Eventually you may 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 helpful hints and tips, or simply sending updates.
Personally, I used notepad to jot down the rough outline of what I wanted my ezine to look like, just filling in the blanks each week until my programmer put it all online for me.
For your newsletter template, you can do a quick Google search for “newsletter templates” and it will come up with tons of free templates for you.
Make sure that it is extremely easy for people to sign up for your newsletter and that the subscription form is visible on every page of your site.
Publishing an ezine that gets read is no easy task. It takes a lot of time and commitment. Here are a couple of things you should consistently do if you want to make it work for you, keeping in mind that it may well be a good couple of years before you really start to see some real monetary benefits from ezine.
You will need to decide if you are going to publish only your own content or if you are going to use other people’s articles. Both options can be time consuming. Writing your own articles takes the time to find topics and write and edit the articles yourself. Using other people’s articles takes the time to find and review the articles for possible inclusion in your ezine. Either way, make sure the content is worth reading, or you’ll just end up with a dead ezine.
How much time are you willing to spend promoting the ezine to get subscribers? It’s not like hundreds of people are going to test your signup form. It needs to be “out there” and visible to as many people as possible, which means submitting it to every ezine directory you can find, exchanging ads with other publishers, getting other people to link to your ezine, etc.
Then there’s the matter of allowing 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?
While giving people free ads to sign up for could get you a lot of subscribers, it could also end up making your ezine look more like an advertising magazine than a really useful and useful ezine that people want to read. So if you’re going to offer free ads, think carefully about how you’re going to work with it to ensure maximum interest.
When looking to build a subscriber base all you really need is a web page and a subscription box, you can even do it without your own web page using list management services. A great way to get subscribers is to create, borrow, or trade something of value. Offer it for free on your site in exchange for the name and email address.
Tell them upfront that by applying for the gift, they’re also agreeing to receive future emails from you, but that there will always be an opt-out link in every email you send them.
I quit my day job after successfully running my own list/ezine.
Do you want to know how you can do the same?
So if you want to learn more about advanced list building techniques and methods, you should check this out: http://www.viralmarketingportal.com/listbuildingmastery