List Building – Follow Up

One important thing to remember when communicating with your mailing list is to continuously provide follow up communications. There’s no sense in creating a wonderful newsletter one time, blasting it out to your list and then never speaking to anyone ever again. This might generate some buzz in the beginning, but think about the long term. How could you continue making money online without constant follow up?

You’d be surprised how many websites out there are here one day and gone the next. There are countless people that hear the get rich schemes on late-night tv, pour a little money into them, start a website and gain some traffic, but then give up after realizing this whole process is not as easy as it sounds.

Constant Contact

This term is such an industry standard, that there’s a company named after it! Big companies that sell products that are familiar to everyone in the world practically sell themselves, right? Then why does a large company like Coca-Cola spend millions of dollars every year to send out marketing materials emails to people like you and I?

The reason is because they understand that constant contact with consumers is the only way they will survive! The Internet marketing industry is no different, but this term is much more important here. The competition is much heavier and it’s much harder to get your name out there.

Consistency

One key element to keeping follow ups going smoothly is to maintain consistency with your messages. If you’re mailing list offers a weekly newsletter, send one every week. It’s that simple. The moment you lose this pattern, you’ll see your viewership dwindle.

If you promise specific things like content or free downloads, make sure you keep the same patterns going when performing follow up messages.

My two cents

Don’t lose your current subscribers because of something as simple as follow up. Let them know that you’re always there for them and that they can expect certain things from you, your website and your mailing list.

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Day 1 – Signed up for first affiliate program

March 2nd, 2010

This is technically not day 1 for the blog, but this is the first day that I started my project and it was a big day! I think at one point, I had about 15 tabs opened in Chrome!!

I want to start by saying of all the sites I’ve looked at in regards to free information to making money online, JohnChow.com seems to be the most honest. This is not to say that others are crooks, but John Chow appears to be in this industry for the freedom of it and not just the money plus he’s willing to help out anyone who needs it.

I’ll start listing the other sites that have been helping me out in this as soon as I get my links directory up. As I get further into this project, these daily reports will no doubt get more detailed, so stay tuned and follow me on Twitter or Facebook and the RSS feeds.

What I did today

I signed up for AzoogleAds today and expect my application to be approved (or not) within a couple of days. From what I gather, they seem to be the best affiliate network to start with. Previously, people were touting their referral payout system as being great, but I learned today that they have changed their payout from being a lifetime system to being only valid for 6 months.

I also made minor changes to the site including two subscribe links in the top right to allow visitors a choice between viewing RSS feeds in a reader or getting them by email. I then worked on some various SEO techniques on some of the older posts I had made.

The last thing I did today was setup an email newsletter account with Aweber. Newsletters is not all they do. This service is a monthly charge of $19.99 for the basic service, which is all I needed to begin with. Check out their website to see more details on what this service done, but basically it allows visitors to sign up on the site so you can send them newsletters, updates, free downloads, etc–email marketing.

Although I haven’t edited it completely, I did add a basic form on the sidebar for users to sign up for the newsletter. I plan to move this form up and make it fit in better.

That’s it for now.