No Email Subscribers? I Feel So Listless

Making Peace With Mail

I knew all along that great projects need months if not years or lifetimes of momentum.

Yet, following through has been my weakness.  I've built my own app, published my own ebook, and I have two of the biggest websites up and coming, but nothing has been really maintained, or come back to.  It's all just been a lot of scattershot attempts that have discouraged me because I haven't gotten instant success.

The best image for getting an online business going was mentioned by Pat in an early podcast: it's like pulling a train by your teeth.  Getting it to move that first micrometer takes a concerted effort.  In those first few moments, you've already gotten some momentum.  Somewhere, someone is reading or sharing your first post, hoping for more.  If you can get back to them in a day or so, you've held their attention over time, and you have a fledgling regular reader.  It's even possible to get distracted and have some of these people come back, but in most cases, it may as well be like you just started again.

As a beginning marketer, the point is to get past where disappearing out of public view for a second will cause everyone to forget you.  This assumes, of course, that you'll still work on other parts of your site, and not just take a break.

"Mmm yom yom.  I can almost taste the success... right after this nap."  *Drool*

This is where I'm stepping in with a mailing list.  For the longest time, I've hated using them.  I think it was from making my mailing lists too easy to subscribe to.  People would unsubscribe because my newsletters tried to cover everything, and so they would wobble in their focus.  Either my all-in-one newsletters would try to thinly cover 5 or 6 topics, or they would focus on one topic at a time, and the rest of the subscribers would get turned off.  I can understand that.  Pretend I had a sports site and my only newsletter was about... sports.  How difficult would that be to please everyone every week, with people expecting me to know exactly what they wanted to know about sports?  If you were a football fan, would you read about baseball, basketball, hockey and rugby for four weeks so you could read a newsletter about football every five weeks?

This Way, Please

This is what I'm trying to address in this blog and at my other upcoming sites.  For this one, I'm dividing newsletter topics into three newsletters.  The first one, Tips, is no-cost or low-cost how-tos for beginning marketers and people who can't or don't want to spend money yet.  It also offers summaries of each SPI post I put up here.  The second, Strategy, is a combination of what has worked for me and the products I am paying for (at this rate, Aweber is the only one I'm paying for until my WordPress e-book starts taking off, and it's still possible to go free for fewer features via MailChimp).  The third newsletter, Discounts, doesn't talk down to people who already know how to word their action buttons or practice effective SEO.  If they want to know about discounted products I'm using, or products my guest bloggers created, they can get notifications with highly optional review links.  Doing this comes from rule #8 of several rules I learned years ago, The Travis Rules.

Anyhow, this site isn't LionelHoudeWins, so I'll have two podcast reviews tonight.  Thanks for reading!