The technical components of creating and emailing a
newsletter (or ezine) are extremely important, and should
be studied before embarking on your newsletter journey. At
the risk of frightening you, if you make too many mistakes,
your website could be blacklisted!
I strongly recommend using a web-based service to send out
your newsletters - you can save many hours and prevent many
problems this way. For example, your ISP probably has
strict restrictions on how many emails you are permitted to
send and may not allow you to use their service for
marketing your business. When I first started my
newsletter, I used Yahoo to send it out - about 5 years
ago. At that time, they allowed only 50 emails sent per
hour, so it took several hours each time I sent out a
newsletter, just to mail it out!
The first determination to make is whether you are only
planning to keep in touch with clients and prospects, or if
you plan to grow your list substantially in order to sell
products or otherwise increase passive income in the future.
If you only plan to keep in touch, especially if you are
not very computer literate, you want to select a service
based on good customer service and available training.
Whether you are more or less technology savvy, the software
should be easy to use. Many services offer a free 30-day
trial.
If you just plan to keep in touch with clients and
prospects, a single opt-in service will probably work fine.
This means either you or the subscriber can sign up and
they are on the list. They can opt out at any time.
If you plan to grow your list over time, and plan to use it
to sell products or other passive income, I strongly
suggest you use a double opt-in service right from the
start. This means you or the subscriber signs them up,
then the subscriber receives an email asking them to verify
or confirm the subscription. They can, of course,
unsubscribe any time.
If you build your list and then move to a double opt-in
service later, many, and I mean MANY, of your subscribers
will not follow you to the new service. (This happened to
me, sadly.)
As we all know, spam is a huge, out-of-control issue. All
ISPs and other internet services have added regulations and
policies to combat spam. Unfortunately, some policies and
restrictions harm legitimate business people like us,
affecting deliverability. ISPs often market their services
by talking about how strict their spam filters are. Many
individuals and businesses set their filters very high,
filtering out our newsletters. These filters often look
for attachments (Note: don't use attachments at all, ever,
in your newsletters) and certain words.
Subscribe to some other newsletters from businesses similar
to yours to see what they do. When you see words like
fr*ee and mon*ey with an odd character in the middle of the
word, or obvious misspellings, this is done to fool the
spam filters.
If you are interested in learning more about successful
newsletter publishers' personal experiences and the
services they have used, I suggest you ask newsletter
owners for their input. Many newsletter publishers would be
happy to share their advice and experiences with you. Good
luck with your newsletter!
----------------------------------------------------
Audrey Burton, Small Business Coach, is "The Tigress". Get
her FREE Special Report, "Closing the Sale is Not
Complicated!" and her FREE monthly email newsletter at
http://www.TigressCoaching.com .
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