Give Your Subscribers A Steak

By Ernie West
Posted Sunday, January 16, 2005

Your newsletter should give your readers something of substance and value in each issue. That should be your prime goal.

And yet, I see too many ezines giving their subsribers bologna. (Or worse, spam!)

Don't fill your newsletter with ads and nothing else. Or hype. Or poor quality material. Your readers originally subscribed in order to gain some benefit from what you have to say. Give it to them!

Don't hold back. Give them a prime rib steak in each issue that you poured your heart and soul into preparing. The rewards might not happen right away, but they will. It takes time. Many newsletter authors give up because they want instant results. Stick with it!

The health of your subscriber base will decline if you continue to give them bologna.

If you are a vegetarian, substitute your favorite dish wherever I mention meat!

And if you are trying to succeed online without publishing a newsletter, you are spinning your wheels. Your faithful readers, who benefit from each valuable issue that you give them, are many times more likely to make a purchase from you or from a product you recommend than from a one-time visitor.

And the one-time visitors who DO make a purchase are gone forever because you do not have their contact information to market to them on an ongoing basis.

Look at Microsoft. They not only are successful at selling their product to first-time customers, but they keep their existing ones by releasing new upgrades to their products. An ongoing revenue generator.

There is no excuse for not publishing a newsletter. I put it off for a long time because of perceived challenges. Once I took the time to look into it, I realized that there was nothing to it. I take it seriously, yes, but there is no real difficulty in actually doing it once you obtain the tools.

I've been taking a look at some other sites on the Internet other than my own and I'm surprised at what I'm seeing. Some high-profile sites have an invitation to subscribe to their newsletter way at the bottom of their page, or otherwise hard to find, while others don't even have an invitation at all!

Only a few sites "get it" and have a subscribe invitation at the top of the page, immediately obvious upon arriving. Easy to find, easy to subscribe. I chose eGroups as a service to automate my newsletter because they make things easy. New subscribers do not have to go through an obstacle course or answer a bunch of personal questions in order to subscribe.

Publish your own newsletter and grow your subscriber base through promotion. Design a professional site with your own domain name, and put your subscribe invitation at the top in plain view. Make it easy for your visitors to subscribe and they will, provided that you also impress them with high quality content on your site.

See you at the top.

About the Author
Ernie authors a free publication, the Inner Circle Biz Tips newsletter.
Subscribe at his site: (http://CompleteCircuit.com)