I read an article a short while ago that reinforced my earlier lessons on list building.
It stated quite simply that you need to write and publish articles about the topic of your interest.
In fact, it stated that you need to put out about 120 articles each and every month with a projection of about 19 signups to your email list per article.
This means that for each month, you are projecting to get 2280 sign ups and of them, you will keep maybe 2000 of them. This attrition happens when someone doesn’t continue the opt-in process or decides not to continue.
Now before we go any further, let me assure you that this signup rate is quite aggressive, so plan on less than that.
If you run this over a 6 month period, you will have retained 12,000 people on your list (using our example). This would be a very daunting list to have. And the main reason is that they have expressed an interest in the topic that you are discussing. Hopefully, this means that they are prospects for your goods and services.
It is important that your articles are simple to read and understand and that each delivers value to your readers.
Your audience must be able to read your entire article in a very short period of time, which means in a couple of minutes or so.
About 500 words in your article can be read by most people in less than 2 minutes. So, this would be a good target number of words for your article.
If you are using a professional ezine publisher, you are not allowed to make a sales pitch or promote your goods or services within your article. You are imparting things like “how to do something” (like this article) or “how to use the XYZ” that you are really selling, but are not selling in the article.
What you really want to do is build your email list. Then you can send promotional material to them to your heart’s content.
So, in your article (usually near the end) ask them to take some sort of action to get something back in return.
To get them to sign up can be as simple as “click here to learn more.” The –click here– part would be a link to your “squeeze page”.
A squeeze page can be nothing more than a form on your website or on your list mangers site that captures the responders name and email address.
From this squeeze page, you can have a function that sends the responder an email telling them where to get the additional information or a page that tells them how it is going to be delivered to them.
You will need to have something prepared that will become your actual sales pitch or presentation, more detailed information (that leads to a sale), or something similar.
This could also be a free sample of your product.
I hope that we have delivered some meaningful information so that you can get started. If you would like additional information on this topic, please visit our website articles section.
Thank you.
…..Bruce
