List Building Mastery

You may eventually decide that you want your own ezine or newsletter sent directly from your website via email to your subscribers. The reasons for this could be anything from using the list to sell your products, sending out helpful hints and tips, or just sending out updates.

Personally I used notepad to jot down the rough outline of how I wanted my ezine to look, and just filled in the blanks each week until my programmer put it all online for me. For your newsletter template, You can do a quick search on Google for "newsletter templates" and it’ll bring up tons of free templates for you. Make sure you make it extremely easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, and have the subscription form visible on every page of your site.

Publishing an ezine that gets read is no easy task. It takes a whole lot of time and commitment. Here are a couple of things you need to do consistently if you are going to make it work for you, bearing in mind that it can quite possibly take a good couple of years before you actually start seeing some real monetary returns from the ezine.

You will need to decide if you're going to be publishing only your own content, or if you'll be using other people’s articles. Both options can take a lot of time. Writing your own articles takes the time of finding topics, and writing and editing the articles yourself. Using other people’s articles takes the time of actually finding and reviewing articles for possible inclusion in your ezine. Either way, make sure the content is actually worth reading, or you'll just end up with a dead ezine.

How much time are you willing to spend on promoting the ezine to get subscribers? It’s not like hundreds people are just going to chance upon your subscription form. It needs to be “out there” and visible to as many people as possible, which means submitting it to all the ezine directories you can find, ad-swapping with other publishers, getting other people to link to your ezine etc.

Then there’s the question of whether to allow ads in your ezine. Are they going to be free ads for subscribing? Or are they going to be strictly paid ads? How many ads are you willing to have in each issue? Whilst giving out free ads to people for subscribing might bring you lots of subscribers, it could also end up making your ezine look more like an ad-rag than a really helpful and useful ezine that people want to read. So if you're going to offer free ads, think long and hard about how you’re going to work it to ensure maximum interest.

When you`re looking to build a subscriber base all you really need is a webpage and a subscribe box, you can even do it without your own webpage by making use of list management services. A great way to get subscribers is to create, borrow, or barter something of value. Offer it for free on your site in return for name and email address.

Tell them up front that by requesting the freebie, they are also agreeing to receive mail from you in the future, but that there’ll always be an opt-out link in every mail you ever send to them.