OPT IN MAGIC
by John Botscharow
So, you've got your own opt in list. You are providing valuable, important, relevant and original content. So what do you gain from this?
First, and most important, you gain the trust and respect of your subscribers. "Why is that important?" you ask.
Let me answer that question by giving you a choice. You can buy something you need for your business from someone you trust and respect; OR you can do a search and buy from whomever comes up first (the highest search rank). From whom would you buy?
This is the reason I do not put a lot of faith or energy into search engines nor do I worry about their rankings. To me it is more important that I focus my efforts on my newsletter to get traffic to my site than in playing the silly search engine games.
Unless you just want to be perverse, you buy from the person you trust and respect. Price does not even really become a factor. You buy from someone you know is an expert. That person is an expert in your eyes not because of their reputation, but because they have proved it to you time and time again.
That is the PRIMARY purpose of having an opt in list - to make sales. That's why we are all in business. We love doing what we do, but we sure wouldn't mind making money in the process.
So, let's look at how to make sales to your opt in list. As I said earlier, you do not bombard your opt in list with a ton of advertising and nothing else. You provide them with quality ORIGINAL content, with an ad or two interspersed in that content.
You keep providing that great content, week in and week out. No, this is not going to make you money overnight! But it WILL make you money and KEEP making you money if you do it right. Building trust and respect is a long-term project. And it's very easy to lose that trust and respect, if you are not careful. One wrong comment somewhere along the way, and it's gone.
Building and keeping trust is like walking across a thousand-foot deep chasm with only a knife edge to balance on. VERY precarious. It takes a lot of "magic" to do it. But this magic is not the magic of spells and potions used by the sorcerers in my favorite kind of escapist literature. It's the magic of treating people like people, of constantly giving value.
I subscribe to almost two hundred newsletters. Why, you ask? Well, it started as a way for me to find quality content for MY newsletter. Most ezine publishers tend to be somewhat shy about using their own material at first. We feel we don't know enough to act like an expert. But you do, IF you picked your area of expertise correctly!
Anyway, I still occasionally pull an article from a newsletter I like and reprint it here. But I really don't need to go looking for the content any more. The content seems to come to me. I guess the Web Street Journal has developed a big enough subscriber base and a sufficient reputation that people WANT their articles published here. The fact that many of you are quality writers does not hurt either!
What I use those newsletters for now is partly for inspiration and partly just to see what the competition is doing. It never hurts to keep a tab on your competition. And some of the articles I've written have been in response to something I read elsewhere.
The thing I've noticed is that so many of them are more than fifty per cent advertising. That's wrong! That's not good business. It cheats their subscribers and it cheats them as publishers. You do not build the level of trust and respect necessary to survive in business with a newsletter or an eBook or a video that is predominately advertising. Nobody READS it! And what good is an ad if nobody reads it?
You can offer, as many newsletters do, free ads to your subscriber. You can offer all kinds of FREE bonuses to get people to subscribe. Yes, you might build a large list. But, are your subscribers reading it? Are they staying with you? If they don't read it and they don't stay with you, then how can you develop their trust in you and their respect for your opinion? I'm very proud to say that I still have most of those 37 subscribers who received the first issue of Robomarketer way back in April! I believe that they and you stayed because I strive to keep up a level of quality content not found in many newsletters.
Back when I first started, I discovered a newsletter that really impressed me. The content was always top quality, original stuff, written by the editor herself. Then a few months ago, she changed the format. Now it's more ads than anything. Her own articles are less frequent, and what she does write is shallow and superficial, especially compared to what she used to write. It really disappoints me. I still get it because I belong to her members site, but I just skim the newsletter. And I've lost most of the trust and respect I had for her.
She's not the only one, either. Too many publishers now seem more concerned about building their lists as large as they can as quickly as they can. Not me! Oh sure, I would love a list of 20,000 subscribers by next year. Who wouldn't? But I'd rather have 1500 subscribers who actually READ my stuff, click on my ads, and come to me with their problems knowing I'll answer them to the best of my ability, than 20,000 subscribers who just automatically delete my newsletter every week without EVER opening it.
What about you?
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John Botscharow is editor of the Web Guerrilla Journal and the R Market Daily. He is also one of the partners in 3 R Marketing. Visit them at http://www.3r-marketing.com and subscribe to one or more of their marketing newsletters.
This article is copyrighted by 3R Marketing. All rights reserved. You may use this article in your newsletter as long as the article is left intact and that the author information and this disclaimer are invluded.
Please send me a courtesy copy of your newsletter if you do use this article. Send it to: mailto:reprints@3r-marketing.com
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