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.