In this installment of List Building Tips, I'm going to talk about archives. This may be one of the sneakiest and cleverest ways to build a list that you will ever run into. And the best part is, it's totally ethical.
Let me start out by saying that this isn't a tactic you can use when you first create your newsletter and it doesn't work with a canned series. I'll explain what I mean by a canned series shortly. But let's first explain why this doesn't work with a new newsletter. To understand why, you have to first understand exactly what I mean by an archive.
An archive is a collection of old content, whether it be articles, photos or whatever. Most people create archives because they don't want to clutter up the main page of their site. For example, a Magic the Gathering site I go to has a series of articles for different topics. The main article for each topic is on the main page. The back issues are all archived and can be viewed by clicking on a link to get to the archive section. This way, your main page doesn't look like a train wreck and take forever to load.
Great, so how can we apply this to a newsletter? Again, this doesn't work with a brand new newsletter and it won't work with fixed length newsletters, meaning those that have X number of emails that go out and then stop.
What you do is simple. After an installment of your newsletter goes out, you copy and paste the content onto a web page and upload it. I recommend uploading each installment separately and then uploading a page that has an index to each installment. As you then send out each subsequent installment of your newsletter, you will include that installment as part of your archive.
After you've done all that, what you then do is simply drop links to your archive wherever you can. Make sure the index page has an opt in form so that if people want to read future installments they can sign up and get them immediately instead of waiting for the archive to be updated.
Will some people just keep checking back for the archive, not wanting to be on any mailing list? Sure, some. But there are going to be those who won't want to wait. They're going to want to get these installments right away, especially if they're timely. This tactic works very well if your newsletter deals with time sensitive issues.
Like I said, you can't use this method with a fixed length series because the archive will never be updated. And you have to wait until you have a few installments that you can upload. But if your newsletter seems to be a good fit for this model, you might want to consider it.
Because even if just ONE person reads your archive and joins your mailing list, that's one more person than you had the day before.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Your First Giveaway Event
0 comments:
Post a Comment