or type it like this:

youremail [at] gmail [dot] com

Only a real human will read and understand it’s an email address; the bots will never know.

Use Gmail filtering

If you are getting too many emails from the same sender, you can mark the email as spam or mute the emails. 

Gmail has folders to keep the promotional and social media updates separate so you should be good to go when managing your email.

With a Gmail account, we can get access to various free Google services that I am going to outline below,

Google Services for bloggers

There are a bunch of Google services that can help grow your blog, and all you need is a Gmail account to access them. Below I am outlining some of the most prominent ones:

Google Drive, Google Docs

Google Drive is free web storage where you can store documents, photos, and media. Their free account offers 15 GB of online storage that is enough for the regular blogger. Drive gives you access to many of the office tools we can use like Google Docs.

Google Docs is an online word processing software just like Microsoft Word but you can edit it online. I like to draft my blog posts on Docs, proofread them, and finally publish them on my WordPress blog. Docs allow me to easily compose an article and have it as a backup.

Link: drive.google.com

YouTube

YouTube is an online video platform, and you probably know this already. You can create a YouTube account with your Gmail account where you can create up to 50 channels. Over there you can upload and host videos free of charge. 

I like to use YouTube as a platform for delivering video content. Other than that, I also create instructional and screen sharing videos to give to interested parties. 

Link: youtube.com

Feedburner

Feedburner is an old blog syndication service from Google. It’s still around and allows us to deliver new blog content via email for free. I still use them and have them as my blog feed service.

Link: feedburner.google.com

Other notable Google services

• Google Analytics: Let’s you track blog visitors. It gives you a detailed report showing the devices and countries they are coming from and which pages they are visiting. 
• Search Console: Yet another Google service informing about your Google search positions. It shows how many keywords you are ranking for.
• Adsense: This one helps you put Google ads on your blog and YouTube videos to make money from your blog. Adsense is a good beginner option to earn money.

Conclusion & next steps

Blogging world is full of promotional emails so it’s better to have a separate email address to keep it clean. Gmail is the best free email service around so you should definitely check it out and the Google services that come with it. Make sure you are not sharing your email address on the internet to keep those spam emails in control. Up next you should:

• Sign up for a Gmail account for your blog
• Start your blog and get blogging
• Leave a comment on this post and let me know your thoughts