64 tips for email marketing tactics

Introduction to email marketing tactics

When building an email list, it is important that you can identify with your target group and vice versa. You provide the interested parties who have voluntarily subscribed to you with high-quality information in exchange for providing their email address and agreeing to receive the newsletter.

Once a subscriber has confirmed their email address and their desire to subscribe, you can send them promotional emails later, provided you keep a good balance between emails that are just trying to sell and meaningful and useful content.

Email marketers (like you!) collect leads via a combination of so-called squeeze pages (special, targeted entry pages for a newsletter) and opt-in forms. These forms are automatically generated by your autoresponder and the corresponding code (usually HTML or PHP) is then inserted into the source code on your website in order to display the finished form on the page.

Every time a visitor comes to your squeeze page and enters their name and email address, they are added to your mailing list and become an active subscriber to your newsletter.

Building a list helps a lot in converting newsletter subscribers into active customers for your products. This is because you are able to build a relationship with your subscribers, through which they gain more trust in you and ultimately buy. Some will only buy once, but many will buy more than one product from you.

Select profitable niches

Firstly, you need to choose a niche for which you want to advertise. This is not as easy as it sounds. It's not enough to choose a niche, you need to choose a profitable niche. Not every niche is as profitable as you might hope. In the past, I have chosen a few niches that I was sure would prove to be profitable. However, despite all my efforts, I have not been able to find a single product that would justify the time invested.

Fortunately, I am now able to select niches that generally promise more success. The research phase before any product development is the most important part of the entire development process.

Inexperienced marketers create a product and then look for a market to sell it to. This is the sure way to failure.

If you know a market, you may intuitively know what products that market needs. However, you will need to do some research to make sure the demand is there. If you don't make sure that demand exists, then you will struggle to make sales. Far too many marketers skip this stage because they think they know what the market wants.

Brainstorming

The first step is to find an idea that you want to work with. You might see something on the news, read something in a newspaper or hear people talking about a certain topic. Firstly, make a list of niches that you would like to promote. However, be sure to make a long list of niches that you think could be profitable or that you would like to promote.

Draw up a list of 10-20 niches right now. If you need help, take a look around and let yourself be inspired.

Here are some areas that might inspire you:

• You may see something in a shop - shops often offer special promotions on popular and promising products. This can give you valuable ideas.
• You can also search niche forums for posts that often reveal people's problems.

If an issue is raised regularly, then you know that there is a problem that many people are facing.

• Look around your house. Things like kitchen appliances, barbecue accessories, office supplies, audio or video equipment and musical instruments are all niches you can advertise around the house.
• Look around in a bookshop - either online or offline. Visit amazon.com or go to a bookshop near you. Browse through books and magazines.
• Look around on websites for hot topics. Check sites like Google Buzz for new trends.

Check possible profitability

If you have a list of 10-20 niche ideas, it's time to narrow them down by examining their potential earning power.

Here are two ways to do this:

1. I check whether there are any magazines that report on this niche. This is sometimes, but not always, an indicator that the niche could be profitable.
2. I check how many people are advertising on Google AdWords for this niche.

People tend not to advertise in niches that don't promise a profit, especially if the cost per click is very high.

Keyword search

Whether you decide to use pay per click marketing, article marketing, blogging or any other form of marketing. You need to find appropriate keywords if you want decent traffic numbers. I use the Google keyword tool for a quick and free search:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool is very easy to use. Simply enter your core keyword phrase and you will receive a large number of keywords related to it. You can sort these keywords according to the frequency of monthly searches. On this page you will find a video on how to best use this tool

You can search for keyword phrases that:

• have at least 5000 searches per month
• have less than 50,000 competition pages

To find out more about the competition, you may wish to want to enter a keyword phrase into Google. This shows you how many people are searching for this exact phrase.

The tools you will need

To develop a profitable email marketing campaign, you need a few tools.

Autoresponder software that you install yourself on your web server

This is the cheapest method. You can get one here!

or

Professioneller Autoresponderservice

Über Service provider like www.GetResponse.com or www.Aweber.com, are You in the Location, one unlimited Quantity from Mailing lists build up, whereby each then their own Opt–in Code has, the on Your Websites insertedügt becomes. This allows you to create different lists for different occasions. For example, one where people can sign up for your newsletter directly on your blog.

Then there's another list where subscribers come in who join your list via giveaways and where interest usually wanes rapidly after they pick up the gift.

And then there are the lists that you build up through cooperation with other marketers, through joint ventures and through your partner programme. Of course, the most important list of all is still missing: your own customer list, i.e. a list of people who have already bought something from you at least once.

By segmenting your list in this way, you can target different types of subscribers and tailor your emails to the exact needs of the recipients. This will generally result in better conversions from visitors to buyers.

Squeeze side

A squeeze page contains your entry form for your newsletter and offers your prospective customers an opportunity to get to know you and your products better and to keep in regular contact with you.

As far as working towards a goal is concerned, the squeeze page is very similar to the sales letter, as the latter also has only one primary goal, which in the case of the squeeze page is not the sale, but the entry in the email list.

How you formulate the call to action is important so that you can get the highest possible conversion rate from your site. This is because the page must of course also motivate the visitor sufficiently to sign up for the newsletter.

And this often means that you first have to split test different headlines and key points as well as various incentives for the entry for two weeks in order to find out which combination works best. You can do this very well with the tools from Mario Wolosz in the Split Test Club.

The page must clearly emphasise that the visitor must enter their name and email address in the form and you must instruct him on what to do and in what order.

And you must inform them that your list uses a double opt-in procedure, i.e. that the recipient must first confirm their email address by clicking on a link. This is because you cannot send the person any emails before this confirmation.

While sales letters usually put as much information as possible on the page, the squeeze page, as already mentioned, is not about a sale. The aim of the squeeze page is simply to persuade the visitor to leave and confirm their email address. As a reward, they then receive a free (digital) product from you. It is therefore important that you offer the visitor a very good product for free, otherwise you will not receive a newsletter entry from the visitor.

It has to be a product that you would otherwise charge money for and that represents some value. It makes no sense to give away an ebook that is already being given away on 250 other websites as a freebie for a listing. You need to give away something that they can only get exclusively from you and that is absolutely top quality.

So you need to focus properly on your market and your potential customers so that you know what they want. The offer must be centred around an existing problem or a question that many people have and to which they would like an answer. Then you have a product that will be in demand and accordingly your site will be very high converting.

To really develop the best free offer, you need to study your target group in detail and follow discussions in forums and on blogs. Otherwise you are unlikely to find out what your prospective customers would like and what they would like to sign up for in a newsletter.

Squeezepages should so created become, that these a clean structure offer and one basic Structure should have.

To bring this all back into line, to summarise, your list building funnel comprises the following 3 main components:

1. Squeezepage with entry form (Opt-in formular)
2. Tempting, high-quality offer or other appropriate incentive
3. Automatic follow-up emails and Broadcasts (immediate dispatch of emails)

In the next chapter, we will discuss what a successful squeeze page should look like so that you can develop your own.

Your freebie (Incentive)

Your freebie (free product) is the most important element on your squeeze page.

If your free offer can't motivate your visitors to sign up as a subscriber, then all your marketing efforts are wasted. This means that you definitely need to find something that your visitors would literally go through fire to get. The better your offer is, the more subscribers you will get and the easier it will be.

There are many ways to ensure that the product you want to give away has a high value and that it can virtually guarantee that you will get many listings. To put it briefly, think of products that are currently absolute bestsellers in your niche and create a slightly shorter version to give to anyone who signs up for your list.

If your competitors are successfully selling a product and you are giving something similar away for free, just think how easy it will be to attract new subscribers to your newsletter...!

And better still, what other way is there to start a relationship with a potential customer right at the beginning in a way that inspires confidence by giving them something for free that you could even sell for expensive money?

You could offer the following:

• Free of charge Report
• Free of charge Ebook (Full version or selected chapters)
• Free of charge Tutorial
• Video tutorials
• Free or trial account for a membership site
• Free of charge Booklet with "Top–Tipps"
• Free newsletter with weekly tips
• Free Templates oder Graphics
• Free of charge Audio Interviews, Lections

The key to finding a successful product that you can use for free for list building is that it must be relevant and of high quality for your target audience and niche and that there should already be a demand for such a product or a similar product.

If you can do this, you'll have little trouble building a massive list that eagerly awaits your emails. If you are planning to promote an ebook or email course, a very good way to build a massive list is to give away a chapter of the ebook as a free sample in advance. You give this away before the actual product has been published.

Anyone interested in your product will then sign up to see if the ebook or course is worth buying. If you then have your own affiliate programme, other newsletter publishers will even send you the leads. For a corresponding profit share, of course. You can also remunerate both the leads and the sales. After all, these are all actions that you would not have without the help of others.

If your product is well written and resonates with your audience, then you will find it very easy to build a large list of people who will be interested in your work and who will be very likely to buy the full version of your ebook when it comes out.

This way, you can also initiate a viral campaign, because people in your niche will then also talk about your ebook pre-chapter in forums and on blogs. This will maintain interest until your product launch.

This is exactly what the big film studios do when the latest blockbuster is about to hit cinemas. It's not unusual for the hype surrounding a film to start 2-3 months before its premiere.

But you don't necessarily have to do everything yourself. You can also outsource a lot by handing over individual tasks to experienced freelancers. On the following platforms, you can find people who can take on tasks for you, for example for the promotion of your ebook:

• http://www.myhammer.de
• http://www.projektwerk.de/
• http://www.freelancermap.de/
• http://projects.resoom.de/
• http://de.gigajob.com/job/
• http://www.freelance-boerse.de/
• http://www.interlance.de/

And there are certainly dozens of other platforms where you can advertise your tasks as projects.

How to create a high-converting squeeze page

To help you get a squeeze page online that converts as well as possible, I would like to give you a brief overview of what the most important elements of such a page are and what you absolutely need for your own page:

Irresistible, attention-grabbing headlines

The headline should be the first thing that catches a visitor's eye when they come to your page and should therefore be formulated in such a way that it immediately makes it clear to the visitor what your page is about. If the headline is interesting enough and the other key points are also coherent, then you should be able to attract new subscribers relatively easily via such a page.

The text of your headline must be significantly larger than the rest of the text on your page and, if possible, in a different colour than the normal text (red or blue work very well)

You can and should also work with underlining in the heading, um the emphasise the most important part of your statement even more. You can also <h1> and <h2> Tags to increase the size of your text and to attract search engine crawlers for better rankings.

The headline should be centred on the page and the main part of the page can then be divided into 2 sections below it. In the left-hand section there are a few key points that explain a little more and on the right-hand side or at the bottom can be the entry form for your newsletter. This keeps it relatively close to the headline and also immediately catches the eye.

Contents/main text

The Contents should very short summarised be, so that the Visitors only one short Üoverview über the Topic and about what you have to offer them. Avoid squeeze pages that have endless paragraphs of text on the page. The page should only do one thing: Convert visitors into subscribers, so the page should be clear, precise and of course exciting!

You should split test your page to see which variations produce the highest number of subscribers.

Below is an overview of what the site still consists of:

Key points to advertise advantages

Key points briefly summarise important aspects and draw attention to your special offer and explain why the visitor should subscribe to your newsletter.

This is an easy way to enter the greatest benefits as a bullet point list.

For example, if you're offering a report that addresses the "secrets to finding a work-from-home job," your bullet points for the benefits might be as follows:

• • FindFind out how to find a well-paid telecommuting job, even if you have little experience with the Internet!
  • Avoid devastating work-from-home scams that exist in this industry that target people just like you!
  • Discover You the Website für Freelancer, the 99.9% the new PC Homeworkers one new Job procured and although direct in the first week.
  • Write an exciting work profile that is designed to catch the attention of the bosses of the well-paying companies and that virtually guarantees that you will stand out from the crowd!

Always keep your FOCUS

Eliminate all (internal and external) links that lead to any other pages and make sure your site stays on point. Avoid any distractions for the visitor, as the only option on your site should be for them to sign in or close your page.

Prevent the visitor from becoming confused or distracted, otherwise you will never see this person again.

So no navigation menus where the visitor can jump back and forth, no plugins and no links to any articles.

Your page should only contain the points already mentioned and the only links should be those that lead to your privacy policy and to your legal notice (both at the bottom of the page and not too large) so that the visitor can check who exactly they are dealing with if necessary. An imprint is mandatory.

Clear and strong "call to action"

If you want your squeeze page to bring in as many subscribers as possible, you need to give your visitor clear instructions on what to do on your page and, if necessary, ask them to confirm their wish to become your subscriber (double opt-in).

Don't assume that people already know what to do. After all, not everyone has had experience of signing up for a newsletter and it may be the first time anyone has done this in their life. That's why you need to formulate your instructions as precisely as possible so that EVERYONE really understands.

The page directly after the entry should also contain instructions on how the interested party should confirm their email address and what to do. Although this is usually also stated directly in the emails containing the link, it is often the case that people do not read the exact instructions carefully.

You cannot contact prospective customers until they have confirmed their email address. That is why precise instructions are the be-all and end-all when acquiring subscribers.

However, you can usually set this up automatically by creating a second page on your server and redirecting the interested party to it once they have taken the first step and signed up for your newsletter.

Like your squeeze page, your confirmation page should be simple and contain only the most important details. There should also be no links to other pages on this page so that the potential subscriber is not distracted from confirming the email address.

Maximum results through intensive promotion

Once the squeeze page has been set up and the autoresponder prepared, it's time to start developing an effective email campaign that is activated immediately when a website visitor becomes your subscriber.

And this is how it works:
Your visitor enters their information via your squeeze page and confirms their email address and their wish to receive your newsletter in future.

Now your autoresponder goes into action and sends your new subscriber a welcome email that you have written for the new subscribers. This is sent within a few minutes of the entry and confirmation.

Your autoresponder will then continue to send your subscriber new emails at predefined intervals. You can even set the times from the entry to the next email in your autoresponder admin area.

Example: You create 4 Emailswhich will be sent out according to the following schedule:
Email 1: Dispatch immediately after entry. A thank you and welcome email in which you have also entered the download link for your free ebook.

Email 2: Set so that it is sent out 3 days after the entry in your list. In terms of content, this should preferably contain a link to a free article or a free report.

Email 3: Goes out 7 days after the entry and advertises one of your products or that of a joint venture partner.

4th Email: Goes out 10 days after the entry, etc.

You need to find a good balance between purely promotional emails and emails with good content or free gifts. The more you give to your subscribers, the more likely they are to give back by buying from you.

For some, the aggressive approach to email marketing, i.e. sending mainly promotional emails, also works. But for most, it's best to keep a good mix, otherwise the majority of your subscribers will quickly unsubscribe from your newsletter.

Only when you have built up a good relationship with your subscribers can you send more promotional emails. These will then be much more successful in terms of revenue than if you have not built up a relationship with your subscribers.

You simply need to condition your list to receive promotional emails from you from time to time. It's up to you to find out what works best, how often you contact your list and whether they respond to your offers.

Don't be afraid to experiment a little and find new and innovative ways to grow and maintain your list.

HHere are some of the quickest and easiest ways to build your list:

Create multiple squeeze pages

Instead of creating a single page for collecting leads, consider creating several different squeeze pages, each with different offers and subtopics.

In the area of internet marketing, for example, you could publish an ebook on the topic of "Facebook marketing" on one page, an ebook on the topic of "Twitter marketing" on another page and one on the topic of "niche marketing" on yet another page.

By doing this, you are addressing different target groups within your main niche, because not everyone has the same interest in every sub-topic. For example, if you don't like Facebook and have absolutely nothing to do with it, you won't want to download an ebook about it.

They might be better served with an ebook on niche marketing.

The more different squeeze pages you use, the greater the likelihood that a prospect will be attracted by one of the subtopics and sign up to your list.

In principle, however, you can use the same autoresponder message series for all pages. However, you must at least adapt the first message for each page and also adapt the respective download link to the product, as you are giving away a different product on each page.

Use your squeeze page as a landing page in your social media profiles

If you have been working in the field of internet marketing for a while, you will probably already have several profiles on all the social media platforms.

And they usually ask for your websites too. Simply link directly to your opt-in pages in the profiles and you will gain new subscribers through your social media activities alone.

In principle, this applies to all platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Xing and even YouTube if you are also active there and regularly post videos.

Article marketing

Artikelmarketing is a very effective (and free!) marketing strategy and can help you attract many visitors. A lot of traffic can be generated if you target the right keywords and only write articles where the competition is not already huge.

Article marketing is mainly about providing high quality content that is intended for your target audience and that is designed to get readers interested in your website to find out more about you.

Article marketing doesn't require much preparation and if you can write, you can get started almost immediately. But even if you are not so good at producing good content yourself, it is possible to attract visitors and earn money through article marketing.

In this case, you simply outsource and hire other authors to do the writing work for you. I have already mentioned freelancer websites in a previous section.

Even if you have a tight budget, it should always be possible to have a small package of articles written, each consisting of approx. 350-500 words.

Start by submitting 3-5 articles to the article directories each week and before you know it, you will be able to generate a steady stream of traffic to your squeeze pages. The more articles you publish, the more visitors you can expect for your pages.

However, it is very important that the articles are of a suitable quality, otherwise readers will not click through to your website after reading your articles and the chances of gaining new subscribers will be lost.

These articles represent you and your brand and it is therefore important that your articles impress the readers, otherwise it will be difficult to sell your info products later if the readers think that you only write rubbish.

Eighth You on it, like You Your Author box create, the itself each on End one Articles is located.

The author box is a small section at the end of the article where you can write 2-3 sentences about yourself and from where you can link to your own website.

In this section, you must ensure that the reader becomes curious about your other articles and products and, of course, you should link directly to your squeeze page from there so that you in turn gain new subscribers.

However, there are also many article directories where there is no such author box and where you can simply link a few of your keywords to your homepage. Of course, you should also link directly to your squeeze page.

Your squeeze page will then also be better listed in the search engines for queries for your keywords. Links from other websites play a major role in search engine rankings, but that is a completely different topic.

How to earn money with your email campaigns

Here are some ways in which you can earn money with your list as quickly as possible:

1) Market affiliate products
You can simply promote products where you receive a commission from the product owner for each sale. To do this, you must use a special affiliate link so that the sales can be correctly allocated.

You don't even have to approach the programme operators directly, but many products that you can market can be found directly on the major platforms such as Clickbank.com.

2) Sell advertising space
There are many advantages to selling advertising space within your newsletter, including the fact that you can set your own pricing structure. Of course, the more subscribers you have for your newsletter, the higher prices you can charge for adverts in your newsletter.

You can even offer advertisers to send standalone emails, where only the adverts are sent out to subscribers and nothing else. However, this should not be overdone, as you can drive many subscribers away if you send an email for others every other day.

I personally wouldn't recommend it unless you limit this to 1-2 standalone mails for others a month.

Of course, you can and should also sift through what can be advertised in your newsletter. Otherwise your competitors will come and advertise products that you also have in your programme. In order to sell advertising in your newsletter at all, you need to reveal a little about the demographics of your list.

You should also have at least 1,000 subscribers to your newsletter before you offer advertising space and mailings.

3) Create your own products

Since you have direct access to potential customers through your list, you probably already know what kind of products your subscribers are interested in. So the next logical step would be to create products that cater to the needs and desires of your list.

Also consider launching a survey to find out which product you should create next. You can also use this to assess what exactly your subscribers want.

At the end of the survey, you can take the interested parties to another squeeze page, where the people who sign up will then receive further information about the launch of your product and where they may get access a little earlier than the general public.

Maken You Split–Tests!

Split testing of squeeze pages is an important element for a successful email marketing campaign.

No matter how beautifully you've designed your site, or how precisely you've constructed individual sections of your site, you simply can't predict how your visitors will react to a particular type of page without having directly compared a few layouts, in terms of opt-in rates.

A free alternative way to test your pages and conversions is by using Google's Website Optimiser, a free tool that helps you with split testing.
You can register here free of charge:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Develop your own brand!

It is important that you also build up a brand awareness for yourself and your products that is directly recognised by your subscribers and with which they associate the quality of your products. This will make it much easier for you to convert subscribers into buyers.

Every email you send out should also work directly to strengthen your brand. This means that you need to be very careful about what kind of products you promote and you also need to check every time before you send out an affiliate email that the product you are promoting is really as good as you claim.

As a rule, you will receive access to the product in advance if you ask the product owner for it because you want to test the product first. Even if you have not created the product yourself, your subscribers will be interested to see whether the product is really as good as you claimed in your promotional email.

If this is not the case, they will rightly want to hold you responsible if the product was of inferior quality.

You should therefore always request a trial version of the product - without exception. If you have not received one, you should not advertise the product. This is the only way you can really be sure that your recommendations will be taken at face value in the future and that you are not doing this just to earn a few euros.
Your emails should be focussed and relevant. If you want to move into a different niche at some point, then you should build a completely new list for it. For example, you can't switch from internet marketing to the health niche and suddenly tell people what they can do for high blood pressure.

That doesn't work and with something like that you turn your readers against you!

Segment your lists for better target group capture!

Segmentation is more important than just making sure that your emails reach the recipient. Segmentation also helps you to better target your messages to your recipients because, as we have already seen, they can come from many different sources (giveaways, joint ventures, your own blog, etc.). This helps you achieve better response rates and therefore more sales.

So if you're building a list for "internet marketers", for example, it's very likely that many of your subscribers will have completely different backgrounds and experience in this area. Some may be complete beginners, while others have sold and are still selling many of their own products and are hoping for more advanced tips.

You could, to stay with the example of internet marketers, build one list for beginners and another where you can target marketers who are much more experienced.

Accordingly, you could also develop different product groups. One for beginners and one for advanced users, as the latter would hardly want to buy products for complete beginners

Don't let your lists get cold

You need to focus on staying in constant communication with your subscribers. Now this doesn't mean that you have to send them something every day, but you should have something like a schedule so that your subscribers can expect to receive an email from you once or twice a week.

Your subscribers will then expect your emails - especially if you always send them out on the same days. This will give you better open rates for your emails, which ultimately means you will earn more.

The more consistent you are with your email distribution, the easier it will be to get your subscribers used to the fact that you don't just send out free content all the time, but that you also advertise products from time to time.

After all, you want to make a living. You can't do that if you only send out free stuff...

Write profitable promotional emails

As already mentioned, building a list is actually quite simple. If you have a good offer, people will be happy to sign up to your list. So you can build a pretty big list very quickly if you have enough traffic on your website.

Getting the most out of the list you have built is much more difficult. Most people don't know how to write a proper email title or write an email that gets the results they want. It's a complete waste of time if you write a boring email that only triggers the desired response from 1% of recipients. A well-written email could bring the desired success to 5% of your readers!

In this report I will show you some tricks that you can use to dramatically increase the success of your emails. This report will help you get the most out of your list and make a lot more money with every single email you send.

After all, why would you want to settle for just an 1% conversion rate when you could easily make 5%, 10% or even more on the same list? If you make 2,000 EUR with an 1% conversion rate, you would make 10,000 EUR with 5% conversion! The difference between 1% and 5% may not seem like much, but the difference between 2,000 EUR and 10,000 EUR is huge - isn't it?

The most urgent questions and problems in your niche

Before you write even a single email, you need to find out what the most important questions and problems of your market (your niche) are.

Large companies invest thousands of euros in market research companies that use surveys, for example, to research and record people's problems, questions and behaviour.

>>> You do not need to do this, as this information is already

are available free of charge. You just need to know where! <<<

I essentially browse two places when I'm looking for the hottest topics for a particular niche. First, I visit a few forums in the specific niche. I spend about 15 minutes to an hour reading the various thread titles on the biggest forums in my niche. I make a list of the most common problems and questions from the forum users.

I then visit Tool Yahoo Answers to find the appropriate questions and relevant keywords for my niche. This place is a real goldmine for market research!

http://answers.yahoo.com/

or German-speaking:

http://de.answers.yahoo.com/

Let me give you an example.

I simply went to the Yahoo Answers website and searched for "golf". Here are some of the questions I found:

• Which golf club brand is best for beginners?
• Which golf ball reacts best on the green?
• Does it really matter if golf clubs are old and worn?
• Which golf clubs are suitable for beginners?
• What golf clubs does a beginner need for a round of golf?
• Which golf ball flies the furthest?

As you can see, many people have questions about golf clubs and golf balls. You can take advantage of this. There are of course other questions, but the questions listed here have been asked very frequently.

If I had a list in the golf segment, I would definitely make reference to these hot questions. I would make a list of the top 3 golf clubs for beginners and recommend them in an email as an affiliate. Or I could recommend a specific golf ball as an affiliate.

Why people buy

To get people to buy the exact product you offer, you need to address the exact needs of your niche. To do just that, you first need to research your niche.

Now that you've done your research and found out what the problems of people in your niche are, it's time to figure out how you can capitalise on those problems to get people to buy your products.

Let's look again at the example of golf mentioned above. I noticed that a lot of people were asking questions about suitable golf clubs. From the questions researched, you can see that many people, especially beginners, are very concerned with buying the right golf clubs.

I try to put myself in the position of a beginner golfer and find out why they are so concerned about this topic. If I were to take up the sport of golf, what things would I think about when buying the right golf clubs?

1. I don't want to spend my money on golf clubs that aren't any good. That would be a waste. Golf clubs are expensive! If I'm going to play golf, I need to have the best possible equipment to have a chance of winning.
2. I don't want to look stupid to the people I play golf with. What if I bought a certain brand of golf clubs and it turns out that the professional players are making fun of that brand? That could be very embarrassing.
3. Perhaps I would also ask myself whether a particular model might be easier to use for beginners. Perhaps there is a type of golf club that would help me to play better right from the start?

I would make a list of the reasons I think people ask these very questions. Sometimes you won't even guess them. If you read forum posts, you may get the answers to exactly why your niche has these specific problems. This information is invaluable!

You need to know exactly why people have questions about certain topics in order to really market your products effectively to this target group.

Here is another small example for better illustration:

Suppose you are a young person and want to buy a new radio for your car that will impress your friends.

Imagine you now receive an e-mail about a new generation of car radios.

This e-mail concentrates on showing you the absolutely high-tech components the radio is equipped with and explains that the sound is so crystal clear that it sounds like a concert hall.

Would you buy this car radio?

Possibly!

Why only possibly? Because the email doesn't address your real problem. You are not interested in the latest technology. You are also not necessarily interested in the original sound - you mainly want to impress your friends (young people are like that ;-)).

Now imagine that the same person sends you an e-mail that really addresses your direct problem.

The email says how prestigious this special stereo sound is. It says that the ultra-deep bass will really impress your friends and attract attention.

This would really interest you and you would want to buy the car radio! It's exactly the same car radio, just presented in a different way. But your problem has been addressed directly, so you really want to buy the car radio.

That's what you need to do. You need to recognise the problems and mindsets of your potential customers and address their needs and wishes directly!

This will rocket your sales!

Email title for maximum open rates

For your emails to have an impact, they need to be read. Most emails are not even opened. So you need to make sure that people actually open and read your messages!

There are two good ways to achieve this:

1. make sure you regularly deliver lots of quality content to your list. Do NOT send marketing message after marketing message! If you do, people will unsubscribe from your newsletter or ignore your emails.

2. strong email titles that grab attention and practically force people to read your message!

Creating powerful email titles is not as difficult as it sounds. Finding the ideal headline for a sales page is much more difficult.

Email titles need to be short and to the point.

It's easier to create a short, concise and compelling headline for your emails than to try to win over your customers with a multi-line headline in a sales letter!

Your email title should have only one purpose - to entice people to open the email! You should not try to sell something with the email title. Your sales intentions should also not be the content of your message right at the beginning.

Here you can see some very ineffective email titles:

• "The number 1 product against heartburn..."
• "Important message, please read!"
• "Hello, name. How are you?

Believe it or not, these examples are all very common email titles that don't usually work very well.

The first title is simply too sales-orientated. It literally screams: "I AM AN ADVERTISING MESSAGE!" As a rule, people don't open emails if they are sure that they are an advertising message.

The second and third titles are meaningless. People get no insight into what the message is actually about. Such emails are often simply skipped over.

When creating your email title, think about what your customers' most pressing problems and questions are and use these in your email title. This will attract attention - and people will want to read your message.

For example, if you sell golf clubs, you could use the following titles:

• "How do I find the right golf clubs?"

This title is a bit boring, but it gets straight to the point. And this title would appeal to both beginners and experienced golfers.

(GUT)

• "The ultimate golf clubs for beginners"

This title sounds like it could be an article that is very useful and interesting.

(BESSER)

• "These golf clubs improve your score by 5 strokes"

This title speaks directly to the reader. It lets them know that this is about golf clubs that will help them improve their golf results. It doesn't necessarily sound like an advertising message either. It could just be a recommendation.

(BEST!)

You should bear the following points in mind when creating your titles:

• Your titles should be 10 words long
• Your titles should attract attention, but not be too salesy sound
• Your titles should encourage people to open your emails.

How you "force" people to read and buy

Get people to read your message and buy your product.

But opening your email is not enough. It also has to be read. If people don't read your message, you can't get your message across. It can be difficult to get people to read your email. Often people are very busy and don't like sales emails.

Therefore, you need to keep these important things in mind so that people read your entire email message:

The message has to be relatively short if it sells something.

• You need to attract attention immediately without sounding like you're trying to sell something.

Your messages should ideally consist of no more than 3 - 5 short paragraphs. People are very busy and they are easily distracted. When reading long messages, people will usually stop in the middle and not read to the end.

The task of your email is to lead readers to your sales letter. Only your sales page should sell.

A good way to start your email is to make it clear to the reader that you know what problems, concerns and questions they have and that you understand them.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Identify with your readers on a personal level
2. Let them know that other people feel the same way.

To identify with your readers on a personal level, you can start your email as follows, for example:

"I remember when I first started playing golf, I was very worried that I would choose the wrong golf clubs. Golf clubs are expensive. If I bought the wrong clubs, I would have wasted a lot of money and my golf game would be poor."

To let your readers know that you feel the same way they do, you can start the email like this:

"A lot of people have been asking me lately what golf clubs they should buy. I always answer them the same way and I thought you might like to know this information too."

Don't forget to address your readers personally!

Do not write things like:

• "I wanted to write my list ..."
• "I wanted to let you all know that ..."
• "Does anyone have problems with ..."

Write directly to your readers as individuals:

• "Do you have any problems ..."
• "I wanted to let you know that ..."
• "Have you heard about this ..."

Your readers will know that you didn't write the email directly to them personally, but that's not the point. The point is to unconsciously create a personal level that inspires trust. On a personal, trusting level, people find it much easier to buy something!

The more personally engaged your readers feel with each of your messages, the more likely they are to read your entire message - and the more likely they are to buy from you.

As you can see, writing effective emails is not that difficult.

If you implement the guidelines outlined in this ebook when creating your emails and autoresponder messages, you can significantly increase the effectiveness of your emails.

You certainly won't be able to create the "perfect" email message and the "perfect" email title straight away. But keep at it, it's worth it.

Test different headlines and content for your emails until you find the most effective variant.

List building strategies

Make your content relevant

This keeps your readers happy and increases the number of people who recommend your newsletter to others!

As I see it, one of the biggest problems that newsletter and ezine (internet magazine) publishers have is that they write about topics that nobody cares about. They just write about whatever they think people want to know about, without doing any research. That's a big mistake.

Other publishers may have a well-defined niche, but they too write articles in their newsletters that are of no particular interest to readers. It makes no sense to have a newsletter about coin collecting but publish articles about stamp collecting just because you haven't bothered to find the right content.

The problem is easy to solve: Simply send an email to your readers and ask them what they would like to read. You can also subscribe to other newsletters in your field to see what they are writing about.

Add more newsletter subscription options to your website

Sounds pretty simple, but only a few webmasters actually do it. If you have a website with 100 subpages, then you should also offer 100 entry options for your newsletter.

You can basically place such an entry field anywhere on a page: at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a page text.

As long as you publish good content on your website, you will have no problem getting subscribers to your newsletter.

The following is an interesting option for a content page:

Go to this website and see what the webmaster does to get newsletter subscribers. It's very clever:

http://www.associateprograms.com

Offer an extraordinary gift

In the past, I've had a problem offering freebies to get newsletter subscribers, but I now know that it works great if you do it right.

Why did I have a problem with it?

Well, I don't actually want entries from visitors who want my newsletter because they are keen on the gift that comes with it.

The best way to offer something for free is to create something free yourself and not something that you, like 500 other webmasters, only have the reprint or resale rights to.

But you want something unique, something that adds a lot of value to your newsletter.

Do you know what a really good bonus for a newsletter request is?

Good previous issues of your newsletter!

Use viral free ebooks to attract new subscribers

You have implemented the above methods, but you want even more? Do you want to get thousands of new subscribers to your newsletter without spending a cent on advertising?

Viral marketing is the way to go! Write viral ebooks that are passed around and spread like a virus.

Writing viral ebooks is nothing new, but it's still a great way to get the word out about your newsletter.

There are a few tried and tested methods for creating a viral ebook:

Either you offer it straight away as a free product or you charge a fee and in return grant reprint or resale rights so that buyers can redistribute it and make money further down the line.

I favour the reprint route myself. The thing is, once the novelty of the first ebook wears off, you have to write another one, and then another, and then another, and so on! All following the same formula, all with resell rights and all plastered with your newsletter sign-up forms.

The aim is not to make big money from ebook sales, but to get more subscribers.

So: find a number of publishers in your market niche, let them know that you've created a new ebook that they can use and offer on their website, give them promotional support through a blurb, tell them that they can have the ebook for free, to sell the ebook to their customers with or without reprint rights.

That's easy money for them and more subscribers for you!

Buy leads through co-registration

A quick and easy way to get subscribers, if not the best; that's how I would describe co-registration.

Some marketers swear by it and achieve good results with it, for others the opposite is the case and they throw the entire list out again because it is riddled with fake addresses, spam complaints and pure freebie hunters.

So what is co-registration?

Co-registration refers to list building with addresses that have been purchased from a corresponding service provider.

Dr Ralph Wilson describes it as follows:

"Co-registration is a frequently used method of building or growing an email list. It works as follows: After users fill out a sign-up form or before they leave a website, they are given the opportunity to sign up for one or more newsletters. If you are listed among these with your newsletter and the site has a corresponding volume of visitors, you will receive numerous new subscribers."

You pay a fee to these companies per subscriber. Each time the service provider provides you with a new lead, this fee is due. It is usually between 15 cents and 1 euro, depending on the niche and whether you want double optin or single optin.

If possible, always select double opt-in.

The best way to make money from this type of subscriber is to give something away for free first. Build trust with them. Offer a free course, give them some bonus products as described above, etc.

But if someone wants to be removed from the list, do it immediately! Never argue! It would be fatal for your entire newsletter.

Write free articles

While it is the default to include your newsletter sign-up address in the resource box at the end of an article, it is not the best way to get readers to sign up with you.

It is better to write a few free e-courses via autoresponder, to which users can subscribe, and skilfully weave the links into the text of your article.

Here is an explanation of what I mean (and I can assure you, hardly anyone does it this way):

Let's say you have a newsletter about ice fishing and you are in the process of writing a few articles to be sent out for publication. This is how I would proceed:

On the www.getresponse.com site, I would book one of the services and then start writing two or three e-courses on things related to ice fishing and put them in my autoresponder.

Why would I do this if I want interested parties to subscribe to my newsletter?

Well, article writing is always under threat from people who think it's a peccadillo to leave out the author's details. They simply steal the content and pass it off as their own.

Instead of having to deal with people like that every day, I have accepted that these things happen, but I take precautions. And indeed, they work in my favour.

I let readers know in the text of my article that there is a great internet course that they can sign up for free. I don't necessarily have to mention that the course is mine. I simply weave the information into the text so that it looks as if I'm pointing the reader to an interesting free thing.

I would then provide them with the autoresponder link and the knowledge of how to subscribe.

Always keep this in mind when writing the resource box of your article: you don't have to direct prospects to a webpage to sign up for your newsletter.

You can write your newsletter entry information in the Resource Box as follows...

"For more information on how to catch more bass every week, sign up to our newsletter by simply sending a blank email to youremail@address-here.com."

Use a sales letter to attract subscribers

This is something I've seen a lot lately. Some use direct sales letters to get new newsletter subscribers. They create real sales letters, as if they were selling some product, but at the end there is no buy button, but a sign-up-here button.

You don't even realise when reading that it's not a sales product, but only realise the difference at the very end.

This creates a WOW factor for people. Because you present your newsletter in such a valuable way that when they finally realise it's free, readers say to themselves: "Wow, I can hardly believe they're giving away all this information for free!"

This is pure marketing at its best, and it's exciting. Marketing should also be exciting, just like life.

Use mp3 to gain more subscribers

Another great idea to attract new subscribers: Audio interviews with experts. I won't go into the details of how to create audio products, that's a topic for another ebook. But interviewing experts over the phone and recording the whole thing on mp3 will spread your newsletter all over the internet, especially in areas outside of internet marketing where people don't expect to get so much quality information for free.

When you take tactics from the internet marketing space and apply them to other market niches where they have not been seen before, they get a lot more attention. Everything has been tried in internet marketing and we are all almost immune to even the most brilliant methods because we come across them almost every day, but other areas are still receptive to them.

Creating audio interviews is not difficult at all in terms of equipment, and finding professionals to interview is a breeze.

Do you know how I can find experts in any field almost off the cuff?

Well, most FAQ pages on http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ include the author's name and email address. These people are obviously knowledgeable in their field. Therefore, they make great experts who can be interviewed.

Tell them you want to interview them because you read the information they wrote and that you think your subscribers would appreciate their information.

Most of them will do it without asking for a cent, it simply flatters them to be interviewed.

Then inform your fellow publishers that you have created a great set of mp3 interviews that they can have for free to offer to their clients.

Set up a download link to these mp3s on your website and place the subscription option for your newsletter close to it and you will be surprised how many visitors sign up after listening to your mp3s.

Don't make it so that these interested parties have to sign up for the newsletter before they can listen to the mp3s!

Archive your old newsletter issues

Quite often people are reluctant to give out information about themselves because of the general spam epidemic; this is especially true of their email address, even if what you are offering them is free.

But if you allow visitors to read your previous newsletter issues without having to sign up first, you can show them the quality of your content - and will usually make them want to sign up to your newsletter mailing list too!

You may think that archiving and making back issues freely available reduces the desire of your site visitors to subscribe because they get the information without having to reveal their email address, but the opposite is true.

Simply let them know that as a newsletter subscriber they will receive the latest information two weeks earlier than non-subscribers!

Use a known and chargeable autoresponder

I cannot emphasise this enough. Do not use free autoresponders or mailing lists!

As a rule, these service providers not only look unprofessional, they can also close down overnight.

They are also used and badly abused by spammers.

I use www.tom-responder.com and have never had any problems at all. I get everything I need there.

Post in free forums

This is a great way to not only generate new addresses for your mailing list, but also to promote yourself as an expert in your field. Because by posting helpful information in forums in your niche, you will get a lot of attention.

I won't go into detail here, because it's pretty easy to get started:

1. Find suitable forums in your market segment.
2. Read some of the old posts, find out who is the boss, who delivers good content and what the rules are.
3. Start posting useful information and add your newsletter notice at the end of the post or in the signature box.

What most webmasters have trouble with is not writing good posts, but finding forums to post in.

But this homework has been done for you. Go to the websites listed below and enter the topic of your newsletter in the search field and you will get a list of all suitable forums:

• http://www.hoood.de/
• http://www.forenverzeichnis.com/
• http://www.spin.de/themen/

You can google other forum directories yourself.

Swap adverts with other publishers

This is an easy way to generate new subscribers immediately. You place an advert for another publisher's newsletter in your newsletter and the colleague does the same for you.

I'm not a big fan of this approach, but it works. But there are a few things you should be aware of:

Exchanging adverts with others works great if your mailing list is still small and growing quickly. However, it is difficult to find suitable exchange partners if you have 10,000 or more subscribers.

How do you find publishers who are looking for ad exchanges? Nothing could be easier! Make a search query on Google along the following lines:

"Your niche newsletter" for example: "Modelling newsletter"

Then simply contact all the publishers you can and ask if they are willing to swap ad space in their newsletter for ad space in your newsletter.

But don't spam these people. Instead, sign up for their newsletter, visit their websites, write a personalised email so that they realise you're not just trying to harvest email addresses, and you'll be successful.

You don't always have to exchange adverts within exactly the same niche. Related niches are also productive. Just because you publish a houseplant newsletter doesn't mean you can't swap with a garden newsletter. You understand what I mean.

Start a competition

It's my favourite method. The idea is that you get a number of publishers together who all agree to organise this competition with their list, while you do the same with your own list in return.

In order to take part in the competition, each newsletter publisher must sign up to the email list of the other(s) and vice versa.

The competition can be about anything, depending on your market niche. For example, if the publishers contacted have ebooks on sale, you could offer the winner several or all of your ebooks for free as a reward. Anything of value can be entered.

Set up a website specifically for this competition and provide it with all the necessary information. Then tell your subscribers about the competition and how to take part. Everyone on your list who takes part will automatically become a subscriber to the other publishers' newsletters; in return, of course, you will also receive their participating subscribers.

Here are the steps in detail:

1. Find four or five newsletter publishers from your market segment.
2. Contact them and explain your idea and that you are willing to make all the arrangements. All the publishers need to do is give you the newsletter entry information and something that can be offered for the competition.
3. Set up a domain and create an advertising text that explains the conditions of participation and the opportunities to win to interested parties.
4. Write a mailing text that publishers can use to promote the competition.
5. Set a date when these publishers send the advertising mail and how often.
6. Send these publishers the names and email addresses of subscribers.
7. Add new subscribers to your own list. Make sure that no addresses exist twice.
8. Determine a winner.

Give article recommendations

I learnt this tip from Greg Schliesmann and I wish I had been one of the publishers he did this joint venture with, because it resulted in thousands of new subscribers for everyone involved.

You get four or five publishers together again, they can be the same as before, and get their agreement to recommend an article you have written.

That's all, it's not complicated, and if the others join in, they will get thousands of new subscribers virtually overnight.

You now write an article about the best newsletters in your niche, and these are of course the publishers who agreed to recommend and promote your article.

But write this article objectively, instead of simply praising newsletters in an overtly subjective way; write like a reporter would. Anyone who publishes this article now will get new subscribers, including you, and everyone will be happy.

Sometimes you simply have to create events yourself, especially in internet marketing, and not wait for others to come to you. You make things happen, you can do it. It's not difficult, just leave the usual well-worn thought patterns.

This method works just as well for paid products, it doesn't have to be exclusively newsletters. You could get all the webmasters and publishers in your niche together and write an article about the best products on the market. This way, everyone gets sales just by spreading the word about this specialised article.

The thank-you-for-your-registration page

Simple. Get a group of publishers together again and tell them that you are willing to direct new subscribers to your newsletter to a page where they can sign up for their newsletter if they agree to do the same for you.

You see this from time to time. After you have signed up for a newsletter on a website, you are taken to another page that recommends another newsletter.

This is something like a small version of co-registration, but it costs you nothing.

Buy Solo adverts

Whenever I place adverts in Internet magazines, they are solo adverts. These are sent out on their own, without competing small or other adverts.

As these adverts stand alone, they need to be a pretty good length. Some say the shorter an advert is, the better it is, for the simple reason that the reader has less to read, in reality a well written longer advert attracts much, much better.

There are usually word count and length limits for these adverts, so you are well advised to find out about the conditions.

If you really want to make the most of an advert, then you need to work hard on a captivating headline. If you can write a good headline, the rest should follow.

Place classified adverts

Classified adverts are running text adverts, usually no longer than four or five lines in newsletters or ezines. They are not as effective as solo adverts, but they are very cheap. The secret here is also to write an interesting headline. Even more so here.

You get the most out of classified ads (this also applies to every other advertising measure on the Internet) if you lead the reader directly to the entry option for a free product or a free course, which is then delivered via autoresponder. Once you have the email address, you can advertise again and again until a sale has been made or the user has unsubscribed.

This is by far the best way to use classified adverts.

Place sponsor adverts

Sponsored adverts are usually at the top of a newsletter and are the first thing readers see. They usually cost half as much as a solo advert, but they are not nearly as good.

They are usually five to eight lines long. Focus on the headline again and lead the reader directly to your autoresponder.

Build up as large a network as possible

Wherever you are, network with other people. You never know who you will bump into. Let as many people as possible know what you do and that you are one of the best in your field.

Participating in seminars and attending trade fairs and congresses is always a great opportunity to get in touch with people in your field and build relationships with important online businesses.

You never know who in your expertise network might be able to help you one day.

Create and sell ebooks with reprint rights

Whether you like it or not, having your own product gives you more flexibility when it comes to online advertising.

And believe it or not, putting together an ebook isn't much more than a week's work if it's done right. If you do it right, the profits can flow for almost a lifetime.

I still get cheques for work I once did two years ago and I owe that to the power of affiliate programs and ebooks with viral marketing.

OK, let's get to the nitty gritty. What is a viral marketing ebook and why should you create one?

A viral marketing ebook is an ebook whose sole purpose is to spread quickly on the Internet under all circumstances. It is not intended primarily and directly to make money. Rather, you want other people to sell and give it away as often as possible.

Why?

Because the ebook is full of affiliate links (affiliate programme links) to other people's products, and every time someone sells or gives away your ebook (depends on how you want it), more people see your affiliate links - and that costs you what? Exactly: NOTHING!

The best example I can give you in this context is that of Yanik Silver. He created two marketing ebooks that spread like wildfire across the internet. He gave anyone who bought the ebooks for $19 and $17 respectively the right to sell or give them away to customers indefinitely.

Needless to say, thousands of resellers and webmasters started reselling it and making it popular on the internet. To this day, he still earns good money from these ebooks and has become one of the best-known internet marketers.

So, how do you create a viral marketing ebook? Here are the individual steps:

Create a product idea based on an affiliate programme that you are already promoting.

It is not difficult to produce ideas. I keep bringing up this example: If you are promoting an affiliate programme about sports betting, then why not write an ebook on how to become a successful bettor. Throughout your book, you can now recommend your own affiliate links. For example, a possible title could be: 101 Insider Secrets About Sports Betting How to Bet with Other People's Money

A tried and tested way to produce ideas is to look at what others are already selling and then imitate this. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, don't make things harder than they are.

Get the tools you need to succeed

You will need the following tools and aids:

A) a domain name

Choose a domain name that is as short as possible but still describes the topic of your ebook well.

B) Web hosting

Let me first explain what you're paying for, because choosing the right web host is incredibly important. You need a company with 24/7 support, so around the clock every day of the week. If your site is suddenly down and you can't contact anyone to get it back online, you're losing money, and often a lot of it.

C) Autoresponder

You need a reliable autoresponder so that you can contact your prospects regularly. For example, you can use it to give away a free e-course or a free ebook (to get the email addresses) and, of course, your newsletter. This is all automated, i.e. without any work for you.

D) Payment provider

The payment of your products and services can also be automated. Various payment providers are available, for example:

Via www.clickbank.com you can accept payment via all major credit card providers. Clickbank also provides thousands of affiliate programmes. The one-time setup fee is less than 50 dollars. Clickbank receives a small commission for each sale, but this is much cheaper than handling payments and billing yourself.

What Clickbank is in the English-speaking world, www.shareit.de is in the German-speaking world.

E) Ebook software

You should offer your ebook in PDF format so that everyone can read it. Some ebooks are in EXE format, but Mac users can't read them. You can create your ebooks with www.createpdf.com at a very favourable price.

You can even do this free of charge via FREEpdf:

http://www.chip.de/downloads/FreePDF_19987224.html

Create a table of contents

Finishing an ebook in one go is difficult and trying to do it without a content outline is almost impossible.

The first ebook I ever wrote took me over six months, but now I write them in less than a week, and that includes sales copy and page creation.

So think about 12 to 15 chapters and write them one after the other. Each page should have between 700 and 1000 words. Provide useful information, not information that you can get for free elsewhere.

Write your content

As I mentioned before: you need original content. There are simply too many ebooks out there where the writers are just regurgitating information that you can get for free elsewhere. This reduces the value of your ebook, which means that fewer people will distribute it and it will be read less.

If you're really struggling with writing, I recommend doing the following: The best way to get a lot of authentic information without writing it yourself is to interview experts in the field.

For example, if you're writing an ebook on how someone can improve their handicap in golf, I'm sure it won't be too hard to find at least one local expert that you can squeeze in person, over the phone or at least over the internet. You then put all that expert advice into your ebook, which is also a good selling point.

When writing, never forget what the purpose of the ebook is. The purpose is to generate you ongoing commissions from affiliate programmes. Therefore, don't be afraid to include affiliate links. Just make sure you do it tactfully, discreetly and in the right place.

Another good idea is to integrate an option in the ebook to sign up for your newsletter. This way you not only earn commission on sales, but also generate new email addresses for your mailing list without having to do anything extra.

Make it clear that the buyer of the ebook has the right to resell it as their own. Clearly state that they have resale rights to the ebook and can sell or give it away as they see fit.

Write a sales text

The sales text is crucial to your success, because it is the basis of the sale.

Creating a sales letter is a lot of work, especially if you're new to the business. The best method - and the method I use - is to emulate other successful sales letters.

If for some reason you don't think you can do it yourself, you have two options:

- You use software that helps you put together a sales text.

- You hire a ghostwriter.

Set up a 5-part autoresponder email series

The most effective way to write a free 5-day email course that your prospects have signed up for via the pop-up window mentioned earlier is to take individual chapters from your ebook and use them as samples and appetisers.

Remember to emphasise a sense of urgency. You need to make those prospects who didn't buy immediately feel like they're missing out on a great opportunity. If they don't buy despite the favourable price, it's more likely that they weren't seriously interested or that they're just freebie collectors.

Do some advertising!

Depending on the topic, your target group probably consists of different people. But no matter what you are selling, there is one group that wants your ebook for one reason, because they want to sell it themselves - they are the internet marketers.

Even if your ebook is about hippos, what really matters to these people is the fact that they can sell it as their own. For this reason, such ebooks always do well.

The key to success is to find a target group in your niche and then the appropriate internet marketers.

Start an affiliate programme to promote your newsletter

If co-registration doesn't appeal to you, you could start your own affiliate programme to make your newsletter better known.

This has been done successfully in the past, especially if you know how much your subscribers are worth to you.

If you know that each subscriber to your newsletter is worth 1 euro, you would probably be happy to pay 20, 30, 40 or 50 cents per address to your affiliates, which is a good deal for both sides.

You won't make any money through your affiliate programme by selling a product, but you will get a long mailing list of subscribers who will become buyers over time.

(If you have a list of 2,000 addresses that bring you 2,000 euros a month in sales through newsletter follow-up, then each address is worth 1 euro. Every month).

Use a dynamic email signature

This one is so simple, but people either forget it or don't do it right: sending a few emails every day is a great way to acquire new subscribers.

All you need to do is place a 4-line text advert at the end of each outgoing email promoting your newsletter. You can use a small advert that you have already used for advertising in other newsletters or ezines.

You will be surprised how many people sign up.

Press releases: not dead, just evolved

Mark Twain once said that the rumour of his death was greatly exaggerated. The same can be said of press releases; they are not dead, they have just evolved and changed.

These PR professionals spreading the death rumours would have you believe that press releases should never have been written, let alone distributed. I disagree with this dusty view.

Flooding the media with press releases has not been good practice since Edward Bernays opened the first PR firm in 1919. Any competent PR person has known for years that media coverage is almost never a direct result of a press release.

Let's talk about the evolution of the press release into a solid tool that helps organisations deliver key messages to a wide audience in the digital age.

In the not-so-distant pre-internet past, press releases were aimed exclusively at trade and consumer sales channels. The media served as gatekeepers, making decisions on whether or how to use incoming information.

Today, however, thanks to the Internet, it is possible for organisations to bypass media filters in numerous ways.

Bear this in mind: Both journalists and consumers use the Internet for research. More than 550 million search queries are made daily via the web. In the US, users search for something on Yahoo! News, Google News or other news search engines 27 million times each month. In a recent survey by Middleberg/Ross and the Pew Internet Project, we learn that 98% of journalists go online daily, 92% do so to research articles, 76% find new sources and experts, 73% find press releases, 68 million Americans are online daily,

30% use a search engine to find information, 27% go online for news.

You need to think differently about press release writing in this new age. You can increase the influence of your PRs beyond the media by making them search engine friendly. Ultimately, your press releases will become long-lasting, searchable and findable online databases for your organisation.

Once they are properly written - and also meet the needs of both readers and search engines - they still need to be distributed. PR Web™ and PR Newswire are my two favourites. Both services help you get into newsrooms and beyond.

PR Web emails press releases to 60,000 to 100,000 contacts worldwide every day.

Journalists, analysts, freelance writers, media channels, newsrooms as well as ordinary internet users are all signed up to receive this information. PRs are also distributed via FTP, XML feeds and a network of dedicated websites. PR Web related sites are among the 2,500 most visited websites.

Every press release sent by PR Web is search engine optimised and PR Web guarantees that your press release will be considered by Yahoo! which is the world's number one most visited website on the Internet.

Does that work, you ask? Let me give you a fresh example. I used PR Web to send out a press release about my client Brent Dees and his Focus Four training for entrepreneurs. The editor of Leadership Excellence emailed me after seeing the PM and asked Brent to write an article for his magazine.

The granddaddy of all press release services is PR Newswire, which delivers directly to the central computers of daily newspapers, weeklies, national news services, trade publications and radio and television newsrooms.

In the USA alone, it reaches a total of 22,000 media outlets. All press releases are distributed and archived in more than 3,600 websites, databases and online services. PR Newswire's own website is one of the 2,000 most visited sites on the Internet.

Finally, let's take a look at online newsrooms. Their main purpose is to provide journalists with easily accessible data about organisations, such as executive CVs, income figures, key contacts and other specialist information. An organisation should therefore place press releases here, especially if it wants to reach executives, investors and influential people etc.

Consumers interested in technology often visit online newsrooms for the same reasons as journalists: they expect to find specialised information.

Flinging out press releases and dumping them in the media in an unsorted manner is a foolish practice. But using them as a strategic weapon to target influential people and leaders in the digital realm is smart PR management. Experts who believe press releases are dead need to evolve or they are doomed.

Give your newsletter personality

What makes the difference between the countless newsletters out there and yours? One thing and one thing only:

Your personality.

You're not a lifeless drone; add some spark to your writing, be funny, be witty, be controversial - just don't be boring!

Tell a story. Stories are great for captivating people before they realise you're selling them something.

Below is a short story I used to promote a work at home affiliate programme.

Are you different?

I don't know about you, but I've always thought I was different from my contemporaries. This is an amusing story and will probably touch most who read this ebook.

When the children at my school were playing at lunchtime, as children do, I would set up my shop. The school canteen never offered a large selection of sweets, so I always brought my own to school, which I got from a shop in my neighbourhood, where they were much cheaper and very plentiful.

I always brought a bag of lollies to school, and believe me, I was a pretty popular kid. Other kids would ask me for lollies all day and it got quite annoying, so something had to be done quickly.

It made me downright sick to simply give away lollipops I had bought with my hard-earned pocket money. So I decided to set up my own little lolly black market business. I bought all the varieties of lollies you couldn't get at school and jacked up the price by 500%. I bought them for 10 cents each and sold them for 50 cents. The demand was so great that I had to double my supply. In one day, I was able to make 20 dollars with lollies that I had bought for 5 dollars.

Of course, I had certain "VIP" customers who I gave more favourable prices to, which was only fair as they made up a large part of my business. I also had a few people I gave lollies to for free, for the sake of peace.

Eventually, more kids were doing what I was doing and I had some competition on my hands. After a few months, I stopped selling lollipops when the demand got too hectic and the neighbourhood shop called my mum.

I knew I had a passion in life, but I didn't realise what it was until I was in year 10 and I left school to pursue a career in direct mail. Marketing was and is my life, I love it. I read everything I could get my hands on and have a collection of books like a bookshop. Of course, at the time, I wasn't sure I wanted to do anything serious with marketing, but I knew I never wanted to work for anyone but myself.

Every day I stop and think about what I would be doing if I hadn't discovered the joy of working from home, which I also owe to my father, who taught me that there is more to life than working from 9 to 5 every day.

Ensure that your newsletter does not end up on spam lists

Here are a few useful tips to make sure you can't be called a spammer.

Familiarise yourself with the legal requirements.

Only use the double opt-in procedure.

Save the detailed information about all entries and withdrawals, in particular the IP address.

Never buy bulk enamel lists from the Internet.

If you make use of co-registration service providers, make sure that they are reputable and do not use dubious methods to generate traffic.

If you set up an affiliate programme, you should include an anti-spam clause in the contract.

Avoid spam-suspicious expressions such as "free", "free of charge", "special", "guaranteed" etc. in the subject line.

Never buy bulk enamel lists

I just read a post in a well-known marketing forum where someone wrote that he had access to a list of 800,000 email addresses of people interested in making money.

He said that the list belonged to a friend and that he was prepared to make it available to him for a mailing on the condition that he did not mention his name.

That should have been the first alarm bell to ring. He also wasn't sure how the list had been compiled and how the subscribers had signed up.

Moreover, it was not one huge list, but a bundle of lists that were simply summarised.

If the guy actually decides to email the list, he'll be in big trouble and he won't make any money that was worth the effort.

Never send emails to lists that you do not know anything about!

Set up a membership page for subscribers only

Do you really want to boost your enrolment rate? Then start a membership page just for newsletter subscribers.

The key to success is that you can also offer truly fantastic content, so good and so much that customers are really willing to pay for it.

And keep it constantly up to date.

Another thing that comes in handy when running a membership site is an organisation tool. Anyone who has ever made a membership site knows that after a while you have a lot of content. Organising this well to make it easy for members to find and read is very important.

Such a recommended article manager is, for example

http://www.interactivetools.com/

This content management software makes it easy to manage news-orientated websites, especially for non-technical users. You can use it to manage articles, categories and authors. You can upload graphics, create texts in the WYSIWYG editor and much more.

The tool can save a busy webmaster a few hours a day struggling with HTML.

Create a free course for new subscribers

This tip is not difficult to implement. With a free course like this, you can easily promote anything, be it an affiliate programme, your own product or whatever. It's the sales accelerator that allows you to contact your leads as often as you want.

However, I must warn you not to write to your customers every day, perhaps not even once a week, but only when you have something really substantial to offer. This will keep your list happy and your emails won't be seen as junk mail that nobody wants to read.

Above all else, we first need a good title. Nobody will register if they are not interested. Many authors fail here with an otherwise good report. You need to choose a title that is as exciting and precise as possible.

Here are a few examples of really poor titles:

• Make money online
• Anti-Migraine Report
• Easily create your own product
• Play cricket like a pro

I may have been a little harsh in labelling these titles as poor, but they simply lack that certain something that ignites the reader's imagination.

Here are my suggestions for embellishing the titles more. Any title can be spiced up according to this principle:

• Generate permanent income with partner programmes in just 7 days
• Stop migraines in 5 simple steps
• How to create hot digital products that sell like crazy in no time at all
• Pitch like Lee and bat like Border - playing cricket like a pro

So, what's the easiest way to create your own 5-part course?

The best thing is to write about five articles yourself on a topic you want to promote and pack them into a free course.

The problem that most people who try to do this have is that they write thousands and thousands of words at once, get tired and never finish.

But if you subdivide the topic, it is much easier. Example: If I were to write a free course on how to make your own fishing bait profitably, then I would go something like this:

Lesson 1: Why fishing lures are so profitable

Lesson 2: How to make your own fishing bait at the kitchen table

Lesson 3: How to automate the entire manufacturing process

Lesson 4: How to market your fishing bait offline

Lesson 5: How to market your fishing lures online with little money

I would skilfully weave links to affiliate programmes into every single lesson and mention my newsletter. The content of the lessons needs to be of high quality and not just some blah blah blah. If you do this, you're sure to get a lot of people to sign up or buy from you.

Of course, you shouldn't just throw a few items together. You need to combine them in an appealing way. The first email, for example, could be a thank you for the customer's registration, which contains a reference to the welcome gift. With the first lesson, you then begin to build customer loyalty. So if you have such info articles, it's better than anything else and they should be used from day one.

Set up your own forum

Having your own forum is a great opportunity to get new subscribers to your newsletter. Building a community within your website has the effect of bringing visitors back to your site again and again, with the result that it is more than likely that users will sign up for your newsletter.

You can see a good example at http://www.howtocorp.com/. Have a look at the forum. The webmaster has his newsletter entry field there and also product recommendations. People like to help other people and answer their questions. And after a while you no longer have to answer many questions yourself.

The best way to start your own forum is to do it yourself and host it with your hoster. Do not use service providers, especially not free services.

If you already have a number of customers and prospects, let them know that you are planning to launch a newsletter and let them know that they can sign up at any time and receive all the information for free.

These people have already expressed an interest in you or what you are selling. So it really makes sense for them to hear from you more and more often.

Set up ongoing thank you pages

This is a secret that no one I know uses and I'm pretty sure no one ever has.

As you know, someone who has subscribed to a newsletter is then redirected to another page that confirms the subscription.

Most webmasters just put something like "Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter." And then maybe they add a hint to buy a certain product. But they could make much better use of the opportunity.

Once your new subscriber has signed up and reached the thank you page, they should be given the opportunity to sign up for another free newsletter or course, if you have one.

This way you get the same user in maybe three or four lists or courses!

Allow users to use your newsletter in their own works

Tell everyone who has already signed up as a subscriber that they can forward your newsletter to friends and even that they can use parts or all of the newsletter in their own works and newsletters.

Provided, of course, that you include a backlink or cite a source including your URL. So this is like writing an article, only with your newsletter issue instead of a single article.

Send letters of recommendation

Here's a very clever way to generate a small but steady flow of new daily subscribers.

Whenever you have used a product or service and were satisfied with it, write a positive comment and send it to the supplier. They will be delighted and publish the testimonial on their website together with a URL link.

This way, visitors to other websites will also find out about yours!

If you register a new domain to which only the readers of your product recommendation come, you can even measure the success.

Get other newsletter publishers to mention you all the time

One of the very best ways to gain subscribers at no cost is to get other publishers to keep mentioning you. This builds trust with their subscribers and when they finally join your newsletter, they already know a lot about you and are eagerly awaiting your emails.

Fine, but how do you get other publishers to mention you in their newsletters?

There are various possibilities: Organise a competition, claim to know/be able to do something that no one else knows/can do, give your colleague a little insider tip and allow them to pass it on to their subscribers, and so on.

Build relationships with these newsletter writers and become their friend.

Be economical with data

If you really want a higher percentage of visitors to your website, squeeze page and so on to sign up for your newsletter, then be sparing with the request for personal data.

Users always have a subliminal concern that their data will be misused - and not without good reason, as we know.

That is why the Golden Rule is called:

The less data, the more subscribers!

In fact, you don't even need to know where someone lives or when they were born. All you need to deliver a newsletter is the email address.

Even asking for first name and surname is not absolutely necessary. You can offer these entry fields, but they are optional, i.e. the new subscriber may or may not disclose them. They can enter a nickname or omit the information altogether. Whatever the user decides, their subscription request will not be rejected just because a field is not filled in.

I would like to thank you again for devoting your time and attention to this basic course and I hope that you have learnt something new in terms of list building and that the information is profitable for your business.