1. Don’t bury your subscriber form, place it on your home page and or at every page and make it VERY easy to find.
2. Add a one-liner to the byline section of your online published articles. For example: “You can subscribe to [name]’s free e-newsletter by visiting [URL].”
3. Give people an additional incentive to subscribe. Give them a free ebook or ecourse that has valuable content on a topic that will attract the exact type of ideal clients/customers for you.
4. During network events, ask if you can sign them up for your newsletter. Then manually add them when you return from the function with a double opt-in feature. Explain the opt-in feature when you ask them to subscribe. This gives them a way out if they were just being polite. Keep asking and don’t stop. Practice a simple two or three-liner to explain the frequency and purpose of your e-newsletter.
5. Contact any trade organization or associations you belong to or memberships that have your target market. Ask for their member list. Members usually get this free, they may charge you if you aren’t.
6. After you have the organization’s or association’s member list, send a direct mail letter, and offer a free subscription and other free offers you have that will help them get acquainted with you, the type of services you provide, and the benefits of working with someone such as yourself. You can educate them through free ecourses that were created from your e-newsletter articles.
7. Recommend your client’s company’s newsletter in your e-newsletter. Ask them for a reciprocal recommendation. Both of you win with new subscribers.
8. Write reviews or provide feedback to other newsletters (electronic or printed) you read and enjoy. Many times your comments will get posted in a future issue, along with a link to your site.
9. One of the top ways to attract people is by giving them various ways to interact with you at your website. Use questionnaires, contests, giveaways, games, or ask for post survey questions and post the statistical responses. Send out a special e-mail announcement when the results of the
questionnaire, survey, contest is posted on your website. The Sales Lead Report, http://www.imninc.com/macmcintosh, adds a survey with each issue, then uses the information in its PR campaign with phenomenal success.
10. Offer a different writing style. One that is warm, comforting, as if you are talking to a friend on the phone. Write conversationally with a personal tone. Add I’s, me and you.
11. Always encourage your readers to forward a copy of your e-newsletter to friends, colleagues, and co-workers. You can even write a “forwarding e-mail paragraph” at the beginning so it is even easier for them to forward.
12. If you do speaking engagements or sales presentations, use one of the first few slides or last slide to invite them to subscribe to your e-newsletter. Don’t turn off the screen so it is displayed after you are finished speaking, if possible.
13. At speaking engagements, pass around a clipboard with a manual way they can register for your e-newsletter. Start passing the board around before you begin speaking. Place a small different piece of paper with a short letter from you to them explaining the topics, frequency, and objectives of the e-newsletter as well as the opt-in option.
14. Send out a press release regularly to the organizations you belong to about what’s been going on in your e-newsletter. I began mine by sending out a short press release whenever an article was published. When I began getting published 10 and 20 times a month, that no longer seemed practical. Thus, I moved over to a once-a-month press release with a list of where the articles were published. Add a press release section to your website and post them there as well — at least the last six releases.
15. Find sites that give out awards for e-newsletters and keep applying until you receive one. When you do, send out a special announcement to your list as well as post it in a few issues of the e-newsletter and rewrite your bio paragraph at the end of your articles.
16. Don’t add people on your list without asking for permission first. Always offer an opt-in/out option. Give them a personal greeting if you are responding to a particular networking group or other particular groups. Some web hosts only need one s*p*a*m complaint before they shut your e-newsletter down. And it isn’t worth the problems caused by not respecting this.
17. KISS your subscriber form. Meaning, “keep it short and simple.” Ask for their e-mail and first name only. You can even simplify it more by just asking for their e-mail address.
18. Set up a section for past issues of your e-newsletters. I recommend just listing their main topic or the name of the article and not by date. People don’t like to read things that they consider “old” easily. If you create pdf files for past issues, remember that it does save space but it also doesn’t allow you to use unique meta page tags so that they show up in the search engines.
19. Add your e-newsletter bio line to all your e-mail signatures.
20. Send out your e-newsletter articles as content for reprinting into other media.
21. Offer targeted subscribers a special report when they refer your e-newsletter to three or more colleagues. Add a price to the special report to give a perception of added value. A special report is 3-10 pages on a very focused topic.
22. Offer your readers high-value content for them to read. Content they can’t find easily or ever somewhere else on the Internet and they will keep coming back. This is the new wave for 2008. Subscriptions to e-newsletters are going down because content is too general.
Catherine Franz, a Certified Professional Marketing & Writing Coach, specializes in product development, Internet writing and marketing, nonfiction, training. Newsletters
and articles available at: http://www.abundancecenter.com blog: http://abundance.blogs.com