How to build your ezine list by "buying" subscribers?
It's getting harder and harder to build a decent subscription base for your ezine.
In the old days, two or three years ago, word of mouth and other free methods were enough to build your list. But now there is so much competition that people are already suffering from ezine overload.
One way - and the best way if you can write well and quickly - is to submit articles to ezines and websites. But writing well is not something all of us can do.
But one other sure-fire way to get new readers is pay for them. Call it advertising if you like.
We all know that advertising works. The big companies are the ones that spend most on advertising and marketing. The bigger the promotional budget the bigger the sales. When I was in England the other week I read that Walkers Crisps became the countries biggest selling potato chip last year by spending around $500 million dollars on advertising. Do you think they'd have reached that coveted number one spot without spending big on advertising? Of course they wouldn't.
It stands to reason that if you advertise your ezine heavily you're going to get a lot more subscribers than if your ezine remains a little known secret.
( though whether you retain the new subscribers you "buy" depends on the quality of your publication )
Here's what to do:
1. Decide how much you can afford to spend on promotional activities...on marketing/advertising. Set aside a budget for buying advertising - whether it's a percentage of the income you make from your web site, or just money you can afford to set aside by quitting smoking or something. You also need to work out how much a new subscriber is worth. Here's a clip from Ken Evoy's brilliant Sales From The Edge ezine, which you can subscribe to (http://salesnow.sitesell.com)
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"Before forking out any money, always think of what you can get in return first (sorry, I'm a mercenary guy here). So ask yourself... if you pay GoTo.com $x per click-through, how much profit can you get in return?
Confused? A little math will clear things up in a jiffy...
Suppose you are selling a digital product (i.e., zero incremental per-unit cost of production) at $50, and you have a 1% conversion ratio, i.e., you make one sale for every 100 visitors. So one visitor is worth $0.50 ($50/100), and that is the maximum amount you should bid at GoTo.com for each keyword. We will call this your BID CAP."
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Of course, if you're not selling a product, just giving away an ezine, you need to look at it a little differently. A simple way is to add up your monthly advertising income + affiliate program sales income and divide it by the number of subscribers. If you make $500 a month from 2000 subscribers then each subscriber is worth 25 cents. (though if they stay subscribers they will be worth a whole lot more over time).
2. Buy spots on Goto and similar pay-per-clickthro search engines. I've listed a few on the Goto pages I put up at (http://www.ozemedia.com/goto.htm) You'll also find links to some great Goto keyword tools
3. Buy advertising in other ezines. You can find a lot of info on this at Ruth Townsend's Directory of Ezines at (http://www.lifestylespub.com)
4. Running an affiliate program where you pay people to send subscribers to you. Two ezines that do this are Bizbot and Web Promote. I'm not sure how well this works though. I signed up for their affiliate programs maybe a year ago, but I've never received a check from either of them so I guess I haven't sent many people their way.
5. Directly paying for subscribers. A number of web sites have sprung up which act as newsletter subscription points. The details of your ezine are entered into their databases and a subscription form to your ezine is placed on their web site. You then pay them for each subscriber they send your way.
Most of them charge between 8 and 15 cents for every new subscriber they get you. And it can work out to be expensive. With Newsletters For Free you have to agree to pay for 3000 at $300 a month, if they can produce that many subscribers for you.
One thing to think about before you start using these services, is that when people find your ezine through one of these sites the unsubscribe rates may well be higher than usual. This is because people often just check a number of subscribe boxes, then later realize they've got too much mail, and go back and tick the unsubscribe boxes.
The best way to avoid people leaving your newsletter is to put out a quality publication.
List World
List World will get you subscribers for $0.15 each. You can elect to receive them as individual emails or they can be added via email commands directly to your list server. (http://www.listworld.net/)
Newsletters For Free
Newsletters for Free charge you 10cents a subscriber. It's a good professional site with plenty of traffic. The downside is that you have to agree to pay for at least 3000 a month if they can send you that many. You can elect to have new subscribers sent to you daily, weekly, or monthly, and you should elect to get them daily. If someone signs up and doesn't get a welcome letter from you for weeks then they might think you're spamming them. (http://www.newslettersforfree.com/)
Best Newsletters
This site used to charge you $15 a month for 100 subscribers. If they didn't get you 100 new people you didn't pay, but now they've changed to charging a fee of 8 cents a subscriber. (http://www.bestnewsletters.com/)
Cumili
This one works differently by billing you a yearly fee of $100, but you can reduce this to just $30 if you run two newsletter adverts for them, plus link to them in your "thanks for subscribing"letter.
(http://Cumuli.com/)
You can find a lot of excellent information on building your ezine list, on how to set ad rates, on how to judge the value of a subscriber - and a lot more - at (http://www.ezine-tips.com)
My 3 "Must Use" Secrets for Big Fat Subscriber Lists
1. Give the Subscriber a *Reason* to Subscribe
Several psychological studies have demonstrated that giving someone a reason to comply to your request will greatly increase their chances of compliance. And the reason doesn't even have to be good! Amazingly, just using the word "because" will increase your response.
2. Really "Sell" the Content of Your Newsletter
People don't know whether your newsletter contains pure junk or gold. You could have the greatest, most informative newsletter in the world - if you don't *tell* them, they will never know.
Now, here's the key. You don't want to tell them yourself "my newsletter is the best". No one will believe you. The best way to let people know how great you are is to have someone else tell them for you!
You should get a testimonial or two about the content of your newsletter and use this to "sell" the content of your newsletter.
3. Provide an Incentive to Subscribe
How many people offer a free newsletter? No one can know for sure, but I'll tell you that the answer is: "too many"!
What is *unique* about what you offer? If you tie your subscription into being able to access something unique, I promise your subscriber rate will go through the roof.
Can you offer a free service? Can you offer a free download? A free (and unique!) report? Access to some exclusive information?
Generate curiosity in your potential subscriber. People are inherently curious and it is painful when curiosity is not satisfied. Set it up so subscribing to your newsletter is the only thing they can do to satisfy that curiosity.
Now, let's put this all together. Here is an example of a "call to subscribe" you can use that puts all three principles together. Put this above your subscription form for one week and I predict your visitor-to-subscriber rate will *at least* triple:
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"~Newsletter Name~ is fantastic.
"It's one of the very few newsletters I actually read every time."
- Mark Joyner of ROIbot
Subscribe right now; because, for a limited time you will be given instant access to the powerful report: "My 3 'Must Use' Secrets for Big Fat Subscriber Lists."
And you'll get more great tips like this in each and every issue.
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This should be enough to get you started. Sit down right now and brainstorm. Think of at least 5 ways you can apply these principles to your newsletter subscription process. Pick the best ones and apply them *today*.
How to Design a PopUp Window to Boost Opt-Ins
I get many emails a month from people asking how to go about designing a popup window to extract the maximum number of opt-ins from visitors to their web site. In this article I outline the seven essential steps you should take in your design of a successful popup:
1. PAY your subscriber
Okay, not literally PAY them, but you generally need to give something back in return for the visitor's name and email address.
For example, a free course, a free book, a free consultation, anything that's of VALUE to your visitors and of RELEVANCE to your web site or business. I see so many popups that just say 'Type in your name and email address here:' without giving anything in return for these details.
2. Make your headline SELL
The headline of your popup is incredibly important, as it's often the first part of the popup window that the visitor's eye is attracted to. If it doesn't interest them, they'll shut down the popup immediately.
What can you do to improve your headline?
You need to focus strongly on the BENEFIT to the potential subscriber - tell them exactly how are they going to BENEFIT from giving you their name and email address. For example, the following are all headlines suitable for my own site that offer a clear benefit to the reader:
"Boost your Subscribers by 535%"
"Discover Secret PopUp Techniques"
"FREE Report: Exit PopUp Boosts Sales 110%"
You could emulate this type of benefit-laden headline for your own site.
3. Make it load QUICK
A slow loading popup is going to be a quickly closed popup! No visitor to your web site is going to sit around while your elaborate popup loads all your fancy graphics, they're just going to close it straight away - it's your job to CAPTURE THEIR INTEREST as soon as possible, and thereby prevent closure of the window before you've made your offer, and hopefully get them to type in their details.
Some graphics are usually more effective than none, but minimize your use of them, and optimize the graphics files before uploading to your server.
4. Use an effective TITLE
I see many popups where the title of the popup window (i.e., in the title bar, set by the HTML title tags) is completely inappropriate. For example, 'popup page' or 'popup1'. At best, this looks unprofessional, so try to make your title relevant to the offer you are making to the visitor, and mirror your headline in some way.
5. BALANCE the popup page
The page you display in the popup window should at the very least look pleasing to the eye. This means the fonts on the page should be consistent and not look out of place, the colors should provide high contrast and make it easy to read, and the alignment of the text and any images on the page should not make any element look out of place.
6. Offer a way to CLOSE the popup window
You can easily add a button or a link to your popup page that allows visitors to close the popup window if they wish. You can do this easily by adding the code onclick="self.close();return false;" to your link or button tag.
7. KEEP IT SIMPLE
Overall, the best rule you can follow is just to keep to the point and Keep It Simple - this way you can capture the attention of your visitor quickly and easily and not distract their attention from your main aim which is to get their name and email address. And of course, once you've got their email address, treat it well and keep their interest.
By following these seven essential tips, you'll definitely have all the basics in place. The trick then is to keep on tweaking and testing your popup to try and optimize on your results.
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