Publish
an E-Mail Newsletter
But
why distribute an e-mailed publication instead of (or alongside) putting up a
website? Think about your own web surfing habits. Do you visit new sites
everyday? Do you visit sites frequently?
Which
sites do you frequent most often? Which sites are most interesting to you? What
do those sites provide to you that is of value? These are the things to keep in
mind when you go to design your own page, and/or your own e-mail publication.
When
individuals visit any given web page, they might stay there for 10-20 seconds
before their attention span fades away. Their attention is drawn to something
else, they click on another link which leads them away from your site, or they
simply get bored. So, your first (main) page needs to have enough information
to entice that user. Unless you have something worth returning for, they’re
probably never going to return. Sure, they might bookmark it, they may even put
a link to your site on their own web page, but the chances are slim that
they’re going to keep coming back to you regularly.
However,
if you can show visitors what you have to offer up front and get them to
subscribe to your e-mailed publication, then you’re going to have them as
captive audience members until they decide to unsubscribe. You don’t have to
count on them to revisit your website at all; they’re going to receive your
e-zine whether or not they’re online when it arrives in their e-mailbox. Get
them to join, and then send them on their merry way.
Offer
Free E-Mail Courses
Once
you write and set up an email course, it becomes an incredibly easy and
effective way to promote your site and your products. An e-mail course is a
short series of lessons delivered, of course, by e-mail. Interested students
sign up by sending an e-mail to an autoresponder address of your choice. To set
one up, you’ll need to use an autoresponder service that has follow-up message capabilities.
Many autoresponders that come with basic Web-hosting packages are often of the
oneshot variety. That means the autoresponder will send only one return message
and that’s it. You can either ask your Web host if it offers a multiple-message
option, or you can use a free online autoresponder service, such as
GetResponse.com,
http://www.getresponse.com/
SendFree,
http://www.sendfree.com/
FastFacts.net,
http://www.fastfacts.net/
What
type of material should you offer in an e-mail course? The best source of ideas
is the list of articles you have written or are thinking about writing on your
area of expertise. Let’s say you’re a wedding planner and you just wrote an
excellent article called Five Steps to Planning a Memorable Wedding Reception.
Each step consists of at least three or four paragraphs. Instead of offering
this wonderful advice as another free article, split the steps into five
lessons to be delivered via an e-mail course.
To
go the e-mail course route, simply insert the wedding reception planning steps
into your autoresponder files and instruct the system how to deliver them.
Lesson one will always be delivered instantly whenever someone sends an e-mail
to ReceptionPlans@autoresponder.com (or whatever your autoresponder e-mail
address is). You determine when follow-up lessons are sent. You could send one
lesson every day for five days or send them every other day to spread the
course out over 10 days.
If
your course requires recipients to do a week of activities between lessons,
you’d have the
Autoresponder
send out messages seven days apart. The beauty of autoresponder e-mail courses
is that, once they’re set up, all these messages are sent to interested people
without any effort on your part.
Submit
Articles to other E-Mail Newsletters and Sites
It
should be easy for you to position yourself as an expert that other Webmasters
and e-zine editors will want to expose to their audiences. You should already
be creating content for your own site and newsletter. While you may decide to
make select portions of your content exclusively available through your own
vehicles, most of your content should be freely shared with the world. I’m not talking
about material you write that’s sold in books and other formats; material from
those projects should be reserved for paying customers. What we’re addressing
now are the many articles, columns, and tips you publish with the sole intent
of spreading them far and wide.
Why
will Webmasters and e-zine editors are interested in the free content you have
to offer? Here are some of the reasons:
· E-zines need quality content that inspires
subscribers to open their e-mail and read it.
· Web sites need useful content to draw
first-time visitors.
· Webmasters need to update their sites
constantly to get return visitors.
· Good content is hard to find.
· Experts on specialized topics are even harder
to find.
·
Most marketers offering free content are turned down because they fill their
articles with self-serving hype. Starting today, begin viewing your written
expertise as a valuable, in-demand commodity you can use to help others while
meeting your own needs. In return for the use of your material, Webmasters and
e-zine editors give you access to their audiences—the type of exposure that
plants mental seeds that will soon sprout into full-blown recognition of you
and your brand identity. When your articles, columns, and tips carry the right
type of author attribution, this exposure will also motivate thousands of
people to subscribe to your e-zine and visit your Web site.
Here
are a few places to announce that you have free articles available:
Ezine
Articles, http://www.ezinearticles.com/
FreeSticky.com,
http://www.freesticky.com/
Idea
Marketers, http://www.ideamarketers.com/
Set
up an Affiliate Program
There
are two sides to the affiliate game. Most people are playing the game by
signing up with affiliate programs, then linking from their Web sites to the
site running the affiliate program ... hoping to make money in the form of
commissions. It’s very easy to get started, and hundreds of thousands of people
have already done so. Amazon.com claims to have 400,000 affiliates (or “associates,”
as they call them), for instance.
Of
course there’s another way to play the affiliate game ... you can set up an
affiliate program yourself, linked to a shopping-cart system, then recruit
other Web sites to send business to you.
One
of the largest directories of affiliate programs on the Web, Associate Programs.com
lists just 2694 different programs. Of the millions of businesses operating on
the Internet, just a few thousand have managed to not only set up a
shopping-cart system of some kind, but to also integrate an affiliate program
into it.
Why?
Because it’s difficult to do so. There are a number of programs available to
help you do it (a few are listed in the Links page mentioned above), but in
general they are either expensive, or complicated to install ... or both. Some
e-commerce systems have very crude affiliate systems, systems that require, for
instance, that you add each affiliate by hand. You really need a system by which
affiliates can sign up for themselves—everything should be automated.
If
you’re looking for a good affiliate program, you might check out
AffiliateTracking.net,
http://affiliatetracking.net/. It’s a great little program, with features such as these:
·
Automatic affiliate signup and assignment of affiliate links
·
Affiliate statistics page, so affiliates can see the number of click throughs,
sales, and commissions
·
The ability to pay commissions based on click throughs, sales, or “sub
affiliates” (when an affiliate signs up another affiliate)
· A
series of reports and tools to help you track who you owe and how much you owe
·
You can specify how many days an affiliate “owns” a visitor that the affiliate
site has directed to your site (if the visitor buys from you after the
expiration period, you don’t owe the affiliate a commission)
·
Each time an affiliate order is logged the system can, if you wish, send a
notification to the affiliate and to you
· A
payment tracking module, to help you pay the correct commissions
· A
mail system for sending an e-mail to all the affiliates at once (great for
announcing special promotions!)
Giveaway
E-Books
Free
e-books are growing in popularity on the Internet for good reason. Here are
just a few things you can do with a free e-book:
·
Give it away from your site.
·
Convince other Web sites and e-zines to give it away.
·
Offer it as a freebie for new e-zine subscribers.
·
Give it away to your current subscribers as a token of your appreciation.
Give
your e-book an attention-getting title and fill it with lively information that
focuses on your specialized area. By encouraging your fans to share your free
e-book with others, your brand identity may spread faster than a chain latter.
The following sites are e-book directories, e-book search engines, or sites
that in some way compile lists of available free e-books. Visit them and get
your title listed.
Bizinfocenter.com,
http://www.bizinfocenter.com/free-ebook-directory/
EBook
Directory, http://www.ebookdirectory.com/
Ebook
Giveaways, http://www.ebookgiveaways.com/
EBooks
Portal, http://ebooks.searchking.com/
Ebook
Shop, http://ebookshop.bizland.com/
Free-eBooks.net,
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
cheers,
Sly Media
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