How to Build Traffic and Enhance a brand with EASY Newsletters

• Establish a web presence (if you haven’t already): If you don’t have a website, visit this quick guide on Web Publishing:  maximizingthenet.com/web/webpublishing.html
• Sign up for an Email Marketing Service:  I’m currently using MailChimp under their “Forever Free” program that allows you to have up to 500 subscribers and send 3000 emails per month.  MailChimp is very easy-to-use and they have excellent support that is always timely and responsive to queries.  Feel free to click the badge below to get started with your “Forever Free” MailChimp Subscription.  Another option you have is one of the market leaders in email marketing would be Constant Contact.  They have monthly plans that start as low as $15 a month, and they offer a lot of additional solutions like online surveys, event marketing solutions that assist with planning events including tracking registration and payments for events.
• Add people to your list (ethically):  I want to emphasize “ethically” because there are rules and regulations to how you can add people to your list.  For instance, just sending a blanketed business-related email to everyone in your email address book can be considered “spam”, especially if you did not acquire their email through a legitimate business transaction within the last 18 months. Remember: Do not randomly add people to your newsletter list without their permission.  
• Use the tools of your Email Marketing Service:  MailChimp lets you not only see statistics on who opened your newsletter and when, but also what they clicked on, and if they forwarded it to someone.  You can set up automated messages or “autoresponders” that send a message to your mailing list (or even only a subset of the mailing list that you identify) at a specific time or date in the future. 
• Create Interesting Topics: As a general rule of thumb try writing one (1) newsletter article per week, and work on creating “evergreen content”, which is “timeless” content that can be reproduced again over the years without much information that gets “dated” quickly.  One great tip I would suggest would be to write out in advance, 52 topics that you’d like to hit with your newsletter within a year. 
• Watch the Analytics of Your Newsletter: Use that information and analyze it for what it’s telling you about your audience.  What do people click on most? What doesn’t get any clicks?  What type of subject lines get opened the least?  And be sure to integrate a feedback survey at some point, to get feedback from your subscribers and find out what they think of your newsletter directly.

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