If you have a successful blog with a large readership, you can create an additional stream of income (and repeat visitors) by having a newsletter. Depending on the topic of your blog, you may have readers who wish to receive a newsletter that contains more in-depth information. You start by creating an email opt-in list of newsletter subscribers. This list can then be used for other marketing promotions or you can monetize your newsletter through sponsor ads.

If your blogs offer something of value to your readers, chances are they will expect your newsletter or email campaign to do the same. This is a good thing because you will attract subscribers, but if you don’t deliver you will find that many of your readers end up unsubscribing. Add value to your email correspondences in the same way you make your blogs interesting to retain and attract subscribers.

Make sure you give readers something of value in these emails and give them a reason to read them so that your advertising methods have the greatest chances of being successful. If you promise little known tips or hard to find information, you better deliver or readers will unsubscribe.

A good way to increase the number of people subscribing is to reveal extra information that can be found only in the newsletter.

One example is to conclude a blog entry in an email for subscribers only.

Readers who are eager to get the whole story and will be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter. Free incentives are also a good way to get subscribers, it doesn’t have to be something fancy. Some ideas include offering a free report or list of tips. Even the free info you give out should be useful. Don’t just offer up junk. If your free information is that good, people will come back for more.

Monetizing a newsletter or email campaign is similar to monetizing your blog. While you cannot use Adsense and other similar advertising methods, you can directly sell ad space and depending on the size of your subscriber list you can charge a hefty sum.

You can also use affiliate marketing in your newsletter, just be sure to have the bulk of your newsletter contains relevant content and not just ads or else your readers will start dropping like flies. Make sure your affiliate marketing is related to the content of your newsletter or email and that your audience will be interested in what you are promoting. Don’t overdo it. Treat your subscribers well!

You can also sell your own merchandise through your newsletter. If you have created merchandise with your blog logo or related slogans, adding a link in your news letter asking readers to check out your store or merchandise won’t hurt, just make sure it is paired with good content.

If you build up a large subscriber base, you can also use it to send other email campaigns and promotions for your merchandise, book, or affiliate products. A word of caution, however, no one likes unsolicited emails so you should be sure that you have permission to send additional emails and that they offer something of value and are not just viewed as annoyances.

Finally, over time as your readership and brand grows, you can also offer a paid version of your newsletter that contains more information than the free one.

If you decide to start a newsletter, make sure you pick an autoresponder system that is reliable and has high deliverability rates.

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If you don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to your email list, you are losing a lot of repeat traffic. Think about it, how many blogs do you visit on a daily basis? There are too many blogs to keep up with - yes, even the good ones. Sometimes I visit a blog that I find interesting and I will check it frequently for a while until they start going off topic and I lose interest. However if I sign up for their email notification list and I get a “friendly email reminder” that a particularly interesting post has been written chances are I will go and visit that blog again.

Previously, I have written about capturing all your blog readers. Having an email subscription system is one of the ways to keep in touch with your readers. Of course, if you’re into social networking, there’s also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Pick your poison.

Sidenote: By the way, if you use Twitter, Tweetscan is a great search engine specifically for Twitter.

My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. With Aweber, they claim you’ll get great deliverability (how does one check?). But the features I like are the ability to set up different sub-lists and transfer subscribers from one list to another based on certain actions. Suppose you’re selling your own product and you collect a list of prospects.

Now if someone on the prospects list buys your product, you can have them automatically switched to your customer list. This saves a lot of manual work.

Another feature that I like is the ability to do a split test on your email list. If you have a list of 6000 people, you can create a 3 way split-test message and you can partition it evenly (2000/2000/2000) or in any proportion that you like. This is a good way to test message titles (think direct marketing) and also message styles.

For those of you who are crazy about tracking, the reporting options are fantastic. You can keep a tabs on the daily trends of new leads, unverified vs. verified leads, countries, states, area codes, follow up status, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a tab on how many people subscribe to your blog after a post that really appeals to your audience.

At $19.95 a month (if you have less than 10,000 people on your list) Aweber is unbeatable value!

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There is so much crying for our attention these days. Information overload is a common thing. Think of it, over the course of the day, you get bombarded with messages from the radio, TV, internet, your co-workers, your boss, your family - everyone is trying to get your attention.

My point is this - if you are merely relying on your RSS feed to reach your readers, you are missing out on a large piece of the pie. After all, as RSS feed readers get more popular these days, people start subscribing to so many different feeds that they RARELY get to scan every single post that goes into the feed reader. So what you need to do is to maximize every opportunity you have to keep in touch with your readers and/or potential readers.

Email subscription

Many blogs will benefit from having an email subscription list that you can use to send out special announcements, updates, tips, tricks, strategies and what have you. I’ve been using EmailAces for the longest time but I feel that it’s time for me to move over to Aweber.

Actually I have been using Aweber for quite a while too, but not just for readers of this site. I have many other sub-lists on different topics which are hosted over there. But the reason I’m moving over is because I like the features that Aweber has introduced over time. They are an innovative company in this space that keeps coming up with new ways to reach out to people.

It’s not to say that EmailAces isn’t a good service but nothing has changed over the years. One of the features that I like about Aweber is the ability to split-test your messages. You can partition your list into sub-groups and send out different messages and measure the responses. This is something that direct mail folks do all the time.

You can also do click tracking with all the email messages you send out. This is crucial for measuring response and the effectiveness of your split-testing.

Another thing Aweber does that makes me think they really care about their customers is that when you first sign up with them, you’ll get a letter in the mail (yes, snail mail!) welcoming you to their service along with a little note with all the important information like how to contact them, your login information, etc. It makes like easier for you. You know that when companies go out of their way to do that, they’ll be successful.

If you are interested in receiving updates from me, please sign up using the form on the sidebar on the right. It’s the one that says “Money Making Blogs Newsletter”. If you were on my previous list (and I thank you), please sign up again using this form. After some time, I’m going to retire that old list.

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