When you have a self-hosted blog and don't rely on Medium, Wordpress or Ghost, it's very likely that you'll struggle to build an audience. SEO is not enough.
Newsletters are a great solution for building a long-term audience.
If you are a blog writer, you should have an RSS feed so that your latest posts can be sent to your subscribers.
RssFeedPulse is RSS-to-email service that lets you end newsletters to your subscribers using your RSS feed.
This service is particularly useful when you have a static blog like Bloggrify , Jekyll, Gatsby or Hugo , as you have no way of collecting subscribers and sending out newsletters natively.