Keep in touch

Keep in touch
A newsletter is not just an email filled with advertisements and sales pitches. Emails like that are called spam. Instead, a newsletter needs to contain NEWS--news about things related to the subject of your blog or other website.

With the advent of the popularity of blogs, the need to publish a newletter of some kind would seem to be diminished. After all, the news items are already being published in your blog, right? While there is a lot of current news being talked about on your daily blog, there is still room for a newsletter. The real purpose behind a newsletter is to keep in touch with your friends who read your blog, and your customers who have made a purchase from you.

In light of this, be sure and include things in the newsletter which do not appear on your blog. If your website is a store that sells merchandise that you ship out yourself, then be sure and include a few private specials in the newsletter that are not known to the general public, as well as special coupons if you use coupons in your business.

Often, rather than try and fit all this into a short email (these things DO need to be short!) some newsletter authors send only the headlines and subtitiles, or basic info and coupons, in the email itself. They then include links that will take the reader to the actual fancy newsletter, which of course is really simply a dedicated page on your main website.

Not more frequently than monthly, please.

The biggest key in making this work is, as always, finding ways to make it interesting and useful to your commercial family. Don’t send your emails to people who aren’t interested in what you are doing. You will only waste your time. The goal is to have the best list, not the longest list.

I think it was Mark Twain who admonished us not to waste our time trying to teach pigs how to sing: “You’ll waste your time and annoy the pig.”

Your visitors are hardly pigs, of course--it’s only a quote.

POSTED BY RELAX MAX AT 10:36 AM


LABELS:

Blogging for dollars

The actual mechanics of earning a good living from a blog are very simple and straightforward. In fact, there are only two things you have to think about and work at. It is HOW WELL you do those two things that determines whether or not your blog will make you any money or not.

Everything you do will fall under one of these two major categories:

1. Setting up and maintaining your blog
2. Driving traffic to your blog

There are many specific things you have to do, and there are many subtleties and variations as to how you decide to do them, but they will all fall under one of those two main categories.

Interestingly, the actual act of blogging—of writing posts—falls under the second category, not the first.

In order to understand new concepts, it is often helpful to compare these new ideas to things we are already familiar with. With that in mind, let’s compare the opening of your new blog with something you may be more familiar with: the establishment of a “regular” business—say a grocery store.

In such a comparison, setting up your blog will include pretty much all the things you would need to do to open a grocery store. Driving traffic to your blog would include all the things you would do to induce customers to come into your store.

Here we should pause and note the difference between the two words “shop” and “buy.” The word “shop” implies you have induced people to come into your store to look around. The word “buy” means they have purchased something from you and given you money. In the blogging business, this distinction is important because you can make money either way.

Use newsletters to build loyalty

As you continue to broaden the circle of your internet friends, don’t forget the importance of offering a newsletter. Keep your newsletter interesting and entertaining, and be sure to talk about things that were not discussed on the regular blog. Use a newsletter to make friends and to build a solid base of regular visitors to your website.

Don’t send out your newsletter so often that you irritate people and defeat your purpose. They should look forward to receiving it because of its interesting content. For the same reason, don’t put too much advertising in your newsletter.

Make sure your newsletter is sent out regularly. Keep in touch, so that your blog readers are reminded of you. A newsletter is also a good place to run unique coupons and other special incentives that are not available to the general web population.

Along the same lines as a newsletter is the offering of an RSS feed. This also will help keep your regular readers in the loop and help keep them in your big happy blog family.

Links

Another really important thing that will increase traffic to your website is when other sites begin to link to you. As usual, there are several ways to get people to do this, but the most important way is the same: content. That is, make your content interesting enough and entertaining enough and useful enough so that people will WANT to link to your information and articles.

When you have been producing quality content for a while, you can begin mentioning it when you are out reading the blogs of other people and when you are making comments on those blogs. Also email the owners of popular blogs about your subject, and briefly tell them you have written an article they may be interested in reading, and give them the link to the article. Don’t do this very often, until you build up a circle of friends by making the rounds like this.

That’s really what the Web is all about--reading each other’s material, inviting them to read yours, interacting. If you continue to be a frequent commentor on other blogs, you will begin to get noticed. People will begin to visit your own blog as well, and many will begin to link to it.

The simple act of commenting on several blogs on a daily basis will in itself bring you some additional traffic, even if the visitor doesn’t actually put up a link to you on his site. You can’t be a wallflower in the blogging world. Most people are friendly. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Otherwise nobody knows you are lurking silently out there. Silent lurkers don’t make any money.

Work to become known, without being intrusive. Work to build up a circle of internet friends. And--always--return the favor by linking back to these people.

Making money with your blog

By now you have discovered that building traffic to your blog is the main thing you need to concentrate on. Odds are, if you are successful in your efforts to drive traffic to your website, you will make money. You can have the most beatiful website in the world, and you can have it perfectly monetized and strategically set up, but no merchandise will move out the door if you don’t have customers. Fact of life.

We have had several posts about how to bring traffic to your internet store, and of course there are more things you can do that we haven’t talked about yet. But let’s go back for a moment and summarize some of the main points you need to be taking action on in order to build your traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO.)
Advertising on pay per click services.
Getting important successful sites to link to you.
Using other blogs and forums to get your site exposure.
Working to build repeat business.

Let’s briefly go over each of these points, so you are clear about what each step means.

Choosing affiliate partners

I would recommend that you first make a list of your personal interests. This is because you will tend to do a better job talking about products or subjects that you personally care about and find interesting.

This holds true not just with with the advertisors you affiliate yourself with, but also with the theme of your website itself and your blog for that website. To be successful, and to have fun doing it, please consider working with some subject you like. So start by making a short list of your personal interests. Golf? Antiques? Travel? Whatever.

Your blog should be about this subject. Share your thoughts and discoveries about that subject. Explore that subject and talk about it on your blog. Make the design theme of your main website along the same lines as that subject so that the interface between the blog and the store website is smooth and natural.

Finally, it will then be a natural step to choose advertisers to be affiliated with which offer products and services that have something to do with that main subject. You will be attracting visitors who are searching for information about that subject--that’s why I think it is a mistake to try and blog about more than one subject on one blog, or even to try and sell more than one major category of products on one website store.

Of course you have more than one interest. That’s because you are such an inquisitive and interesting person. Just make sure you have a separate blog (and website store) for each subject you want to talk about.

Keep in touch

A newsletter is not just an email filled with advertisements and sales pitches. Emails like that are called spam. Instead, a newsletter needs to contain NEWS--news about things related to the subject of your blog or other website.

With the advent of the popularity of blogs, the need to publish a newletter of some kind would seem to be diminished. After all, the news items are already being published in your blog, right? While there is a lot of current news being talked about on your daily blog, there is still room for a newsletter. The real purpose behind a newsletter is to keep in touch with your friends who read your blog, and your customers who have made a purchase from you.

In light of this, be sure and include things in the newsletter which do not appear on your blog. If your website is a store that sells merchandise that you ship out yourself, then be sure and include a few private specials in the newsletter that are not known to the general public, as well as special coupons if you use coupons in your business.

Often, rather than try and fit all this into a short email (these things DO need to be short!) some newsletter authors send only the headlines and subtitiles, or basic info and coupons, in the email itself. They then include links that will take the reader to the actual fancy newsletter, which of course is really simply a dedicated page on your main website.

Not more frequently than monthly, please.

The biggest key in making this work is, as always, finding ways to make it interesting and useful to your commercial family. Don’t send your emails to people who aren’t interested in what you are doing. You will only waste your time. The goal is to have the best list, not the longest list.

I think it was Mark Twain who admonished us not to waste our time trying to teach pigs how to sing: “You’ll waste your time and annoy the pig.”

Your visitors are hardly pigs, of course--it’s only a quote.