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.)

There are a lot of ways for a writer to make money online these days, and while I’m a big advocate of starting your own site so you can maintain complete control (and keep 100% of the earnings for yourself), that can be daunting if you’re not sure where to start.

What if you’re not ready to launch your own blog and you haven’t decided which “niche” you’d like to cover?

You may want to start out writing for a big site such as eHow, which pays you a percentage of the income your articles earn. There are no rules about niches–you can cover whatever interests you on any given day.

Joining eHow is what one Writing for Your Wealth reader chose to do, and a year later she’s pulling in over $1,000 a month.

Maria, who goes by WriterGig on eHow, agreed to answer a few email questions and offer her advice for other writers who may want to get started this way.

1. Would you like to share a bit about yourself and what made you start looking online for ways to make money? And what led you to eHow?

I’m been a work at home mom since my oldest son was born in 2003. I left the newspaper where I worked to be home with him, but kept up freelance writing and then started grading high school English papers for a homeschool curriculum part-time (from home).

I began to move into online content writing in the spring of 2007, which paid better than grading. I heard about eHow’s Writers Compensation Program from Rich, the community manager at eHow, when he posted about it on the WAHM forums I frequent. I decided to try eHow as an experiment and when the money was good, and I realized the awesomeness of residaul income, I stayed.

2. How does eHow work as far as writing for them and making money goes?

Writers submit original how-to articles via a simple article submission tool. Earnings are determined primarily by Adsense revenue sharing, but article popularity, ratings and views may contribute to the algorithm used.

3. What kind of money are you making and how long has it taken you to build up to that?

I earned nearly $900 in September 2008 with about 200 articles. I have 223 article on eHow today, and have already earned more than $1,500 for October. I expect to see similar earnings in November and December. I have already earned over $24 per article (on average), and the money increases each month. I have been a member on the site for exactly one year.

4. How many articles have you written? Do you have to promote them yourself, or do you get a lot of traffic naturally since eHow is a big authority site?

I have written 223 articles on eHow.com under the Writers compensation Program, and while I do link to some of my best articles through my blog, I do very little social promotion of my articles. One of the best things about eHow is that it receives a ton of traffic and ranks great with the search engines, so I imagine most of my traffic comes from Google.

5. Do you focus on one niche or area of expertise, or do you write about anything that strikes your interest?

I enjoy writing about personal finance, health, home and garden, and seasonal topics. But I will write on just about everything that I know something about.

6. Any tips for writers who may be interested in making money through eHow?

Write original titles. If the same or nearly identical title has already been written, think of something else. Google won’t index more than 1-2 articles with the same keywords on any given site. Learn basic SEO, and concentrate on quality content for each and every article you write.

Okay, that’s it from Maria!

If you want to learn more about her strategies for making money from eHow, you can check out her eHow ebook. Her Work at Home Mom Blog is another resource you can check out, and here are a couple of her eHow articles you may find useful:

How to Create Passive Income Writing eHow Articles
How to Earn eHow Payments

Update (Maria had a few comments and clarifications she wanted to add after this went live):

I wanted to mention, though, that I don’t see eHow just as an alternative to having one’s own site for those getting started –it is a powerful money-maker AND traffic generator for all online writers, even and especially those who do have the skills to write their own sites (I have four websites and four blogs as well as my eHow, HubPages, BrightHub articles).

My earnings per article on eHow far outstrip my personal website article earnings thus far and there are several reasons why:

• eHow has a page rank of 7 — very hard to get! My eHow articles are indexed in a matter of hours and many hit the first page or so of Google pretty quickly.

• eHow has monthly traffic of 25 million visitors
• The community features on eHow (and there’s more to come) are a huge boost to article promotion

Anyway I just wanted to kind of clarify that because from what I have experienced, eHow is really a cut above the other content/ revenue-sharing sites and I believe it has great potential.

Thanks so much for interviewing me!

At last count there are 7,384,837,283.3 blogs on the web.

Okay, I made that number up, but there are a lot. And a huge percentage of those blogs have been abandoned.

Why does this matter to you? Because, as I mentioned in my “Writing for Your Wealth 101″ e-course, the blog is the cornerstone for turning your words into long-term cash-generating assets. (If you haven’t read the course yet, you can get it for free by signing up for the newsletter.)

Whether you want to make money writing books, creating information products, marketing affiliate products, or running advertising on your site, the blog is the cheapest and most efficient way to attract visitors who are a part of your target audience. And an abandoned blog isn’t nearly as effective as one that is being updated regularly!

So, how do you avoid “blogger burnout”?

Here are some tips I’ve learned over the years:

1. Pick a broad enough niche

When I look back at the blogs that I’ve abandoned (yes, I’ve quit my fair share, so don’t feel bad if you have too!) versus the ones I’ve stuck with, the major difference is often the niche size.

When I got started with Adsense (the first program I made money from), the prevailing advice was to build a site that focused on a narrow niche, so you could more easily make it to #1 in the search engine rankings. For example, instead of creating a blog on fitness (where there are already tons of large, authority sites), you might focus on home gyms, or even the Bowflex.

This approach, often referred to as the “Long Tail” method, can work well for small sites that may never have more than 100 articles. But for a blog that needs to be continually updated with new content, it can be death.

You may run out of topics you haven’t covered ad nauseam. You may get tired of the subject. You may lose the log-in password to your blog dashboard and secretly be glad you have an excuse not to update the site any more (this has never happened to me of course).

Even if none of those things derail your blog, you may find the goal to be #1 in Google limiting.

I’ve had sites reach #1 in the search rankings for certain niches only to find there is a limit to how many people are searching for information in that small niche each day. Sometimes it’s worth going after a broader market. Even if you don’t get anywhere near #1, there may be so many people looking for information each day, that you’ll end up getting more visitors in the long run.

2. Choose a posting schedule you can sustain

Believe it or not, you don’t have to post to your blog every day. You want to post regularly, but regular doesn’t have to mean daily.

If you’ve followed this blog for very long, you’ve noticed I only update it once or twice a week. That’s because my posts here tend to be in the 1,000 word range and take me quite a while to construct. I’d soon dread working on this blog if I forced myself to write that much every day (a 300+ page novel is only 100,000 words, and I’m not trying to write Moby Dick here!).

On the other hand, the blog I write for daily features posts that are around 150-200 words and usually describe products. Most of the time, it takes 15 minutes or less to write a post like that, so it’s easy to add a couple of new entries each day.

If you’re looking to avoid blogger burnout down the road, choose a posting schedule you can maintain. I’ll often advocate working on your blog each day, if only to keep up your forward momentum (you don’t want to get out of the habit of posting), but that might very well mean taking three days to put together a post.

Don’t feel that your readers will abandon you if you don’t post every day. Chances are they have lives and don’t have the time to read a book by you each day anyway. Just shoot for contributing to your blog on a regular basis, and you’ll do fine.

3. Choose a blog style that suits your personality

Are you a rambler with a lot to say? Or do you like to write short posts on a lot of different topics?

You’ll do best if you format your blog in a way that suits your writing personality. There aren’t any rules when it comes to lengths of posts.

Short posts could offer quick tips, lists, blurbs on products or new ideas in your niche. Longer posts are great if you are trying to teach a new concept with each entry, but you can teach with short posts and do lists with long ones. It’s your blog, and there are no rules!

Isn’t it great working for yourself?

4. Read, read, read!

A lot of blogs die because their authors run out of ideas.

Ideas aren’t created in a vacuum though. They are inspired by the world around you.

Surround yourself by lots of interesting new information, and you’ll constantly be coming up with new ideas. The only problem you’ll have is finding the time to sit down and get them all out.

When you’re choosing reading material, make sure it’s quality stuff too. As a blogger, it’s easy to get into the habit of looking to other blogs for inspiration. This can be a huge time sink and isn’t always the most effective way for coming up with fresh ideas. While there are some quality blogs out there, there are a lot of people covering the same topics. (You’ve probably seen the “blog echo chamber” in action: an interesting story will break somewhere, and soon 100 different bloggers have covered it, so you end up seeing the same blurb everywhere you visit.)

When I was in an online workshop for fantasy & science fiction, you could always tell which writers had only read in their own genres. All the fantasy novels read like Dungeons & Dragons books (which of course all read like Lord of the Rings knockoffs). The authors who created rich and fascinating worlds were the ones reading history books and science journals in their spare time.

For great ideas, read quality stuff, online and offline, and read outside of your niche.

These are my suggestions for avoiding “blogger burnout.” Do you have any you’d like to share?