Internet Marketing Toolbox

Yep - the money IS in the list… and if you don’t have one, you should really start thinking about it now. The main benefit of having a list is that the people on the list have expressed an interest in receiving MORE information from you… and that means you may be able to sell/up-sell/cross promote products to these people to earn money IF you do it right!

However, there are many different ways of communicating with your list (and I just discovered another one yesterday) so how do you know which one is going to work for you?

It all boils down to what you want to say in all of these email newsletters you distribute to your list of subscribers.

I am subscribed to lots of lists - deliberately decided to do it LOL - and receive mountains of email from all sorts of people every day. Why would I subject myself to this barrage? Purely to see and learn from what other people do. And in the process, I’ve discovered several types of newsletter campaigns.

The “You Just Gotta Have This!” Almost Daily Campaign

There are some Markerters who delight in sending daily emails chock full of (undecipherable and cloaked) affiliate links to all sorts of products they recommend I just have to buy right now to make my life easier!!!!!!!!

The stark reality is that this technique actually does little to make my life any easier… The only way I can do that is to UNsubscribe, ridding myself of the daily grind of deleting their “informative” newsletter.

I’d say the unsubscribe rate for this type of newsletter would have to be fairly high??? Please someone, correct me if I’m wrong.

The “So-o-o Predictable” Campaign

This is the newsletter that arrives at regular intervals, like clockwork, and follows a very predictable format - i.e. welcome - sponsor ad - article - another ad - rest of article - some more links - finish.

Its “problem” IS the predictability! While it’s nice to know what you can expect… being too predictable can also mean boring. It’s going to be harder to differentiate yourself from the crowd if you constantly follow this type of format.

The “I Almost Forgot” Campaign…

This has two main variations.

The first is the “follow-up” email sent almost immediately after you just sent the main one. In my opinion that makes you look poorly organised. This is NOT a technique that attracts positive attention as it is being overdone by lots of people.

The second variation is the type of newsletter which has no set publication schedule - the one which arrives in your mail box whenever the list owner remembers that they forgot to do it!!! And that can lead to unsubscribes when your customer asks “Who the %$@#% is this email from?”

So what DO you do?

Well… to give you an example of what I think works well… fill out the little box at the top right hand corner of this page (under Daily Digest) and subscribe to my list.

Here’s how it works so you know what to expect.

When you subscribe to my “list” you receive a daily digest of the posts made to my web site. This digest is generated (with your FREE Feedburner account) from my main site RSS feed (and THAT was created by WordPress as I posted new information to the site).

If there are any NEW posts made today, you’ll get a summary of them delivered to your email address. If there were NO new posts made, you’ll get nothing.

To give you an idea of what type of correspondence you’ll get from me… just take a look at my home page - short intros to each item. Pretty painless and easy to locate stuff. If something interests you, just click through to read more about it.

You’ve got an INSTANT idea about what I talk about - every post made is an archive of my newsletter:)

At the end of June, my subscribers would have received an email with two items in it on each of the 23rd, 24th, 26th and 28th June. Now while some people might say “Hey that’s a lot of info!” it IS only two short snippets of information each day, clearly labeled so it’s easy to decide whether you want to know more, or want to delete.

And it means you don’t have to visit my site every day to stay in touch with what’s happening, or remember to look up my feed using your RSS reader.

From my perspective, it’s also a HUGE time saver, because once I post it on my site, I KNOW my subscribers will find out about it within 24 hours! And I’ll ONLY post IF I’ve got something to say

And - provided I’m reporting on useful content and doing MY job right - it will be an ongoing source of valuable information for my subscribers, regularly reinforcing in their minds how “useful” I can be (which is part of the secret to attracting more sales).

Other Marketers are using a weekly digest of their posts (Jack Humphrey’s “Friday Traffic Report” is a classic example) and that type of newsletter can easily be generated from your aWeber account.

It’s a very effective use of email and RSS technologies that not enough people are currently taking advantage of.

TIP:

WordPress creates lots of RSS feeds… there’s the main site feed, a feed for each category, and each author. There’s NO reason why you can’t burn ALL of these feeds to your Feedburner account and have multiple subscriber lists, each interested in different aspects of your site!

In fact, if you have a very busy site with lots of posts each day - which would make the daily digest too big and unpopular among your subscribers - then splitting your lists up by category would be the way to go!

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