Monetizing an Email List From Your Blog
In my condensed guide to making a 4-figure income from your blog I touted the benefits of capturing email subscribers from your traffic. Getting the email is not really much good on it’s own – the question is how to make money from that list and my approach is a bit different to most.
Understand The Numbers & Mentality
In order to encourage somebody to sign up for your list you need to provide them with some value and obviously at this stage it must be free. You make money by encouraging those subscribers to buy something that you promote within the list.
Now one thing you need to understand is that there will ALWAYS be a large number of people who will never buy anything from you. These are freebie seekers. There is nothing wrong with them, there is nothing wrong with you, that is just the way it is. Sometimes as marketers and product owners we can’t understand why somebody wouldn’t buy, and obsess over improving conversion ratios but you’ll drive yourself nuts with this line of thinking.
I prefer to accept that many simply wont buy anything for whatever reason, and just concentrate on reaching more people so that I have a chance of grabbing some of those people who do buy. It’s just a numbers game. Whether you make 1 sale in 100 or 1 sale in 1000, whatever your ratio is, the more subscribers you get (that are targeted) the more sales you’ll make.
Balancing Promotions with Managing Unsubscribes
There’s another part of the numbers game which is kinda obvious but easily overlooked – every time you promote is another chance to make a sale. If you have a short 7-part series and all you have is a single promotion in the last part then you only have one shot at that sale. On the other hand if you have a 50-part series that makes 100 promotions you have far more chances to make money.
So you do need to do your promotions – you can’t make money without selling something! But on the other hand, almost every promotion you do can result in an unsubscribe, especially with the more obvious sales pitches. For example, right now Jeff Walker is launching the Product Launch Formula (for the third time, wtf is that about??) so all the big marketers are jumping on it and making sales pitches to their list. These are what I call time sensitive promotions and it is damn hard to promote this kind of thing without it being a blatant sales pitch. I am hyper-sensitive to this stuff and just skip over it entirely.
I have done a few time sensitive promotions to my own list (usually special discounts of my own products) and every time I do I will get a little surge in unsubscribes. That is why I far prefer to integrate my promotions right into the content and avoid blatant sales pitches though there is one exception to this rule…
Give Away Slowly, Sell Quickly
That’s probably a really bad name for the model I have used with my Bloggers Bible course. This is a 49-part course that I offer in two formats. I give away the entire thing completely free as a series of weekly email lessons and I also sell a PDF version of the entire thing. The idea of the free version is that it promotes the ‘fast track’ PDF version and this is promoted in every single email.
It would take almost a year to get the entire course via weekly emails. For the small minority of people who are actually serious about creating a profitable blog (most read but take no action!), that pace is way too slow. The first half a dozen lessons for example could be actioned in a day or two depending on how much time you had available to work on it.
Every one of those emails promotes the PDF and in addition, there are a few other affiliate links dotted throughout some of the lessons but these aren’t the focus. Now some people will always want everything for free. I had one person email me saying that the course was paced far too slowly and that I should do the lessons daily. I resisted the temptation to tell her to buy the fast track if she wanted the lessons quicker :-)
Now whether or not this model works is largely a matter of opinion… you can see my stats posts to see how many new subscribers I am getting per month (several hundred) and how many BB sales I am making (single figures) and draw your own conclusion. Personally I would like to see the number of sales higher but on the other hand the course is priced rather high so each sale makes me a nice chunk of change…
Using Continuity to Avoid Unsubscribes
Now there is another benefit to my model of using a course in this way as the content of the email list – there is a continuity within the emails that is broken if the subscriber unsubscribes. My courses (both Traffic Rush and Bloggers Bible) build up in a structured way – each lesson builds upon the last and I tend to build up slowly and leave the juicier stuff until later in the lessons!
This keeps people wanting more and this is different from something such as a tips newsletter for example. In each email I also provide a teaser as to what is to come in the next issue to keep the reader interested. This seems to be working as I have a very low unsubscribe rate.
Conclusion
There are a few important factors to making money with an email list from your blog:
1) Offer something of value to get the signup in the first place. In addition I recommend promoting the list heavily using a popup.
2) Prefer to work your sales into the actual content of the emails rather than have stand alone sales pitches.
3) Make your entire email sequence compelling so that subscribers will want to stay subscribed.
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Tom - StandOutBlogger.com
April 20, 2009
I am going to really start working my mailing list, so this has been an extremely helpful post :D thanks!
Tom – StandOutBlogger.coms last blog post..Killer Blog Posts – 10 Simple Steps!