A few months ago, I started a quick series on the importance of having a newsletter. I do believe that a mailing list should be part of any business model, regardless if you want to make money online or not. To be honest, my financial newsletter at work always brings me new business. A newsletter is a privileged means of communication with someone you know. It’s a way to:

-          Gain credibility

-          Stay in your client’s mind

-          Become the #1 resource for any topic

-          Offer a quick way for your client to connect with you

-          Be proactive

I recently told you that having a newsletter is one of the things you need to do if you want your blog to make money. There is a lot of potential to make money if you publish the right kind of newsletter. From time to time, I subscribe to newsletters myself in order to gather more information and see what others are doing (learning from others is definitely a great way to improve your business as I’ve mentioned in my newsletter). About 2 weeks ago, I received the following email:

I received this mailing as I registered to My University Money newsletter in order to download his awesome ETF eBook. To be honest, I didn’t have to register for his newsletter as Teacher Man sent the eBook via email. But I was somewhat curious to know what he would do with his newsletter and how he will manage his so precious connection with his readers. I also asked him if he minded having me analyze his “welcome note”.

Do you think it’s good? Do you like it? Let’s take a look with a different eye:

The Newsletter Analysis

There some great features from Aweber that have been used in this newsletter. The first one is the use of my own name (Mike). This makes the newsletter more personal and people are more likely to read ahead. In an effort to optimize , I would also plug the subscriber’s name in the title: “So Mike, What do you think?” would have made an awesome email title. Since the email is coming from a blogger I like and he uses my name along with a question, I would definitely jump on this email to read it.

Another great feature is the not-too-aggressive ad on the left side. The Mint ad is well placed and doesn’t distract the reader from the main content. It clearly says that it’s a sponsor and that he uses the product. Another great thing is that Mint is free; it’s easier to promote a product that won’t cost your readers anything. This is perceived as a less aggressive marketing strategy. On the other hand, since the email is not about personal financial management and we don’t really talk about Mint, I doubt this ad will generate much conversion. The idea is good, the ad placement is optimal, the product review is a good idea and the product is great. But, there is no incentive to register for Mint (besides the fact that it’s free). While the product is great, it’s not directly related to ETF investing. Since you get this email after downloading a free eBook on ETF investing, you would expect to get investment related ads.

Teacher Man and J.B. ask for feedback on their book. I think this is a great idea as it leads to another way to connect with your readers. Each time I ask for feedback from my readers, I receive hundreds of emails. This is simply AWESOME for a blogger! I would have preferred that they define their newsletter first (in order to remind me why I am subscribing) and highlight the fact that they ask for my feedback (put this line at the end of your email and put some words in bold).

The newsletter layout is clean and simple. I like them fairly plain as most people don’t display images when they receive email.   A simple layout makes it less spammy and helps focus on content. The University Money logo is a good addition as it reminds you who send the email right away. I personally receive so many emails in a day that I like to know who sends me the email (as I have this internal voice urging me to delete the email before I open it ).

If I would add something to this “welcome note”, I would create a special section on University Money for my readers. A section that is “secret”. It could be complimentary to the eBook (such as portfolio models for example or ETFs lists). I think it could be a great idea. But to be honest, I haven’t done on mine yet, so I can’t really criticize them!

The other interesting thing to add would be a “best of” or “must read” articles they wrote on University Money. I did that with the TFB newsletter to show my new readers what they should expect and what they should read if they are looking for the best of TFB. It drives additional traffic to your site that is completely independent from Google. If your content is great, it will bind your new readers to your site.

In the end, I think it was well executed and that they did a great job sending this first email to subscribers. I can’t wait to see if they have built a newsletter funnel as I suggest in my newsletter email as this could be very promising.

Readers, what do you think of this welcome email? Would you delete it? Unsubscribe? Or be happy to join the discussion newsletter?

 image credit

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Yesterday, I teased a few of you by claiming that I made $463 in 15 minutes from my newsletter.

If you are patient enough and read through this post (and follow me through my newsletter), you will learn how I did it.

Most people agree that we all as bloggers, need a newsletter. I wasn’t part of the majority at first, but now I am a believer). However, most of you keep asking:

How the hell are you making money with your mailing list?

The answer will come, just bear with me for a few more minutes. But just to make sure you are with me, here’s proof of what I’m saying:

You can see that my affiliate sales show $471 for “Today’s 50 Top Trending Stocks for the period of Jan 1^st to Jan 24^th. So I already lied to you with the title of my email, it’s not $463, I made $471! The best part is that I will keep making money throughout the year with the same affiliate program. This is obviously the very definition of passive income!

But once again, how the hell can you make money with your mailing list????

I told you to be patient because I know this post is long. Because the truth is that you can’t just start running around like a chicken with his head cut off and make money with your mailing list. To be honest, this was my first attempt to monetize the DGB newsletter with an affiliate link in one of my mailings. I wasn’t too sure how to set it up and didn’t want to burn my audience. My Aweber dashboard is showing me an opening rate of 74.21%, a click through rate of 62.08% and a 0.465% unsubscribe rate (10 out of 2152) and 0% complaint rate (because Aweber doesn’t allow you to use their software for spammy reasons). So I guess that I did my job right and made money in a good way.

But before you can do that… there are a lot of things to accomplish first!

#1 Build Your Newsletter

The first step has nothing to do with your readers but everything to do with yourself. Personally, this was the hardest step of them all. I’ve been wondering a lot about what kind of content I should include in my newsletter that would not be redundant for RSS & Blog readers. I also wanted to find a way to provide exclusive content that would be complimentary to my blog.

In fact, the newsletter is like a second blog within your blog! So you need to clearly establish what you want to write in your newsletter and what you want to write on your blog. Make sure to create an incentive for people to a) read your blog and b) subscribe to your newsletter. This is why I haven’t change my way of writing or choice of topics on The Dividend Guy Blog and decided to provide more technical stuff and stock lists in my newsletter. This is how I was able to successfully separate my blog from my newsletter.

I use my newsletter for the following purposes:

-          Give eBooks to my readers

-          Offer stock lists and website resources (free)

-          Announce new projects (such as What is Dividend or Canadian Dividend Stock)

-          Ask my readers for feedback (through surveys or quick questions)

-          Provide more technical concepts (such as the different ways of calculating Payout Ratio)

On my blog, I write about the following topics:

-          Dividend stock analysis

-          Sector analysis

-          Stock market commentary

-          Investing strategy (leveraging, moving average, etc)

As you can see, I’m able to make a clear distinction between my blog and newsletter. It makes it easier for my readers too!

#2 Build Your Readership

Once you know where you are going with your blog and newsletter (this is also called having a direction), you can start building your readership. You can attack 2 sides of the same problem:

a)      Growing your Blog readership and then sending them to your newsletter

b)      Growing your mailing list directly through incentive posts on your blog (such as my Best 2012 Dividend Stocks article)

I guess you already know the basics of growing your blog readership (playing the SEO game, doing guest posts, commenting on other blogs, being active on social media, connecting with other bloggers, submitting your stuff to carnivals, etc.). But I guess that it’s a bit tougher if you want to grow your newsletter readership (it has been for me anyway!).

I’ve used several techniques to grow my mailing list but the most successful was to offer a free eBook to get it (read the full post about it here). Here are other great techniques you can use:

-          Host a contest (you get tons of new subscribers but they might very well cancel after 2 emails!)

-          Make your mailing list box visible (just look at the DGB printscreen):

-          Plug your newsletter whenever you have a chance (mention it at the end of each article, and link to it whenever you have something relevant such as “this question came from George, a newsletter subscriber).

-          Write about what is coming up on your newsletter (I’ve used this to tease my audience, especially for TFB, and it works pretty well too!).

What can you expect from these techniques? How many subscribers is a good number? Here’s what I have experienced so far with the DGB newsletter. This is another screen you can get from Aweber that help you see the progression of your newsletter:

As of January 2011, I had only 203 subscribers. As of January 25th,  2012, I have 2,456 subscribers. The major change was definitely due to the fact that I now require people  sign-up before downloading my eBook (October 2011 and January 2012). Since then, I’m getting an average of 20 new subscribers per day. Can you imagine how fast this will grow in 2012?

#3 Build Trust

Yeah… okay… I didn’t invent this one, I know! It is obvious that if you want to do business with someone, you first have to earn his trust. This is true for any kind of business. But how can you gain trust from someone who you are not directly talking to? Unless you have a few email conversations with your reader, you don’t really know who he is and if he really trusts you to any extent. Since you can’t discuss with everybody by email, engaging the conversation via this media is not the best way to earn the trust of 2000+ individuals!

Some people use their newsletter to plug in roundups or previous articles they have written. I don’t think it’s a bad idea per se, but this is not how to build trust with your audience!

The way I’ve built trust with mine was by sending a series of great articles including great content and absolutely no promotions. I actually do the same thing with my newsletter that I send to clients at my day job. I never mention any of my products or services. I just write good articles with a lot of “what’s in it for me” points for the readers. The point here is to add value each time someone opens your newsletter. You want to create that hype from your readers where they will be looking forward to receive your new stuff.

I also put my subscribers at the top of my list when I want to offer something. For example, when I produced my 2012 Best dividend stocks eBook, I sent them the download link before I even mentioned that the book is available on my site.

#4 Find a Real Good Offer That YOU USE

All right, press fast forward on your time machine and teleport yourself 6 months later (or simply bookmark this artcle ). You have a solid mailing list of 500 subscribers (at least!) that follow you and are eager to read your newest articles. We are still down to the very same question:

How the hell are you making money with your mailing list?

The answer is quite simple. By using affiliate links . However, it’s useless to simply “plug and play” any product in your newsletter. Believe it or not, your readers are far from being stupid and they became BS detector pros after being bombarded by advertisements every single day of their life.

This is why you need to talk about products that YOU use and YOU like. If you don’t do that, forget about this whole strategy; you will end-up hitting to the brick wall. I personally like INO products as they help me make technical analysis before I buy a stock. Therefore, it’s not a problem for me to offer for free, a list of 50 top trending stocks. So INO pays me for each lead and my readers have the opportunity to take a look at the best trending stocks on the market. WIN-WIN situation and everybody is happy .

#5 Make Money Forever With This Single Email

The most interesting part of this strategy is that you can make money forever with the very same email. Say what? While the bulk of my income has been done when I first sent this email, I will continue to make money out of it because… the very same email will be sent to all my new subscribers in the future.

How crazy is that? That’s another AWESOME option offered with Aweber! You can either send a “broadcast” (which is a one time email sent to your current subscribers) or send a “follow-up” message (which will be sent to all your subscribers that will eventually join your newsletter).

The “broadcast” mode is perfect when you want to write a timely email such as announcing a contest or forwarding important news. But if your article is timeless, you can use the “follow-up” mode. The follow-up mode will automatically send your article to subscribers after a specific time determined by you. Therefore, you can create your series of articles and send them to your subscribers every 15 days. Take a look at what I have as “follow-up” with The Financial Blogger at the moment:

So if you subscribe today, in 2 days, you will get my “Do You Know How Dividend Investing Works?” email. 7 days later, you will receive the “No BS” email, and so on.

This technique allows you to:

#1 create a funnel of trust

#2 make sure everybody gets your previous exclusive content

#3 make sure that you have a shot at making money with everybody (KATCHING!)

All right! That’s enough for today!

All right, if your eyes are not burning yet, it’s because you are not human . I’m leaving you with enough work to book your entire month, lol!

However, I’m not done on the topic just yet. I’ll actually continue this series in my newsletter in the upcoming week (don’t forget to subscribe ). I want to create a “step by step” series on building your newsletter and how to do it. And of course, I’ll add this series to my “follow-up” messages ;-D

Send me your questions if there is anything that’s not clear so far!

Cheers,

Mike

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Do you want to know how to close a $1,9M deal at work?

Do you want to know how to make $463 with 15 minutes of work?

Do you want to know how to connect with more than 6,000 individuals in a single minute?

This is all possible if you have a newsletter!

Only 7 months ago, I couldn’t see this as a really good idea… all right: I’ll be truly honest; I thought it was just more work added to my routine. And I also thought that it was on the edge of being a stupid idea. Yup, I’m talking about my partner’s idea to have a mailing list.

Why in the hell would you want to run mailing list when you are already posting on a daily basis and offer RRS feeds?

Why would you write more content that you can’t put on your blog if you put it out via the mailing list? Why don’t you just post it on your blog if you are willing to hustle more?

Why would you PAY a monthly fee to have a professional email marketing service to manage your mailing list on top of that? (I use Aweber by the waywink wink wink

Seriously, is it just me or is this just not making any sense?

Well, believe it or not, it does because having a newsletter attached to our blog completely changed our way of doing business.

I realized it for the first time when I was at work. Since I can’t send clients to my blogs (this is obviously unethical!), I decided to start a newsletter. For about a year and a half, I sent a newsletter about the stock market, interest rates and other financial news to my clients every 6 months or so. I provided them with great content as I don’t advertise any products but instead I give them useful info to manage their finances. After a while, I noticed that every time I sent my newsletter, it generated meetings with my clients. The newsletter was actually their trigger to take action and schedule to meet with me regarding their finances. This was going well until the day that I landed a $1.9M meeting generated from my newsletter. On that day, I understood something about having a newsletter: this is a direct and privileged contact with someone who gives you full trust. You don’t give out your email to someone you don’t want to hear from. You give it to someone from whom you expect to get insightful information.

Since my partner was pushing me to take care of my newsletter seriously for a whole year, I started to invest more time in it. Those who are subscribed to my TFB newsletter (the big box on the right column on the top of the site ) already know that I provide awesome and exclusive content on it. It’s not just a lame excuse to do a round-up and self-promote my other sites. I brought this to a whole new level with The Dividend Guy Blog Newsletter. I guess I have more ease in making it interesting as I’m used to writing financial and investment related newsletters.

This mailing list alone has over 2,413 subscribers (and we started from almost 0 back in June 2011). The opening rate is over 63% and the click through rate (when I include a link inside my article) is over 42%. These rates go through the roof (near 100% for both opening and click through rate) when I look at my free eBook offers (Dividend Investing and Best 2012 Dividend Stocks).

The funniest part is that I only have 753 RSS readers on this blog. So I have 3 times more readers for my newsletter than on my blog (I might stop blogging right away then… lol!). I hooked them up with some freebies (read how I did it here) and they stay connected (I only have 271 unsubscribes so far) since I provide them with great stuff. I’m now able to connect directly with them, ask them questions and send them to my new sites such as What is Dividend and Canadian Dividend Stock.

But it’s not only for bloggers, you just need a newsletter regardless what you do!

The following posts (and next newsletter article!) will be about how I manage (and make money!) my mailing lists. But you can do the same in just about any field. I just gave you my example where I have a mailing list for my clients. In fact, if you are in sales, regardless of which kind of product or service, you need a mailing list! This will enable you to get direct feedback from your clients, connect with them, be the top name in your field when they think of it and ultimately generate more sales!

But if you want to be able to do that, you’ll have to follow the upcoming series carefully. A mailing list can be the most awesome tool for growth in your business but it can also have the effect of a weapon of mass destruction on your clientele if you bully your clients with a bunch of ads and promotions. This is exactly what the big brands haven’t realized yet. But what do you want? Their marketing departments hire kids who only think about pushing sales (I was once like that so I know what I’m talking about ).

So are you in? what are you waiting for? Subscribe to my newsletter

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Today I’m going to share something that has changed my perception of my business.

The image presented below has not only changed my perception of my business but will guide my decisions in 2012 as well.

In fact, I think this image has not only made me a believer, it will make me a successful online entrepreneur too!

I almost sound like you’re going to get the Caramilk secret, right?

In fact, you probably already know what I’m going to tell you but I’m sure that most of you don’t use it. So this is why I think this image will make you a believer and… an achiever!

So here’s a little story;

After coming back from the FINCON11 (thx again Phil!), my partner and I started creating quarterly objectives in order to grow faster while being more focused on very few projects at a time. One of them was to increase the number of newsletter subscribers to The Dividend Guy Blog Newsletter. We were standing at 947 subscribers as of October 1^st. Since we plan to sell a Dividend Investing eBook in 2012, we thought we needed a lot more subscribers in order to have a great launch.

All we did was pretty simple. And we should have done it a while ago. The thing is that we didn’t set it up at first when we launched our first free dividend investing eBook and months simply passed and we completely forgot about it. What am I talking about? Ask people to subscribe to your newsletter BEFORE getting the free eBook.

This is what we did as of mid-October and here is the evolution of our newsletter subscribers (via Aweber):

What was even more interesting is that the number of downloads per month wasn’t affected too much as you can tell:

(January numbers are only for 3 days.)

A quick update on our book; we are now standing at 15,941 at the moment with over $2,000 in affiliate commission earned over 6 months from various sources.

I wasn’t sure if I was lucky or not, and this is why I’ve decided to try it again with a quick eBook on 29 Stocks to buy for 2012. I’ve spent the Holidays doing my research and published the eBook on Monday Jan 2^nd. I thought it would be interesting to do a big research on potential great stocks and give it for free. Once again, I’m asking people to register for my newsletter before getting this eBook. Here are the early results (new subscribers) after only 2 days:

So this is how, in the span of 3 months, I have more than doubled my number of newsletter subscribers (currently standing at 2,011 as of January 4^th 2pm).

In less than 3 days, I’ve got 1,166 downloads of my new eBook (many of them came from my existing subscribers) + 205 subscribers without doing any additional promotion. I am now expecting more results in the upcoming weeks as I’ve sent a few emails to my fellow bloggers along with doing some link building and social promotion. I guess I could easily reach the count of 5,000 downloads before the first quarter which would be awesome!

This has already resulted in $128 affiliate sales as well. While it wasn’t the purpose of this book, generating a few bucks from my efforts is still appreciated But most importantly, I’m getting a lot of new subscribers while I build a strong relationship with my existing readers at the same time. Hopefully, this will result into more sales for my book in 2012!

So if you ever doubt about giving your eBook in exchange of a newsletter subscription, become a believer

I’m currently working on a series on how to use Aweber as a mailing list manager and how to make money out of it. Do you have any questions?

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

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