Building a Newsletter Mailing List

I had started on this a long time ago already. I used aweber as my mailing list provide, but did not have a real clue of what I was doing. A couple of months ago I joined PPC-Coach’s PPC Training program and that is part of the reason why I am not posting as frequently as before – I am busy learning PPC the PPC-Coach way. One of the projects he offers uses a mailing list approach and that helped me to get a better understanding of how powerful a mailing list can be.

 

As mentioned before I had already started building a mailing list a long time. As I had no clue I canceled aweber and used a free mailing list program. Me = Idiot. I should have stayed with aweber as I now have to start over. But at least I know now what to do and how to slowly monetize that mailing list. So, that’s what I am doing. I posted on Sitepoint’s marketplace to find a good writer and that way I can add fresh content to the mailing list. More about this whole topic later.

 

Building a mailing list is a great way to build up revenue for your business. Instead of a one-time deal you get a chance to have return customers and to promote different products. With aweber you can build up a list of messages sent to every subscriber in certain scheduled mailings. The idea is to build up trust and to provide value and then slowly to add product reviews or recommendations. With the trust in place the subscribers might be willing to buy from your (your affiliate link) compared to trying to find a prospect via PPC and do the pre-selling thing over and over again. Of course there is a little more to it, but I think you get the idea. Have a great day.

PPC Update

Well,, the numbers are in for the day. I spent roughly $195.00 on MSN Adcenter (search) today. In return I made $168.00 in revenue – which leaves me with a $27.00 loss for the day. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I found the same offer I was promoting at a different affiliate network (Marketleverage) with a significant higher payout rate. Unfortunately that was not until late in the day so that I missed out on some earnings. Overall if I would have run the Marketleverage offer the entire day I would have made a nice profit. I did some tuning on keywords and bid prices and for tomorrow I am hopeful to turn things around and finish the day with a profit.

 

The really good news is that I have a landing page that converts. Now I can go and expand it and get more keywords going – especially keywords that do not require $3.00 bid prices. I have been bidding $3.00 across the board today and paid actual click prices somewhere from $1.68 to $2.56. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow.

PPC Summit Follow-Up

Last week I attended PPC Summit in Los Angeles – a 2 Day Training Seminar for Pay Per Click Marketing. I still have to do a lot of reviewing and then work out a plan on how to implement the knowledge though. But I can honestly say that this 2 day training provided an intense amount of knowledge. I even got lucky and won a Google Analytics T-Shirt during the Google Analytics session – held by the product manager from Google (nothing compared of course with what other people won from other sponsors of the event, but still nice to have).

September was one of my best months doing business online.  My PPC efforts genereated a net profit of over $1,100 + my “organic” (SEO-based) affiliate efforts were not too shaby either. Adsense kinda sucked and so it is good to have other streams of income going.  October will probably be off to a slow start until I can bring up more PPC campaigns. Last night I did catchup from my mini-vacation after PPC Summit. I have 2 other projects probably keeping me busy until the weekend. By then I want to have reviewed a lot of PPC Summit items as well and come up with a plan of attack. Since I am limited in available time for my business I have to work smart to get most out of it. I have 2 landing pages I will need to adjust and modify and I will write my ad copy. Keyword research is on the radar as well. I am eager to start, but it just does not help starting a PPC campaign prematurely as I need to eliminate risk of getting a Google slap early on.