You're starting to get significant traffic to your website from
the search engines and links placed on other sites. The question
now is: What are your visitors doing once they get to your site?
The nature of the Internet is such that a person can visit your
site, click on a link, get taken elsewhere, and never return!
Each visitor to your site is a potential customer, and so everyone
who leaves your site is a potentially lost sale...unless you
can somehow draw them back to your site at some other time.
How are you going to do that? You could continually advertise
in the same resource that led them to your site in the first
place, in the hope that they will return. But there is a much
easier way that will bring them back, and will in fact improve
your website traffic and sales immensely. Start publishing a
newsletter!
What is a newsletter?
Simply put, a newsletter is a periodic mailing sent out by you,
the website owner, to those who have asked to join your mailing
list (the subscribers). Your newsletter could contain articles
of interest to your subscribers, hints and tips that would help
the reader, as well as reasons for returning to your website,
such as the announcement of a new competition or new features
on your site.
Note that you will often see the term ezine used. This is
basically another word for an Internet newsletter, derived
from the word magazine. So an ezine is an electronic magazine,
whereas a newsletter can be either an Internet publication
or a "real world" offline publication.
Newsletters are so valuable for bringing repeat sales and
visitors to your site that I consider them an absolute must
for any serious online business.
Do you really need a newsletter?
A surprising number of website owners do not publish a newsletter,
and are missing out on a traffic creation machine that is possibly
more powerful than the search engines!
It is also worth mentioning at this point that a newsletter
can be very easy to publish if done in the right way.
As mentioned at the outset, without a newsletter many people
will find your site, browse for a while, and then disappear,
never to return. However, you need them to come back, since
the majority of people will buy from you only after repeated
visits to your site. So how do you invite them back if you
don't have their email address? The answer is, you can't.
You have to hope that they bookmarked your site in their browser,
or else wrote down or memorized your URL. And we all know
how reliable "memories" are!
A newsletter gives you the advantage of being able to repeatedly
invite visitors back to your site.
Reasons for publishing a newsletter
During the course of this you will come to realize that there
are innumerable reasons for publishing a newsletter. Here
are four of the most compelling:
1. You can invite subscribers to return to your site. You can
use your newsletter to announce changes, new features, new articles
and new competitions to your site. If nothing else, your newsletter
will be a constant, regular reminder that your site exists.
2. You can sell directly to your subscribers. If your site
is about a particular topic, your newsletter will also be
on the same topic, so people will subscribe to your newsletter
because they are interested in that topic. Therefore, when
you sell a product or service to your subscribers related
to the newsletter topic, you already have an interested, targetted
audience!
3. You can promote your newsletter as a separate resource. Hopefully
you are already doing your best to promote your website, but
if you promote your newsletter with the same enthusiasm, your
newsletter will very quickly become a real traffic builder!
In the chapters that follow, I will show you a number of extremely
effective ways of promoting your newsletter. Use them all, and
soon people will come flocking to your site!
4. You can sell advertising space in your newsletter. Once
it reaches a certain circulation level and becomes well-established,
you can start offering advertising space in your newsletter
for a price! Most publishers base their price on a CPM basis;
i.e. a dollar rate per thousand subscribers. A targetted newsletter
with a specific audience (such as computer programmers or
homeowners) could expect to get a CPM of between $10 and $50,
depending on the market. Thus, when your newsletter reaches
a circulation of, say, 5,000 subscribers, you could charge
anywhere between $50 and $250 for a text advert in your newsletter.
but then ask yourself: how many adverts will I accept each
issue? How often will I publish my newsletter?
If your newsletter is published weekly, and you allow 4 adverts
in each issue at $50 an ad, that's a maximum of $200 ad revenue
you could be earning every week, simply for running an email
newsletter. Now imagine how much you could make when your
circulation reaches 50,000, enabling you to charge $1,000
or more per advert.
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