Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Stop emailing articles to your list!

If you're sending out articles to your email list, you need to stop right now, this instant, without delay! Yes, yes, I know everyone is telling you to email information to your list regularly, but let me show you why you need to change all that.

I used to do what everyone else does. I would research the latest happenings in my subject area, write up what I felt was a good informative article on the subject, and email it out to my list of opt-ins who like to get that kind of information from me.

But then I signed up to receive information from a search engine guru that I felt knew his stuff. The next day I received an email from him that didn't contain an article, but merely a short description of an article and a link to where I could read the whole thing on his web site.

So I clicked the link and landed on an article page with AdSense on it. That's when it hit me.

Why You Should Post Your Articles to Your Web Site Instead

You should never email a full article to your list. You should always send them a description of the article, or a short excerpt, along with a link to the web page where you have the full article. There are many benefits to doing this:

1. You get additional AdSense revenue from your list.

This one is obvious. If you send your list to your web site, and you have AdSense on the site, you can generate more revenue from the clicks.

2. You can link out to recommended products from the articles.

AdSense is really a tiny piece of the pie that you can earn by sending your readers to a web page. By having links to related products that you recommend inside the article itself, you are more likely to get your readers to click and buy.

Of course, you can also have a list of recommended products alongside every article as well.

3. You're building a content site that search engines can find and people can link to.

If you're posting all of your articles onto a web site, then the search engines can find those articles and send you traffic, and people can link to the article from their own web sites, from forums and in emails. This generates more AdSense revenue and product sales.

4. You can grow your email list.

If your articles are all on your site and you include an opt-in box on each page, then visitors who follow links or find your site through the search engines can join your email list and continue to earn you more money.

5. Your list has a place to go to find all of the articles you've posted in the past.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't deleted that article from that guru that I just didn't have time to read at the moment. I wish I would have saved it so I could look back at it.

Have you ever thought that? I have! And chances are so have many people on your email list. By having all of your articles posted to your web site, they have a place they can go back and find that information. New subscribers have the benefit of being able to go back and read the articles they missed as well.

And again, these extra visits to your archives generate more AdSense revenue and more product sales.

6. Short article description emails are less likely to trip SPAM filters.

A long email article has a much greater chance of using words or phrases that trip email SPAM filters and cause your readers to never get your email in the first place. A short description with a link is far less likely to trip those filters. Fewer SPAM filters triggered, more readers, more clicks, etc. etc.

How well has this method worked for me?

How well have I been doing with my own blog using this method? Well it's only been up a month, but so far it's earned me over $200 in extra AdSense revenue, more than $2500 in affiliate product sales (that does not include sales of my own products, which have been at least as much), and has gotten me 90 new subscribers to my email list.

Keep in mind–it's only been a month. Word is just getting out about the blog, and already I've gotten 90 new subscribers and made thousands of extra dollars from the blog.

All this because I stopped emailing articles to my list.

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