Introducing my Internet Marketing Newsletter

I have been planning to launch a Newsletter to complement this blog for months now. At one point I was going to do a project about it but really, I was just procrastinating. I decided to just go ahead and do it! You can see the sign up form in the top-right corner of the blog.

UPDATE AUGUST 2008 – This newsletter has now been significantly changed so much of this post is now irrelevant!

Why a Newsletter?

I’ll get straight to the point – I am launching this newsletter to build a list! There are two reasons for doing that. Firstly, now that I have started down the path of producing my own products (Traffic Rush being the first), I want to be able to tell my own readers about my stuff. However, my traffic is hovering on around 800 visitors a day with an increasing number of people coming in from search engines. These people probably do not subscribe to my RSS feed so they most likely leave just as quickly as they arrived. I want to capture those people’s attention and the newsletter is an additional channel for doing that.

The second reason is that Feedburner now has the ability to report not only your RSS subscribers but those from an email list as well. This means that if I have 2000 RSS subscribers and another 2000 people on an email list, I could have my little chicklet show 4000. Now you guys will know the deal because I break down all my numbers in my monthly stats but this is great for social proof.

Social proof is something that has been talked about a lot by Yaro Starak. People like to do what other people do so they subscribe to popular blogs. The higher your RSS count, the faster it tends to go up because more people subscribe as it looks more popular. This is why so many blogs show an exponential curve in their readership once they hit a certain point. So far my growth has been very linear so I’m hoping this will be a way of changing that.

So there you go – two purely selfish reasons to have a newsletter! :-p

What Will the Newsletter Have In It?

Longer term readers will know that I despise many traditional email lists. I find most of them to be sleazy pitch-fests. Some people make up all kinds of stories and outright lies in their autoresponder sequences and I can’t stand that stuff! I want to actually provide my readers with something worth reading! Shocking concept huh…

When I was first considering starting a list I read up on it quite a lot and the standard advice is simply “offer a free report in exchange for an email address”. The left me wondering, “then what??” That might be fine if you are trying to build a list for a specific product and you offer some kind of report that helps to pre-sell the product and then you use your list to offer readers more information about your product.

But nowhere could I find any information about what should go in a newsletter that accompanies a blog. I started looking around at what other people do and I couldn’t find much. Firstly, i was surprised at just how few bloggers in the IM niche even had a newsletter. A few people did the standard thing – have a free report. I subscribed to these lists but the problem was that all that came afterwards were pitches – usually to random affiliate products!

That’s no good at all. I don’t want to build a list just to pitch to the subscribers! Well I guess I do in a sense but in order to justify any kind of pitch there has to be a good deal of good quality content being given out. This is where so many other Internet Marketers fail – they just pitch non-stop and don’t give out content. The problem is, what content can I put into a newsletter that I wouldn’t put on my blog?

Yaro has a the best newsletter in the IM industry in my opinion. His is the “Blog Traffic Tips” newsletter which is has a very specific theme – each post is a full length article giving out some information on how to get traffic to your blog. It is not duplicated on his blog and yet it complements the subject of his blog perfectly. Furthermore, it is a wonderful pre-sell for his Blog Mastermind paid program. He also pitches in this newsletter but only occasionally and it never bothers me because the newsletter itself is great. No other Internet Marketer that I have encountered does this as well as him.

So, I had to come up with some kind of topic for the newsletter. I have seen that some bloggers simply publish a roundup of their best blog posts and call that a newsletter. Well I suppose that will do for those people that don’t already subscribe to your blog but that does nothing for your existing readers other than waste their time!

I had a look at the content of my blog and I noticed something – I no longer post news, or very rarely. I tend to stick to tutorials, opinion pieces, updates on my projects and the occasional resource list. I don’t blog about changes in PR (or only when I use it as an excuse to post pictures of my cats!), or new ad programs that are being released, or changes to AdSense terms, or new social media sites and so on. This is a personal choice – I prefer to leave the blog fairly clutter-free so that each post is value-packed.

So my newsletter is going to be just that – a NEWS letter! I’ll be reporting on the news that I don’t blog about. It will be fairly general in subject matter but I will probably have a slight leaning towards social media. If I had more room in my opt-in box, I would have called it “Caroline’s Internet Marketing & Social Media Newsletter” instead :-)

How Often Will it Be Published?

As and when I feel like it! I’ll be aiming for around weekly but it might be a bit less than that but hopefully not more. I find myself very overwhelmed by people that mail me too often and I’ll usually unsubscribe simply because I don’t like to see the number of unread messages going up faster than I can read them so I won’t be doing that to my readers!

As such, the news won’t be up to the minute. I guess you’ll need to subscribe to all the news blogs to get that. What I’m trying to do is simply round out my coverage of the IM scene. I’m not somebody who jumps on the latest thing the minute it’s out; I’m usually a bit behind everybody else so my newsletter may be a bit behind too but at least that way I know I can commit to keeping it packed full of content.

If I try to stick to a schedule or post news as soon as its out I’ll just stress myself out and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that would you :p

I haven’t written anything for it yet – I figured that actually just getting the thing on the blog and announcing it would give me the kick up the backside I need to actually start so for those of you who subscribe now, expect the first edition some time tomorrow.

Will Archives Be Available?

I pondered this lots. I will be writing about all sorts of topics that I don’t cover on the blog and the chances are that if I put the archives on the blog they could draw in a decent amount of search engine traffic. However, as I learn more about SEO I realised that in actual fact they probably won’t bring in that much because each edition of the newsletter is likely to cover a wide variety of topics so it won’t be optimised for any one particular term so all those people who specifically blog about those topics will far out-rank me.

Plus of course the bigger concern is that if I do make them available on the blog when by bother subscribing at all? People could just come to the blog and read it and that defeats the whole point of delivering it via email. So no, archives will not be available.

Technicalities Of My Opt-In Form

Do you like my little box? I am using Aweber to build the actual form code but all that does it give you the input fields and the submit button – there is no graphics or styling. So I looked around for some ready made templates. I actually bought some (for $7 no biggie) but then realised they were no good because they simply didn’t fit in my header and I specifically had this blog layout designed this way so I could put a newsletter signup form in that box.

I searched for more templates but couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted so I just did it myself. I used a technique called slicing. Basically, you load up a graphics package and you design your form purely as graphics leaving a blank space for the actual form elements. Then you use a slicing tool to cut your image up into little pieces and you do this in such a way that one graphic represents the blank space. This is more easily explained by showing you:

I am using Photo Impact 12 for this and that has an option to export your image as HTML and it builds a table with all the pieces of the graphics in the correct places. Then what you do is edit your HTML to replace the blank space with your Aweber code. You can probably see this if you look at the source for this page. I could go into more details but that is probably beyond the scope of this blog post.

One point to note – the HTML that was originally exported looked fine in Firefox but Internet Explorer inserted some whitespace in the middle of the graphicn Luckily with the aid of my wonderful Twitter followers, well Tobey from Yebot in particular, I had it solved within 5 minutes. Another great reason to be on Twitter!

Is There Anything You’d Like To Know?

I’m really not sure if this whole subject of newsletters and opt-in forms etc is something that you guys are interested in. If you have any further questions about it then please go ahead and ask. Judging by the response I’ll either answer your questions directly in the comments or do a follow-up post or two.

Tweet This Post Stumble This Post