Mailing Lists

A good alternative to spam mailing is a subscriptionbased mailing list. Do you have some knowledge or expertise that otherpeople would be interested in? If so, then why not offer a weekly or monthlymailing list that features your expertise?

There are many people out there who are highly offendedby spam (unsolicited commercial email). If you start a mailing list, youwill have the ear of a large number of people that are interested in whatyou want to say. Some of those people are bound to buy your products. Ifnot, you will have made a large number of contacts who feel they know youintimately. You never know when some of these people can help you in oneway or another.

Once you have selected the content, schedule andformat of your mailing list, you will need to begin soliciting subscribers.In the previous chapter we mentioned that you can solicit subscribers inconjunction with your online contest. In my experience, the vast majorityof subscribers to my mailing list have come this way. However, don't letthis stop you from using other methods. You should ask just about everycontact you make online if they would like to subscribe to your FREE mailinglist that offers all this great information. Most people will take youup on it.

There are a number of ways to manage the list. Themost efficient is to use a mailing list server like Majordomo. You ISPmay be able to help you here. The benefit of this type of automated listmanager is that people will be able to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically.Not only does this feature give your list an air of professionalism, butit is also very convenient for the subscribers. Whether you you use thismethod or not, it's essential that you respond to subscribe and unsubscriberequests promptly and courteously.

When you format your message, be sure to type itin a plain text editor like Notepad. Try to keep each line no longer thansixty characters and use a hard line break at each line. This will ensurethat the message looks the same on almost any email viewer. Otherwise,the line breaks may appear at unusual intervals.

Lastly, make sure that the content is important.Don't just send out a mailing list to say "hi, have you checked outmy page lately?" Give them a reason to come back to your site, anddon't pester them too often.

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