You are doing well if you've made it this far with your home
business set up. You should now be getting targeted traffic to
your web site and have started building your house list of email
prospects. Today you will learn a lead follow up method that will
build trust and credibility with your list.
(If you missed the first 7 steps, you can catch up here)
http://kenleonardjr.com/step1
A great way to build a relationship with your prospects is to
produce an email newsletter (or ezine) that would be a useful
resource for them. More work and thought is required to write a
fresh "on topic" newsletter every week (or month) compared to
using a prewritten autoresponder follow up series. If you have
the time, your extra effort can be worth it in the long run. This
means more sales, which builds your most important list of paying
customers.
When creating a new ezine (short for electronic magazine, BTW)
you have a few decisions to make as you get started. First you
will have to choose between publishing a free ezine or one with a
paid subscription. Due to space limitations, this tutorial will
only deal with producing a free newsletter or ezine.
Now you have to choose the format in which you will publish your
ezine; either plain text, html (full graphics) or web based. A
text or html version would be delivered by email directly to your
readers. A web based version would be posted to your web site and
is viewed like any other web page.
If you don't have a good text editor to use (not NotePad or
WordPad), it's time to get one. UltraEdit is a smart choice since
it is cheap and easy to use. A day does not pass that I don't use
UltraEdit for something. http://www.UltraEdit.com
You will use your text editor to create and format your plain
text version newsletter. A good way to see what a nicely
formatted newsletter looks like is to subscribe to a few popular
publications and take notice how they are put together. Whatever
style you end up using, make sure that the formatting is
consistent. This means having a regular line length (usually
between 50-65 characters per line) and a consistent amount of
white space between features.
When creating an html newsletter to email to your readers, you
will need a couple of tools. Use your text editor to compose the
plain text version of each feature or section. Then use a web
page creator/editor or web based service to create the html ezine
page itself, which is a basic web page complete with (minimal)
graphics that is emailed to your readers.
Instead of typing your features and articles directly into the
web page editor, copy and paste the plain text sections you
created with your text editor into the desired spot in your html
ezine. Doing this makes working with a web site creation tool
fast and easy. You can check out a good example of such a service
here... http://webbuilder.ken-recommends.com
If you decide to publish a web based ezine only, the message
emailed to your readers will simply be a notice that the latest
issue is now available online. Provide a link for the reader to
use to view that page on your web site.
If you would like, you can publish in all three formats. You can
then give your readers a choice of format when they sign up and
you will have a copy of (at least) your most recent newsletter
for web site visitors to view as a sample issue. This is a good
way to get new signups, too.
Now that you will be able to create your ezine, what should you
feature in it? Anything you include will be either useful content
or promotional/advertising. For better reader loyalty and
response use much more helpful "on topic" content than the amount
of ads or promotions you run.
Writing original material yourself is the best way to go. A free
3 part tutorial that will help you write promotional and resource
articles can be found here... http://kenleonardjr.com/write
If you decide to run reprint articles from other writers, you
take the chance of running an article that most of your readers
may have already seen elsewhere. That is not good. The more
original content you provide, the more readers you will have that
actually READ your ezine. Unlike a lot of ezines and newsletters
that get the delete button, never to be seen again. But make sure
you provide useful content that is consistent with the offer they
read before signing up for your ezine. Please read the last
sentence again, it's very important.
As you compose your articles and other features, be aware of the
junk mail filters that your ezine will pass through on it's way
to your readers. There are certain words and phrases used
frequently by spammers that will trigger the filters and assess
negative points to your mailing. Any score higher than 5.0 is
likely to be "eaten" by the filters that the major ISPs use, so
do your best to keep the score of each issue as low as you can.
If you find that your newsletter scores highly when tested with a
filter checker tool (you can use a free spam checker here...
http://checker.for-your-biz.com ), post the issue to your web
site and send out a short delivery notice. This is a simple
message to inform your reader that the new issue of your ezine is
ready. By not using any trigger words, your message will get
through most of the filters ( most of them. Some ISPs filter most
commercial email no matter what you do...) and get read. Include
a link to your ezine posted on your web site. Here's the link I
post when I mail a delivery notice to one of my ezine lists:
http://kenleonardjr.com/NME.html
Due to the widespread email filtering problem, it would be wise
to find out if the mail server that sends your email has been
blacklisted by any of the major ISPs. If your mail server has
been blacklisted, either work with the mailing service or web
hosting company to get the problem resolved or move your list to
a different service or web site that has a good relationship with
the ISPs. This service has a good relationship with the people
that control the mail filters, which is good for you...
http://followup.ken-recommends.com
Coming up in Step 9 of the Starting A Home Business tutorial, we
will go over how often you should send out mailings to your list,
how to get people to sign up for your newsletter if you are in a
crowded market niche and what you must know about managing your
list.
See you in Step 9.
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