50 Places to50 Places to Promote YourPromote Your

NewsletterNewsletter

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

Hey, did you see my newsletter?

I love newsletters...but not just any newsletter. I love the ones that are meaty – chocked full of helpful tidbits, resources, and mention of sales now and then to save me money.

All newsletters are not successful...

Maintaining a successful newsletter involves having a really good balance between selling and creating a good connection with your subscribers using quality content.

If you sell too much, you'll quickly lose your customer's interest and burn out your list. On the other side of the coin, if you focus too much on connection and not on selling, then you won't generate enough revenue from your newsletter.

What's the right balance?

80% - 90% of your newsletter should be focused on quality content, solving the customer's problems and making a connection.

10% - 20% of your content should be focused on selling.

Using the 80% - 90% rule will train your subscribers to make the habit of opening your emails. They'll know that by and large, emails from you will be of high quality and worth their time.

Having 80%+ of your content being connection-based and news worthy also does one other thing: it essentially buys you the right to sell to them.

When readers gets immense value from the emails you're sending, they won't feel resentful when they read a sales message. In fact, they'll read your sales messages with an open mind, knowing that there's a good chance they might get value from the product you're offering.

However, if you participate in overselling, people will resent it. For this reason you should strive to maintain a good balance between quality content and selling.

The 5 to 1 Email or the "At the Bottom" Style

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

There are primarily two different ways you can split your selling and connection content.

The first method involves sending only emails that have connection and problem-solving content, then every once in a while send a 100% sales message.

If you choose this method, make sure that your sales messages also provide value. Even if you regularly send out quality content, you still can't just send out a spammy advertisements. Instead, you have to provide value even as you're selling them.

By sending only one sales message every 5 to 8 emails, you keep up with the 10% to 20% rule.

The second method is to sell regularly, by putting an advertisement of one or two promotional sentences at the bottom of every email.

This method usually works very well because instead of trying to get a home run of sales in one email, you're getting a steady flow of sales with every email that you send.

Try to tie in your sales message with the email itself. For example, if your email talked about all the most common obstacles graphic designers run into when looking for clients, then pitch an easy way to find clients in your promotional sentence, even if your product covers a lot more than that.

Walking that fine line between over- and under selling in email marketing can be a little tricky. Don't be shy and miss out on opportunity; however, use the rule of thumb to sell between 10% and 20% of the time to maximize customer connection while still pulling in strong revenues.

Growing Your List

Growing your subscriber list is a very important business building task, but it’s not always easy to know how to do it.

The list below includes 50 very handy ideas for promoting your newsletter. Keep it handy with you and do at least a few of these each and every day.

1. Put it in the sidebar of your website. Have some sort of headline above the newsletter box to draw attention.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

2. Use a popover lightbox. These tend to work better than popovers or popups. Make compelling copy next to the lightbox signup.

3. Include it in your Facebook page. You can get code that lets people sign up to your email list directly from your Facbeook page.

4. Link to it via content from your Facebook page. Post good content regularly to keep people coming back to your website.

5. Use Twitter. Vary up your tweets. Do promotional tweets only occasionally.

6. Ask people you’re close to for #FF referrals. If someone big #FFs you, make sure your following tweets are hard hitting and use at least one to promote your newsletter.

7. Use Pinterest. Post pictures that catch attention, that people are likely to want to share. For example, post content that presents shocking facts or highlights an interesting idea.

8. Do guest posts. Give a short blurb for your website or newsletter at the bottom of the guest post.

9. Get interviewed. Get on podcasts or even radio shows if you can. Talk about your newsletter briefly while you’re on the show.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

10.Create an infographic. Again, highlight little known facts in your industry. If you don’t know how to create one, you can just do the research and pack up the facts, then outsource the actual graphic creation.

11.Add it to your LinkedIn profile. This is crucial in B2B markets.

12.Add it to your email signature. Again, this makes the biggest difference in B2B markets.

13. Buy PPC traffic. Calculate your value per email address before making big buys. Try http://adwords.google.com

14.Get someone with a list to mail a promotion to your landing page. Make sure they get a high commission for everything sold.

15.Buy solo mailer advertisements. You can pay people to mail a marketing message for your list.

16.Buy blog posts to talk up your site. Make sure the site gets relevant traffic in your industry.

17.Buy banner ads on highly relevant internet forums. People on forums are extremely passionate about your market and are very likely to want to sign up.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

18.Use Reddit. Go to specific subreddits, which are like small communities, to post your content.

19.Use StumbleUpon. Make sure your content is quickly digestible and entertaining before posting on StumbleUpon.

20.Post on forums. Be an active participant in the big forums in your industry.

21.Ask people on your list to forward your content. Have a link in your emails that lets people forward content, but people have to signup to see it.

22.Syndicate your blog content. Talk to other site owners who’d want to display your content. Link back to your email opt in page.

23.Comment on other people’s blogs with intelligent, thought out comments. Link back to your site.

24.Write an in depth Squidoo lens and link back to your site. Don’t write a Squidoo lens unless it can really be the best lens on the subject.

25.Join HARO and contact journalists who’re interested in your subject. See if you can get featured.

26.Answer questions on Quara. You won’t get much raw traffic, but a lot of journalists and influential bloggers browse Quara. They might get in touch after seeing knowledgeable responses.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

27.Work on your SEO. Get your pages ranked to bring in tons of free traffic.

28.Contact bigger sites in your industry and see if you can be one of their writers. It never hurts to ask.

29.Publish a free Kindle book. Use it to drive people back to your site.

30.Make it a part of the signup process for a free web service.

31.Buy co-registration leads. Make sure you separate your co-reg lists from your opt-in lists.

32.Get listed in DMOZ. Most other directories are useless, but DMOZ still gets quite a bit of traffic.

33.Talk about it to people you meet in person. Don’t underestimate word of mouth traffic.

34.Create a simple and free iPhone app. Have your website as your iPhone app’s website.

35.Think international. Create an international site to get easy SEO traffic for more leads.

36.Consider creating a pay per lead affiliate program. Pay affiliates for bringing you email leads instead of for sales.

37.Use Google+. It’s not the biggest social network in the world, but it gets a lot of influencers. Getting just a handful of them on your newsletter could be a big deal.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

38.Create a free template that links back to your site. For example, create a WordPress theme for your industry and submit it to theme sites. People who install it will automatically link back to your site and send you traffic, rankings and signups.

39.Launch a review contest. Whoever sends the most traffic from reviews gets a prize of some sort.

40.Brainstorm joint marketing projects with other people. Attending conferences is a great way to meet valuable contacts.

41.Enter a contest. If you win, a lot of people will check out your site. For example, designers might check out Photoshop contests.

42.Create a controversial video making fun of something that’s popular. Chances are it’ll get a lot of shares if you’re in a niche market.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

43.Comment on a recent event. For example, if a new product is launched, get your hands on it and review it right away. A lot of people will link to you, bringing you more newsletter signups.

44.Create a useful Facebook app for your niche. Make it easily sharable, which gets you more fans, which gets you more email registrations.

45.Use a video submission service like TrafficGeyser to get your best videos out around the web. Have a link back to your site.

46.Release informational content on Digg. Digg is much more informational rather than entertaining and has a different flavor than Reddit.

47.Discount and coupon sites. If you sell a popular item, put a discount code on those sites which links back to your site.

48.Your RSS feed. Talk about your newsletter in your blog posts.

49.Start a blog series that spans different blogs. For example, you post Part 1 and link to Part 2, while Part 2 links back to you and so on. Have a strong opt-in box to capture the incoming traffic.

50.Give a free gift away on commercial areas of large internet forums. Make people opt-in before they get the free gift. It can be a report, a video, a download or anything else with high perceived value.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

Email Marketing Checklist

Email marketing allows you to pretty dramatically increase your number of sales by getting people who didn’t buy the first time to come back to your site. You can also get a lot of repeat buyers and high ticket buyers by using an email marketing system well.

Here’s a checklist for all the things you need to do to setup a good email marketing system:

☐ Choose an autoresponder. There are many different autoresponders on the market, each with their pros and cons. Some get higher deliverability rates, but don’t allow you to import outside leads. Others might have lower deliverability, but be more lenient on their regulations. Also take the price into consideration, as well as the quality of their support.

☐ Decide on single or double opt in. One of the most controversial choices in email marketing is whether or not to require double opt-in. If you require double opt-in, meaning someone has to click a link in their mailbox to confirm their subscription, you can lose as much as 70% of your visitors. On the other hand, your spam rate will drop way down. Most response-oriented marketers choose to use single opt-in.

☐ Create an incentive to signup to your list. Why should someone become a subscriber? Is there a free report you could give them, or some other sort of main selling point? Brainstorm a few free giveaways and try to come up with something really enticing.

☐ Write a compelling opt-in page. Either use an opt in page or a prominent email signup box on your home page. No matter what method you end up using, your sign up rate is one of the most important metrics in your business. Put a lot of time, attention and energy into creating the best opt-in page possible.

☐ Determine the consistency of your mailings. Make this decision before you launch your mailing list, because the moment you launch your list you’re starting to set expectations for your audience. You should know exactly how often you want to mail by the time you begin your newsletter. That way people can build the habit of reading your mail X times a week or month.

☐ Write your welcome autoresponders. Your welcome autoresponders are the “set” autoresponders that everyone gets sent before they’re put into the general mailing

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

pool. These can be as short as one message and as long as several months. The main benefit of having a longer autoresponder period is that it enables you to know consistently how much you’ll make within the first X months per customer, because you know the sales funnel will be consistent.

☐ Split test your opt-in page. As soon as you’re getting traffic to your website, you should be split testing your opt in page. Every day you’re running traffic without split testing your opt-in is potential data being thrown away. Data that could result in several percentage point differences in your opt in rates.

☐ Mailing content and sales messages. You should be mailing unique high-quality content newsletters on a regular basis. At least 80% to 90% of your mailings should be content. Your goal is to get people in the habit of opening and reading your emails. Once you get them in that habit, send them a sales email or have a sales message in your content emails every once in a while. Long term customer value is built from content, rather than many sales pitches.

☐ Product launches and promotions. Every once in a while, launch a new product or do a big promotion. Before you do these promotions however, make sure you have a few emails in a row with no sales messages and stellar content to build up “reading equity.” Then write a few emails that pre-sell the concept for the product, then one to three emails actually selling the product. With a good sized list that’s in the habit of reading your emails, you can bring in a lot of visitors and sales from a well timed product launch.

This checklist will take you all the way from not having an autoresponder setup to building a large, responsive and highly profitable list. Some of these, such as creating an incentive, are a one-time setup, while others like split testing or promotions are things you should do on an ongoing basis.

Presented by NewsletterClips.com

Resources:

NewsletterClips.com - Private label content for blogs & newsletters.

PLRContentShop.com – Private label content in various niches.

IveGotBlogs.com – Learn Wordpress to manage your own blog or online magazine.

Email Management / Autoreponders:

Aweber Autoresponder

Newsletter Automation - Feed Blitz (*Coupon Code: NCFreeTrial – Free 30-Day trial)

Simply Cast

Love the Clipart graphics in our report?

You can use quality clipart just like these for your newsletters and blogs.

Click the graphic below for a great resource:

Presented by NewsletterClips.com