Building Your Business One Newsletter at a Time

You've spent hours and many sleepless nights building your new website, making it look cool and writing all about your business products and services. Finally your website is live. It's optimized. You are ecstatic and excited. You can't wait to have your potential customers fill out your contact form or call you.

And then nothing happens. You feel deflated and the high suddenly turns to a low. This story is unfortunately quite common. From a marketing point of view a good website is absolutely essential, however it is useless if you have no way of luring people to your site and then capturing their e-mail once they get there.

We are all bombarded with tons of stuff to buy these days and it requires a commitment to fill out a contact form and an even greater investment to pick up a phone and call someone. These days Facebook,people don't make phone calls. They text, write notes on Linked in, etc. A phone call is a big deal.

If you are counting on that happening after someone visits your site, you are in lala land. Now, there are exceptions. If you have a specific service that someone needs ASAP, they will call. For instance carpet cleaning or plumbing.

Most people I work with are not in that category. Their potential customers are window shopping and gathering ( usually free) information.

The marketing funnel begins with giving interested people free information and beginning to build a relationship. One of the best ways to do this is by giving a free report that is so alluring that people want it enough that they are willing to trade their e-mail address for it.

It has to be good! Mine is actually a workbook, called, 5 Steps to Overcoming Real Obstacles in Building a Successful Small Business. When they download this free report they automatically sign-up for my newsletter. Bingo, I have a new potential client on my data base. My job is to send them a quality newsletter each and every month.

I have had people whine to me that they don't want to do a newsletter, they don't write well, its too much work and so on. Yes, marketing is a lot of work but it pays off if you do it right.

Like your free report, your newsletter needs to be all about 'giving' helpful advice to your potential clients. Certainly you will also highlight your offers, but if it's all about sales, people will unsubscribe in one swift click. How to figure out what to write about each month? Listen to your clients. What questions are they asking?

There are three ways to do an online newsletter. Sign-up with Aweber, Constant Contact or something similar. I use Aweber because of the ability to send auto-responder messages and to have unlimited lists and web forms. I use it for more than just my newsletters.

With Aweber you can do either a text only newsletter or html one or both.

1. Text only will be read by any browser and won't get jumbled. Many people choose this option for that reason. However text only is boring and ugly.

2. Html lets you add fancy graphics, colors and your logo. This can be important for branding reasons. However, your newsletter might look different on other people's computers and some people block html emails. Those people get my text version automatically.

3. A web based newsletter is on your website. You send people a short note with a link to your webpage. The good thing is that people will end up on your website. The risk is that many people won't choose to click the link.

I began with text only and then switched to html because I wanted my newsletter to look good. I put links in my newsletter to direct people to my website.

The important thing is to do it. I get new people signing up everyday and after a year of reading my newsletter, people will suddenly buy a product or fill out the contact form and set up a phone call with me. It really works.