Last night I finished up what I would consider a very laid back email to the subscribers of my Fan Site #1 newsletter. I didn’t want to come across as super desperate or anything like that … a few times I had to refrain from using “so do you like it?? huh? huh?” and “check out this nifty header image I whipped up… !!!”. Yes, sounds terrible doesn’t it! But I was really happy with the way it turned out.
I put together an introductory couple of paragraphs to the newsletter - since it was the first send. I have 25 people on the list as we speak - so yes, it’s tiny - but I’ve got to start somewhere and I also don’t want those 25 people sitting there wondering where the hell their newsletter is - and I don’t do anything until the list gets bigger… no. I see potential in the 25 people, who knows they might forward the email to their friends to sign up - and make my list bigger!
I put in a couple of articles about some things that were written at the site, so it made the newsletter - well, full of things! Wonderous things! LOL. I also added a couple of CPA links to the mix - just to see if anything will click… what will work… not sure… just testing the waters. Why not right!
It’s almost exciting… scary… will it work or bomb. All sorts of things rolling through my head right now - so far 6 have opened and I’ve got a 50% click-thru rate. Not so bad and I’ve got 20 more to go… to see if they ever open it or it bounces or whatever.
I did a bit of flip-flopping when it came to building my newsletter… as in which one to use. I tried the free PHP script that I got with my account, but it was hard to manage and I never did figure out how to send a proper email through it. So I went the easy way 
I went with Constant Contact, the Do-It-Yourself Email Marketing. I didn’t think Aweber was what I was looking for in this case - I didn’t need a multitude of auto-responders… I just needed a way to create a newsletter with the least headaches and hassle.
So I created some images, some content and some links to pages on the site that I wanted to see traffic too - and to let them know, if they’d not been there for a while, that there is new stuff there. I try to get something up on the site every other day or so, or if it’s a good news week… then I’m posting every day on Fan Site #1.
I’ll keep you posted on what happened with the Newsletter… since it’s my first send out on this site - I wanted to be sure it was laid back and not very pushy. Just like me….
Hahahaha.
I really do recommend giving Constant Contact a whirl - it gives a 60 day free trial where you can develop a list for nothing and check out how easy it is to create and send an email. Seriously a definite time saver
Email List Management Tool - 60 Day Free Trial
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July 24th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I used to use Constant Contact. I found them to be very professional. It’s always better to use a emailing company like that because it avoids the risk of being banned by your ISP for spamming and they look after all the opt-outs and whatnots for you.
A good company in the UK is sign-up.to who provide similar services and also SMS text message mailing lists.
Good luck with the mailing list. I was amazed how fast mine took off. It definitely drove traffic to the website although I found CPA in the newsletter itself was a non-starter. In the end though I got bored of writing the thing!
July 24th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I think this is a step inthe right direction. With a list you can recycle money because people who bought from you once will probably buy from you again. I would caution you on doing too much in the newsletter. Html often gets blocked by the spam filters. My newsletters are just regular email format talking about a topic.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:34 am
With the newsletter, I’m hoping to bring people back to the site, who might have forgotten they signed up or even promote it with these people sending the email to friends so they could sign up - a little viral marketing. I’m still hit or miss with the offers I could give on the newsletter. I’d like offers to be more focused on the niche, it is, in a very vague way… hoping to maybe put together a prize package or something to give away.
But that’s a bit down the road, because I’m still wondering how I could get businesses to give things to the prize pack without me having to pay for it…. aaahhh… being cheap!