Steve Smith, host of your TQA Weekly, explains how to create, write, promote and be heard with newsletters, and expalins how to stay out of the junk mail folder.
Episode #2-13 released on December 11, 2011
If your running a web-site and you need to keep your visitors, in the loop, there is nothing better than a mailing list. It can be read on the go with mobile phones, tablets, at home on computers, and is now offered in multiple formats, including HTML, text and mobile formats. Today, I'm going to explain the process of a mailing list, and how to stay out of the Junk Mail folder.
There are a few steps you need to go through in order to make a successful newsletter, and a few more steps are required to stay out of the Junk Mail Folder.
The first thing you absolutely need is, content. If your just starting out on the internet, and you've got a concept, and no content, then you should start by making content. But having content is not good enough, you need content people want to read, otherwise it will be classed as Junk. Good, or great content is anything with demand. If your running a business, and you've got some important news on sales and contests coming up in your store, that is what you need to write about. Got a show online, how about adding links to get the video on their mobile device or computer. You can even add some show notes. Now, for those game developers just starting out, this is also a great platform to allow interested people to see the progress of new games and expansions.
Now, creating the newsletter can be slightly difficult, especially if you want to put out an HTML version. My suggestion is to always have a text format of your newsletter available, but this can make things challenging, then there is always the deal with your ISP, they may feel that your a spammer if your sending out thousands of messages of month to thousands of people. There is a very simple solution for this. Now, doing podcasts like this allows me a very unique chance to tests several services and narrow it down to just one, MailChimp.
MailChimp allows you to focus on your content, while they deal with all the hard work like taking your subscribers e-mail information. You can design your newsletter to their numerous templates, you can even use a version of MailChimp, for free. And, I'm currently using it for my show's newsletter. They assign you a certain amount of points for the free version of MailChimp, and this resets every single month.
Now, content is great, but only if it gets to the person's inbox, so there are many words to avoid in your subject. Let's start with the most important word to avoid in your subject, free. I've included in the show notes some links to a suggested and unsuggested subject lines, needless to say, better to write a short descriptive title instead of resorting to free game downloads. If you have a new game download, you want to try something like “New Game Expansion for Game Title” or “Company Name News Bulletin”. Avoid making it sound like a commercial.
Now, to attract your future subscribers may be difficult. It may be like an impossible prospect, but it will be rewarding. You need to give people a valid reason to join your newsletter, tell them of important advantages that come with joining a newsletter, make it accessible on your web-site, allow them to read the archive of messages to see what they are going to be getting. You also need to make it possible to unsubscribe just as easily as subscribing, and as an added bonus, like I do for my own newsletter, you should make it require confirm before being entered into a newsletter. Then promote the hell out of your newsletter.
Next week, I'll be talking about how to recover documents in a Windows Computer using Ubuntu. A skill made valuable whenever you have problems loading your your Windows operating system either because of severe errors or infections.
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Have a great day, stay safe and online.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions