Developing Newsletters with Private Mailing Lists
By: Cody Moya | Posted: 25th March 2006
If you've paid attention to marketing trends, you know that being able to email information to your customers works much better overall than counting on them to return to your website of their own volition. There are far too many distractions online, for one thing. And people forget.
But you also can't just spam them; all that generally achieves is a lot of hard feelings. And if you have a small niche market, as most young web businesses do, then you can't afford to annoy many of your customers.
What you can do, however, is offer them a fair trade: information that can help them out in exchange for their email addresses. This means developing a newsletter from your website, and asking people to give you their email address so that you can send it to them every week. The most important thing for you to do, then, is to develop content on your website that convinces your customers that the information you'll send them in the newsletter is good, accurate, and something they couldn't get anywhere else.
Developing Online Content
There are webmasters out there who are talented writers, and who can easily and quickly write excellent content for their customers. There are others who are less talented, who hate writing, or who just don't have time. For you, there are private-label rights article lists,
Private-label rights articles (or PRA) are collections of articles sent to subscribers. These articles are search-engine optimized with specific keywords, and they are yours in their entirety. You don't have to put someone else's name on them; you can modify them in any way to enhance the content on your site, including adding or deleting text; and you can use them as many times as you want.
Better yet, when you have PRA content on your website, its already-good keyword structure works in your favor, encouraging search engine spiders to raise your ranking in searches.
Create Your Newsletter
Once you have good content developed and a steady supply of content to maintain your website and your newsletter, you're ready to solicit subscribers for your free newsletter. You may not have a lot of subscribers at first; if you have trouble convincing people to subscribe, run a contest or a special offer that's only disseminated in your newsletter. But don't let low subscriber rates dissuade you; your mailing list will only grow.
You don't have to put all your content on your newsletter; in fact, it's a much better idea to direct your subscribers to your website instead of having everything delivered to them. Ideally, you should have full articles on your newsletter as well as teasers to bring viewers to your website.
Once you have your newsletter set up and mailing out to your subscribers, check your website statistics the day after each newsletter is sent out. The pattern of hits over the first twenty-four hours can tell you a lot about your customer base, and if they appear to be especially interested in one topic, you should consider developing it further.
But newsletters aren't just a means to get your subscribers to come to your website; they are a selling tool. If you have a special you want to run (a special pre-Christmas sale, for instance) your newsletter is the perfect place to advertise it. Or you can sell a limited amount of ad space to your affiliates and others who share a similar customer dynamic to yours.
You can also set up newsletter-only specials, treating your newsletter customers as a special group to reward them for trusting you with their information. For instance, instead of going to your regular online customers with overstock or closeout sales, take it to your newsletter subscribers first. You'll probably sell it faster, make these loyal customers happy, and give others even more incentive to sign up for the newsletter.
Once you have a good body of articles available from old newsletters and discarded content, you can go through the best of it and use it to create an ebook, which you can offer free for download to customers, or disseminate it as a viral marketing tool to article directories. Once you have good content developed for any part of your web business, you're certain to be able to use it over and over again.
About the Author
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his
Free Internet Marketing Course and get additional information at his website: http://www.marketing.us
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Tags: email address, marketing, search engine spiders, niche market, subscribers, collections, distractions, web businesses, volition, private label, talented writers, pra, hard feelings