Now that you know why a mailing list is important, we’re going to discuss how to get started, what to send out to your readers, and how to entice people to sign up for your list.

How do you start a mailing list?

I’m glad you asked! Fortunately, it’s pretty simple, and you don’t have to be technologically inclined.

In my opinion, the best way to get started is with a dedicated service that does nothing but help people establish mailing lists. The customer support is focused on helping you compile a mailing list and publish newsletters. Also, these companies usually have set-up wizards that make things pretty easy to figure out.

The one I use (and that’s one of the gold standards in the industry) is Aweber.

Aweber isn’t free. As I write this, it’s $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers (less if you pay in 3- or 12-month increments), so if you’re just getting started, and money is tight, you may want to look for freebie alternatives.

The downside with the free mailing list outfits is that they usually insert their own advertising into your copy or sign-up box and have significantly fewer features and less flexibility. Also, if you decide to migrate to a paid service later, it’s not as easy as copying your contacts over. Since companies strive to comply with spam regulations, they often require a “double opt in” (people sign up and click an email link to activate their membership) for everybody on the list, so you might have to get everyone on your list to sign up all over again.

If you’re planning to get into this for the long haul, it might be worth shelling out the bucks for a paid service such as Aweber.

What should you send to your mailing list?

Okay, you’re ready to build a mailing list so you can increase your earnings. But what do you put in it?

There aren’t any rules, but you want to write content with your reader in mind. Give them information, tips, news, etc. that they find useful.

What you don’t want to do is just sell your products. Readers will quickly unsubscribe from mailing lists that are nothing but product promotion.

That doesn’t mean you can’t promote products at all, just that you want to find a nice mix.

Let’s say you’re an author selling your book on investing in foreign stocks for newbies. A typical newsletter might start with a personal story that illustrates why foreign stocks are a wiser bet than domestic stocks. Then it could talk about a couple of hot stock picks for the week, and finally you might finish with a short article that tells people how to get started.

Where in that do you promote your book, you ask?

Your product promotion can come at the end (i.e. for more information, please buy my book, the Lazy N00b’s Guide to Investing in Foreign Stocks) or it can be casually inserted into the content of the newsletter (i.e. I go more into depth on how I got started making money with foreign stocks in my book Lazy N00b’s Guide to Investing in Foreign Stocks.

You can experiment and see which delivers better results for you (companies such as Aweber offer all sorts of monitoring and tracking software), but I always like to assume that people may be too busy to read the whole thing, so if you’re selling something, you might want to work that link in near the top!

As I said, there are no rules, but if you set out to provide 90% information and only 10% sales pitch, you’re a lot more likely to have readers stick around than if everything you write revolves around selling your products.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

Now that you’ve joined Aweber, or signed up for another mailing list service, it’s time to get people subscribing to your newsletter!

For optimum success, you’ll want to do two things:

1. Place the sign-up box prominently (think above the fold and on every page of the site).
2. Give visitors an incentive to sign up.

Number 1 should be pretty self-explanatory, so let’s skip on to Number 2.

I’ve got two newsletters, the one you see to the right here and the one on my home and garden blog. The home and garden blogs gets about 5,000 visitors a day. This blog, being significantly newer, gets 100-200 (yup, I can almost count you guys without taking my shoes off!).

Naturally you’d assume that I get a lot more newsletter subscribers signing up at the other blog. And yet… no.

The home and garden blog gets about twice as many sign-ups each day. Considering it gets 50 times the traffic, that’s kind of sad actually. I really should put some more work into making that newsletter sign up more appealing!

But, as it stands now, let’s take a look at the major difference: this newsletter offers the free “Writing for Your Wealth 7-day foundation-building e-course” for anyone who signs up. My other newsletter just says something along the lines of sign up and get blog updates.

Gee.

(Note to self: get off rump and do more to build other list.)

I’m not just speaking from personal experience when I say the secret to getting people to sign up for your mailing list is to give something away they want. Anyone who is involved with internet marketing will tell you the same.

Now, what kind of stuff can you give away?

Again, there are no rules. Just think about what you can create and deliver digitally that will appeal to your target audience. It could be an e-course, it could be a free report or an ebook. It could be an audio interview or a video tutorial. Anything you can put together that your visitors would find useful is fair game.

All right, now that we’ve covered how to start a mailing list and get people to sign up for it, it’s time for you to get started!

(And if you’re already running a mailing list and have some tips or stories to share, we’d love to hear to hear your comments below.)

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

Mailing List Basics for Bloggers and Authors — Part 2

I have to confess that it took me a long time to jump on board the mailing list train. I was afraid I’d be making a lot of extra work for myself, and though I knew it was important for people trying to sell things, I wasn’t sure I needed a list since my income comes from advertisements on my blogs.

I can only guess at how much money I lost out on because of my late start, but as we discussed in my Daffodil Principle post, it’s never too late to get started.

And that’s exactly what I did this past year. As a result, I’ve seen a definite boost in traffic (and earnings) because I implemented a mailing list on my home and garden blog.

But let’s start with the basics here…

What is a mailing list?

Essentially, a mailing list is a collection of email addresses from people who have agreed to receive email from you. It’s often called a newsletter or e-zine, because it typically offers information, tips, news, etc. in addition to product promotions.

You might send a newsletter to your list quarterly, bi-monthly, monthly, weekly, or even daily. You get to make the rules, though it’s important to be aware of what your readers want. A daily email may be too much, thus causing people to unsubscribe from your list. A quarterly or bi-monthly newsletter may be too infrequent, which could also cause people to unsubscribe because they’ve forgotten who the heck you are and why you’re sending them email during the lapse.

Why you need to start a mailing list

If you’re like me, you may wonder if creating a mailing list is worth it. After all, you’re already producing regular content for your blog, and you may be writing books or other information products to sell as well. Do you really want to put more on your plate by agreeing to put out additional content in a regularly published newsletter?

Yes.

Really.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why:

• Mailing lists can increase exposure to your products —

  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, marketing research tells us that people need to have multiple exposures to a product or service before they actually decide to buy.

  Let’s say you’ve written an ebook that you’re trying to sell. No matter how good it is, chances are a first-time visitor to your blog isn’t going to buy it. They probably need to hear about it several times before they decide it might be right for them. Now if that visitor returns to your blog on a regular basis, then they may get that exposure through your site, but what if they simply chanced on your blog and forget about it a day later? Wouldn’t it have been nice if you’d gotten their email address so you could remind them about your blog and your ebook?

• Mailing lists can drive traffic to your site –

  If you don’t have your own products, but you’re making money from running advertising or linking to affiliate sites, then you know you make more when you get more visitors to your site.

  The problem with making money from methods such as Adsense or the Amazon affiliate program is that the whole point is to get people to click links and leave your site. A lot of people who leave will never return again.

  What if you captured their email addresses before they clicked away and sent them newsletters that included links to your site every week? Think of all the times the same person might visit your site and click those ads in the future.

• Mailing lists trump RSS feeds for effectiveness –

  In the blogosphere, it’s popular to encourage/cajole/plead people to sign up for RSS feeds, and sometimes bloggers are so wrapped up in increasing their feed numbers that they forget why it matters.

  It’s all about turning a visitor into a long-time reader (and maybe even purchaser of your products), but a mailing list is actually more effective for this. This is because an email message lands smack in your inbox with your name on it, making it more personal than an RSS feed. When someone sends you a personal email you asked for, you read it!

  The downfall of RSS feeds is that a lot of folks who sign up for them (myself included) don’t read them regularly. Some people are daily feed checkers, but they probably scan tons of feeds when they log on, so your post may only get a second or two of eyeball time. Some people only check their reader when they’re looking for ideas to blog about, and then there are the, “Dude, what’s my Google Reader password?” folks. On the other hand, people read letters.

  Okay, now that I’ve convinced you that you need to start your own mailing list (at least nod your head and pretend I’ve convinced you, so I’ll feel better about writing all that), it’s time to jump into the down-and-dirty how-to stuff.

  Make sure to visit Part 2 of Mailing List Basics for Bloggers and Authors.

  Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

  Mailing List Basics for Bloggers and Authors — Part 1

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