Your newsletter – service and software options
One of the key tools that you will use to make money online is your newsletter.
However, before you can send out your newsletter you need a list of people to send it to. You can purchase lists of email addresses but if you use them you will almost certainly be accused of spamming. You must build this list yourself.
The easiest way to build your list is to have sign up forms on web sites and there is a wide range of services and / or software that you can use for this. Many internet marketers use and recommend services provided by Aweber or GetResponse. They are both good systems that deal with nearly everything you are likely to need and once you are established as an internet marketer you will probably chose to use one of them yourself. These services cost anything from $17.95 per month.
However, if you are starting out and are prepared to do more work yourself, you may prefer a cheaper, or even free, option. An example of a free option is the ‘G-Lock Double Opt-In Manager’ plugin for WordPress.
The G-Lock plugin allows visitors to your blog to subscribe to your mailing list using a double opt-in method. Subscribers’ details are saved in the WordPress database and you can manage the mailing list from the WordPress admin dashboard.
You can use the plugin to convert your blog’s RSS feed into an email newsletter and send it to your subscribers. You can customize the style of your email newsletter and you can schedule your email broadcast weekly, monthly or as soon as you add a certain number of new posts to your blog. You can also export your subscriber list for use by your newsletter software, thus enabling you to send out a conventional newsletter as well.
If you would like to see how the plugin works, why not sign up to my list – see column to the right of this page. You can always unsubscribe again (if you must).
I will deal with newsletter content and incentives to persuade subscribers to sign up in a future post.
