Newsletters

One of the advantages of having your own website is the ability to publish your own newsletter. The distibution of your newsletter can be sent on autopilot with the use of an autoresponder. The main effort on your part is the actual writing of the messages. If you're not familiar with autoreponders they capture and maintain an email list of your subscribers. After they opt-in to your list they are then sent a series of pre-written messages over an interval of days that are set by you in your autoresponder. They are especially useful for internet marketers. They are also very handy for distibuting a monthly or weekly newsletter. You merely draft your newsletter and when you are finshed you send it to all of your list members.

The list of names becomes your potential customer list as you can email them with special offers as you wish. Your goal here is to build this list over time to several thousand people who are already targeted because you captured them from your website and they were there because you had something that they were interested in. One of the oldest and often over used sayings in internet marketing is “The money is in the list”. It is true though. You should offer your list members free gifts from time to time to encourage them not to unsubscribe. This might be something as simple as a new article you just wrote or found.

Since we are on the subject of autoresponders, I need to talk about spam here. Most autoresponders use what is called a double opt-in system. What this means is they sign up for your list from your website. The autoresponder sends them a confirmation link to the address they used requiring them to click a link to confirm that they did sign up. When clicking this link, it returns a message to your autoresponder that they have confirmed and most record the date, time and their IP address. This process becomes your protection from spam complaints. If you’re not familiar with spam complaints, if you get enough of them your ISP can shut you down and you could face criminal charges for spamming.

You will see ads where you can buy leads on the internet that claim to be targeted or co-registration leads. My advice is to stay away from these as they are fraught with problems. Also, if you think about, if the leads are so fresh and targeted why aren’t they using them themselves. Just stay away from these kinds of leads.

A good email program combined with an autoresponder can be very beneficial to your business.