Writing for Your Wealth

In part 1 of Mailing List Basics for Bloggers and Authors, we went over the reasons you need a mailing list (You did read that, didn’t you? I’m not going to have to glare at you all the way through part 2, am I?).

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.)