HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN PROFITABLE E-MAIL

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN PROFITABLE E-MAIL

NEWSLETTER THAT WILL GET ATTENTION AND

INCREASE YOUR SALES

By S. Hunter

Many smart web site owners are quickly learning about the power of e-mail. Creating and publishing your own e-mail newsletter is a terrific way to harness the power of e-mail and convert it into a powerful sales and marketing tool. Plus, the cost of publishing an electronic newsletter is virtually pennies compared to the cost if you were to print and mail a similar version to your customer and prospect list.

The key however, is to produce a newsletter that people will find enjoyable, and will look forward to receiving again and again. In this day and age where SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) is clogging up our e-mail, people do not want to receive junk. The last thing you want to get involved with is the mostly ineffective and highly controversial problem of spam. The solution is to start developing your own house e-mail address list of your customers and prospects who have indicated they would like to receive regular mailings from you via e-mail. Then you must produce worthwhile information in the form of a newsletter or e-magazine that creatively weaves solid information your readers will find useful, with motivating sales and marketing information. Let's look at how you do this.

Select A Name

A short, sweet, easy to remember name is best. The newsletter name should be catchy and summarize in a few words what it's about. Example, Dog Breeders Weekly; Money Making MLM Strategies; Investment Secrets; Entrepreneurs Weekly E-Zine, etc.

Establish A Theme

Your newsletter will need a theme. What's it going to be about? Will it take the form of a product catalog? Will it be information based? Will it be an update of new products and services? Will it be a tool for regular communication between an upline and his or her downline? Think about what your purpose is going to be and this will help you generate a theme.

Organize The Layout and Structure

I am a subscriber to several e-mail publications because I find it's a great way to receive current free information about topics that I'm interested in. I am well aware that the publishers of these newsletters are not primarily concerned with providing me with free information. Rather, they are most interested in getting a return for their efforts by maintaining contact on a regular basis and by selling me something if not today, in a future issue. They wisely know that to achieve this they need to provide me with useful information and compelling sales offers. A general rule in advertising is the "7 Time Rule" which means that a prospect has to hear an offer an average of 7 times before they take action or buy. This quota can easily be accomplished with a newsletter sent out to your customer list once a week, or once a month. It's an excellent way to promote your product and service information to a very select target market. In this case people who are already interested in your services or they wouldn't be on your subscriber list in the first place.

The mistake that many first time newsletter publishers make is not organizing their information in an easy to read format. They cram unrelated information together resulting in a newsletter that looks sloppy and is very difficult to read.

Create headings: Using capital letters at the beginning of each new section is one way you can make section headings stand out or you can use formatting techniques. Some e-mail programs are quite advanced and allow graphics, colored font and advanced formatting. However not everyone can see this fanciness if they aren't using an e-mail program that supports these features. The solution is to keep your newsletter simple so that everyone who receives it will have no difficulty in viewing it. This means using strictly black text in a courier or arial font. You can make the layout a little more attractive by using the space bar to indent and using symbols like the pound and star symbols to offset or highlight certain portions of text.

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Using symbols allows you to make certain words stand out or can be used to create headings ************************************************ ###########################################################

Using character symbols also allows you to separate sections

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Create Excitement and Exclusivity: Offer special deals or incentives available only to your newsletter subscribers. Inform your subscribers that if they purchase one or more product or service and mention your newsletter they qualify for some type of bonus. Here is an example.

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SPECIAL OFFER for all Newsletter Recipients! Receive 20% off all Hair Care and Beauty Products If You Respond By May 31 and mention this newsletter! E-mail yourname@yourdomain.com details or order at http://www.yourdomainname.com

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In short, reward your customers, prospects and readers for being the select privileged group receiving your newsletter. Framework: When developing the framework for your newsletter, consider what elements to include. Remember your goal should be to provide information that your subscribers will find useful and also to provide creative ways to promote your own products and services.

Here are some ideas for what you might include in your newsletter.

-Free reports related to the theme of your newsletter

-Question and Answer section about your products and or services. Invite readers to submit their questions to be answered in an upcoming issue of your newsletter.

-Classified advertising section (see below for more on this)

-Special Offers section

-Plug for your own products and services to get people to call, e-mail or visit your web site for more information on what your company has to offer.

-Schedule of upcoming events.

-What's new section where announcements can be made about new products, new pricing, new service information, changes to your web site etc. You can even test market new products and services by offering them to your subscriber list then evaluate the response and the effectiveness of your sales copy.

-Shared links area, offer to run a free classified ad for someone who does the same for you in their newsletter. Or use it as a barter tool in exchange for products and services.

Running out of ideas of your own? Subscribe to other people's newsletters to see what they are doing. Pay attention to how they format their newsletters, what kind of information are they including, what link of sales pitches do they make? How do they weave useful information with sales information to create an effective newsletter? You don't have to reinvent the wheel, research what others are doing and adapt (not copy) what you like for use in your own newsletter. Here are 2 free newsletters you can subscribe to right now to get your creative juices flowing. Go to http://www.worldprofit.com/lantfree.htm

Also consider contacting other online web publishers and inquire about getting permission to run their articles in your newsletter. In exchange for authors permitting the use of their articles, offer to include their contact information, e-mail address, and web site address at the conclusion of the article. This gives the author gets full credit and some free promotion while you get the use of the articles in your newsletter. (Hint: you can visit http://www.incor.com/webdev for some articles we allow people to reprint for non-profit purposes.

Consider Sources of Revenue from Your Newsletter Once you have a sufficient number of subscribers to your list (5,000 plus), consider offering low cost classified advertising in your newsletter. A fee of $25 per insertion for a 25 word listing is a ballpark figure to charge for this service. You must have a large enough subscription base in order to do this so that you can offer your advertisers a guaranteed circulation and good value for their advertising dollar.

Some larger companies who initially started with a free newsletter have gradually built up their customer subscriber list to the point where they have now created a demand and can charge for a yearly subscription. You too, can consider this when your newsletter and readership starts to grow.

Contact Information

If you are making the effort to produce a good quality newsletter, make sure your contact information is in a prominent easy to find position. Be sure to include your company name, contact person, phone, fax, e-mail address, and web site address.

Getting Subscribers for Your Newsletter

Once you've got your newsletter created you want to do all that you can to increase your subscriber list. Here are some ideas for doing exactly this.

1) At your web site offer a free newsletter subscription and include a form where visitors can subscribe.

2)Instruct your sales and telephone staff to offer all customers with an e-mail address a free subscription to your newsletter

3) Post in the news groups, yellow pages, directories, free classifieds and search engines the fact that you are offering a free newsletter at your web site. Include your newsletter on the following List of E-Zines, http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/

4) In all of your print advertising, radio and television advertising include your web site address and the fact that you offer a free subscription to your newsletter at your web site.

5) Inform would be subscribers of the value of your newsletter. Create excitement about why people should subscribe and what they will get if they do. Example. Subscribe to our FREE weekly newsletter, "Internet Business Strategies" and get valuable ideas for increasing your business online, little known secrets from Internet marketing experts, special offers and discounts on Internet services, and more! Delivered FREE every week right to your e-mail box! (Value $149.95) Subscribe now at www.incor.com

Distributing Your Newsletter

There are two major ways to distribute your newsletter Most e-mail software allows you to send multiple copies of an e-mail message to several e-mail addresses. The problem with this is that it can be time consuming and some Internet Service Providers (ISP's) will only allow you to send a maximum of 25 e-mail messages out at one time. They have had to do this to try and prevent SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) clogging up the mail servers.

The second, more efficient method is to use an automated mail tool called a listserver. A listserver is a software program that allows you to publish your newsletter quickly and easily. When people request your newsletter their e-mail address can be automatically added to your listserver. When you are ready to publish to your list, create the newsletter, copy and paste it into your e-mail software program, enter your password and press "send." Within a few moments, your newsletter is sent to your subscriber list - as many as 10,000 in just a few moments.

YES, it's that easy and that powerful!

A listserver is the tool of choice for anyone who plans to create a large subscriber list and publish to it on a regular basis. The fact that the listserver is password protected means that others cannot access your e-mail list. The listserver also removes duplicate addresses and invalid addresses. It can indicate how many subscribers are on your list, and can easily remove addresses of people who may no longer wish to receive your newsletter. A listserver is also favored by most ISP's because the list is a subscriber list; that is they are people who have requested to receive your newsletter, they are not e-mail addresses that have been bought and sold time and time again by spammers. Listserver technology has been around long before the Internet, it has just taken longer for people to appreciate the power and application of this handy tool. For more information on listservers and what they can do for your business, go to http://www.incor./com

Removal Instructions

Despite your best intentions to produce an interesting newsletter there will always be people who for whatever reason, don't want to receive it anymore. Therefore, your newsletter must include instructions for getting off the newsletter list. If you are using an automated e-mail publishing program like a listserver this is easy to do. People who want off the list simply send an e-mail to a removal address, or they can remove themselves via a web page. The software removes the e-mail address from the list automatically a real time saver when you have a large subscriber list.

Summary. These are the main points for publishing your own successful newsletter.

1. Create a catchy name that encapsulates what your newsletter is about.

2. Organize your newsletter so it is formatted and can be read easily.

3. Use your free newsletter as a promotional tool to bring visitors to your web site

4. Always offer subscribers something of good value in your newsletter so they will want to continue to receive it. Encourage interaction from readers and offer motivational compelling sales offers to keep them as subscribers

There you have it. I've given you some ideas to get you started, now add in your own creativity and you'll be publishing your own e-mail newsletter in no time!

Sandi Hunter is Co-Founder of Worldprofit at http://www.worldprofit.com

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