As someone in the industry, I know that content is king. I hear it daily. I also know that I don't have an enterprise-level marketing budget, but need to routinely take care of some menial marketing tasks - tasks which take time, but really don't have to. Email newsletters and social media are two marketing channels which integrate well with your Web site, drive traffic, and keeps your business in front of your customers.
It takes time to create content once and there's no reason you can't grab that content from your site and send it out. But you certainly don't want to copy and paste it all yourself when there are tools in MailChimp which can take care of it automatically.
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, serves up a list of content on demand. Most of the time these go into some RSS reader (either Web-based or App-based - I like Feedly), but you can also create RSS-Driven Campaigns in MailChimp. It checks the RSS feed you set up for the campaign automatically, you just have to set the schedule. When there are new blog posts, an email campaign is sent out to your list. It's important to coordinate the email marketing schedule with your publishing schedule, but it provides an easy way to send out your blog posts automatically. RSS feeds can be created for Joomlaarticles, but if you're using a blogging component extension, such as EasyBlog, it's built in. You can even set up separate campaigns for individual bloggers by creating an RSS-Driven Campaign pointing at the feed for that blogger's posts.
With these, it's a good to have a buffer of posts (three weeks is a good start, but 1-2 months is better). Just have the content entered and set your creation and publishing date for the future so it doesn't show up until you're ready.
Another great feature of EasyBlog is auto-posting. By setting this up and integrating with your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, a status update will be made automatically when the post is published. Make sure your publishing date is set correctly, or you'll post to your feed prematurely.
It's important to give visitors to your site an easy way to get more information from you. If they come to your site and there's not way to sign up, you'll likely never hear from them. If they like what you have to say in your blog, they'll sign up. For this, we use RS!Form Pro, an extension for Joomla, that integrates with MailChimp and allows you to easily create a form that adds someone to your email list from your Web site when they fill out and submit their information. This saves you needing to add your leads to your list automatically.
There are some other great tools available that help keep your data in sync and keep you on task. Some others we've found and liked are Zapier (which we use to keep our contact lists in sync) and Insightly (a great CRM for small businesses on a budget).