Create An Email Newsletter

Part of keeping visitors to your website is providing them with really valuable and useful content.  Why not get them to signup for your email newsletter?  People love newsletters.  Of course, you really need to provide them with information and resources that they would not normally find themselves.

This video gives a overview on how to go about it:​

Finding Valuable Information To Include

Sometimes the biggest challenges come from not being able to find valuable information.  But there are place that you can check out that I can almost guarantee your subscribers are not.  Here are some of those resources:

Public Domain

​Any item that is in the public domain is considered free to use without any attribution needed.  You are even allowed to put your own name on it.  While it's beyond the scope of this article to describe what determines whether a work is in the public domain, there is plenty of information available about how to do it.  This should be a major source for every content creation effort.

Private Label Rights (PLR)

​This is one that is kind of the seedier side of town.  But it's because people go about it wrong.  PLR is content that exists that gives holders liberal usage rights.  Licenses vary, but typically will include the rights to modify, break up into smaller chunks and use it as articles or web content, include as bonus, build your email list, and others.  Sometimes it includes giveaway rights but you should check the rights before doing so.

The way to properly use PLR is to make major modifications to it.  Make it a completely different product, including changing the title.  Add resources to it and get your affiliate links into the content.  This is why people fail with PLR because they pass if off in its original form.  If you get millions of people doing that, this content is going to exist all over the place and is going to be deemed as low quality.​

Question/Answer Websites

Ask.com and ​Yahoo are major players in this space.  But there are others.  Simply do a similarweb.com search for answers.yahoo.com and at the bottom it will give you a list.  Truthfully, these two should be more than enough to garner some ideas for your newsletter content.  What you want to do is find people that are asking questions in the market you are targeting and then provide a piece of content that can help them.

Forums and Blogs

People spill their guts on these websites about all kinds of problems.  This will give you great insight on what to write about.  And due to the fact that there are millions of these out there, it's hard to imagine that you would ever run out of ideas by just this technique alone.​

Outsource Your Content Creation​

If you find three or four good freelance writers, you can get yourself a steady stream of content, all​ while freeing up time to run other aspects of your business.  Sure, this will cost you money.  But if the content they write is top notch (and it had better be!) then you will get a return on your investment from your list, etc.  So the cost becomes justified.  Plus, the fact that you are leveraging your time will mean that your sales will probably happen sooner.  However many freelancers you hire is the number of times of leverage you are employing.

Repurposed Blog Posts

​You know all of those blog posts that are sitting on your blog, collecting digital dust?  You can simply take what you have and put it into your list funnel.  If it's something that your list has seen before, add something to it and let the list know that it's been expanded upon.

Content Curation

I am not usually a big huge fan of content curation because it has the potential of flagging Google that your site is implementing duplicate content.  But for an email list, which Google has no one to access, it can be a wonderful way to offer current event type of content.  There are plenty of tools for content curation.​

Deeper Research Methods

Providing your list with information from a simple Google search is going to get you a lot of unsubscribes from your list.  People are not stupid.  They will know when the quality of the information you provide is just average.  It's certainly not bad use a simple Google search as your starting point.  But you want to make sure that you get much greater insight with your content than your list is willing to do themselves.  This requires learning how to properly research subjects.  If you do this, your content will drastically improve and you will become an authority on your subject.  Your list will thrive when this happens.​

How Not To Upset Your Email Subscribers

Consider the following scenario: you build a list of subscribers, get really excited when they subscribe.  But then you noticed a couple days go by and many of them are unsubscribing.  While there may be several reasons that people unsubscribe, one of the biggest is that you are using the same list for initials subscribers as you are for ones that are already subscribed.

The solution is to create two lists and make sure that when someone actually subscribes they move from the list that you are promoting to one that is for current subscribers.  This way you are not sending the current subscribers the salesy, promotional pitches that you are using to the current list.  It's okay to sell them once in a while but you want to do it from the vantage point of someone who is familiar with you already.  They know you through your writing and when you promote to that list you want to do it more like you were telling a friend about this great product that you know they would love, etc.​

If you think I am suggesting that you manually manage this, don't worry.  There is a solution for you that takes care of this automatically.  Aweber supports a concept called list automation. I have used it and let me tell you, it works beautifully.  Believe me​, if you were to try to manage this manually over time it would make you crawl out of your skin.