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About Mert Erkal
He left his full time job as of 1st August, 2008 to earn his living as a problogger from blogging and freelance Internet projects. He also shares his 10 years of experience he gained in a giant multi-national company for Small Business companies and builds Corporate Identity. Read more about him!
Composing a great newsletter is not an easy thing to do. It takes years to get master at writing a great newsletter. But it is obviously one thing which every problogger should get master at it. The good thing is there are some newsletter writing principles that are proven to work for many bloggers. I would like to tell you about those principles. But first, let’s start with the basics.
Start With Learning Basic Concepts:
You need to learn fundamentals of internet marketing and email marketing list building. Here are a few good articles you should read if you are fairly new to the concept:
In the next part, I will tell you about ‘things to do’ and ‘things to avoid’ in order to write a hot newsletter. Until then, read above mentioned posts carefully, and leave your questions to this post.
If you don’t tell your visitors why they should subscribe to your mail list, honestly your email list won’t grow so quickly. You need to show the real value to your readers first before expecting them to subscribe to your list. There are thousands of mail lists on the Internet, why should they prefer yours?
Below video is the Part 3 of the post series Getting People to Subscribe to Your Email List. It is an introduction of Aweber email auto-responder. You should read Part 1 and Part 2 before watching.
In Part 1 I stressed the importance of building an email list, and using an email auto-responder for your email marketing campaigns. Now it is time to talk about which email auto-responder to choose.
Which Email Auto-Responder?
There are currently two major auto-responders in the market which are Aweber and GetResponse. You can use both of them for your email marketing campaigns. They have more or less the same features. However, Aweber is quickly growing to be the standard. Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Chris Garret, Caroline Middlebrook prefer Aweber for their email marketing. Even though Aweber seems on the high side in terms of pricing, believe me it is worth spending every penny.
Why Aweber?
Both Aweber and GetResponse have similar features, and there is no big difference in pricing. Aweber charges $19 per month up to 500 subscribes, whereas GetResponse bills $17.95 per month. So how can you decide which one to choose? You may also ask me why all these pro-bloggers are working with Aweber while GetResponse can also serve as a good email auto-responder. Let me tell you some of the benefits of Aweber, and then you will understand clearly why GetResponse can not beat Aweber at the moment.
There is a one small deal that Aweber struck with FeedBurner, more specifically they report count of email subscribers to your blog feed! If you are trying to build your RSS subscribers, this means having your email subscribers shown as your RSS subscribers by Feedburner.
Aweber recently added a new feature where you can make email segmentation. You can track your subscribers reaction to your emails. Imagine you are a pro-blogger, and you know which readers always interested in your sales emails. Why should you bother other readers?
You can build your list faster with lightbox style web forms prepared by Aweber. Some of your readers might be upset, but your mail list will steadily grow.
What Can You Do With Aweber?
You can send engaging email newsletters using built-in newsletter templates
Publish a sign-up form to your blog (like I did for my blog, take a look at my blog’s header and sidebar)
Welcome or educate your subscribers by setting up sequential auto-responder messages. Create your own blog mentoring course.
You can manage unlimited mail campaigns.
Send blog newsletters.
Evaluate the outcome of your email campaigns with Aweber’s tracking functionality.
Integrate your shopping cart into your mail campaigns.
In Part 3 you will find a how to video guide on Aweber captured by me. Until then please subscribe to my RSS feeds so that you don’t miss any article.
If you build a good subscriber base to your email list, you can monetize it in similar ways as your blog. You can promote products as an affiliate, sell advertising, promote your own products, or use it to deliver more content to your readers. This post focuses on the importance of email lists and how to get people to subscribe to them.
Why Should You Have An Email List?
If you are a blogger who is willing to make regular income from his blog, you should commit to build your email list via your blog. Within the next 6-12 months you will be happy you did it, because you will have two assets at the same time. Imagine doubling your blog income from the next 6 months. Wouldn’t it be too great?
Lets take a look at the other advantages of email marketing:
Speed:Get your messages to your mail list very fast with an email
Low cost: Even though you need to pay some money for email auto-responder services, compared to traditional mail, it costs you less.
Ease:Sending an email newsletter is not a rocket science. You may use your previous posts, or share something valuable for your readers (like videos, discount offers, freebies, etc.)
Viral: If you send valuable content to your readers, they will be eager to forward your mail to their friends.
Tracking:Autoresponders let you track how many subscribers open your mail, or whether they click on your links or not. You can even segment your subscribers to get the best results from your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Complimentary: Email marketing compliments your other marketing efforts extremely well.
What is an Email Autoresponder?
An email autoresponder is a software which helps you send emails to people automatically. With an autoresponder you set up a sequence of prewritten emails which are sent out to prospects on your email list at regular intervals.
You can use it to essentially send emails to your target list, even when you are offline. Lets imagine you created an eight part blogging course. Then you setup the intervals for the emails to, say, once a week and send them one part of the course each week.
This is simply amazing! You write the emails one time and then whoever joining the list will automatically receive those emails once a week for eight weeks.
Most Internet marketing gurus tell that the majority of people need to be told about a product seven times before they buy it. So if you are telling your visitors about your product less than seven, no way out! You need an auto-responder to remind people about your product.
In Part 2 I will be telling you more about the auto-responder services. By the way, until I launch Part 2, why don’t you sign up for my email list to get weekly blog tips newsletter?
