In this lesson we address email marketing and Answer your burning questions!

How effective is email marketing really? Aren't too many people worried about spam these days to sign up to newsletter lists?

The short answer to this is that, no, spam concerns don't seem to have much of an impact on sign-ups.

Just to give you an idea: Mark Ling gets very high sign-up rates across the board for his newsletters. All in all, he has about 1.5 million newsletter subscribers, which is a pretty clear indication that there are still lots of people whose interest in receiving free content outweighs their fears about spam.

Email marketing is huge. At the very least it will double your affiliate income; and some people claim to make much more than that.

I'm not sure how to make a good newsletter. Can I still just make money from driving traffic?

Yes, of course. We certainly don't have newsletters for all of our products, and they are still good earners even so. The reason why we haven't created newsletters for each and every product is that bad newsletters lower sales. Quality is essential. If you don't have the time to put into creating a quality newsletter series, you are better off without one.

Should my newsletters be long, short, or a mix?

You can mix up the length a bit, but as a general rule, a good newsletter that provides lots of value will need to be at least 1000 words.

Five hundred words is actually quite short and you don't really have room to promote. On the other hand, with a 1000 word newsletter, you can fit a subtle promotion in at the top, middle and bottom —and people don't even notice that you've been promoting to them.

I would actually suggest that every fourth or fifth newsletter should be even longer, something like 2000 words. The higher value usually results in higher conversions and you'll find that you also get more people writing in to tell you how much they are enjoying the series.

Of course it's a bit of an effort to write a 2000 word newsletter, but just remember that giving away value is very good for you in the long term. If you give people what they want, then you'll get what you want too.

Should I rewrite from Elance?

Using Elancers to write your newsletter series is an excellent idea if you don't personally have a great love for writing. However, we don't recommend rewriting your Elance newsletters simply because it's just too time-consuming. If you've chosen your Elancer well, you shouldn't have to anyway, unless it's just to add in a few keywords for SEO purposes.

If you are receiving bad articles, then it's usually more cost-effective to throw them away and start again, rather than rewriting them yourself.

How subtle should my promotions be?

Every 7th newsletter can be a hard-sell, but the rest of the time, your newsletters should be focusing on value, and promotions should be subtle.

For example, this newsletter for the product Meet Your Sweet is about 1500 words long and contains a subtle promotion in about three places. Here's the promotion text from the middle of the email:

"For a course that tells it like it is, and that's PACKED with spot-on, laser-accurate analyses of men, love, dating, relationships, and sex, I recommend you check this out:https://www.meetyoursweet.com/recommends/wantmore/index.php"

You'll notice that it is carefully placed to tie in naturally with the rest of the content. It's barely even noticeable.

Too many hard sells make people stop opening your emails.

As I've mentioned, good quality content is extremely important, especially in the first 10 emails when people are still developing the all-important first impression of you. Some of our best customers have been on our newsletter list for over 6 months, sometimes a couple of years! Building long-term value is critical.

How long should my autoresponder series last?

Ideally your newsletter should never run out. We try to make sure that we put together a year's worth of newsletters at once. And the next year, we add another year's worth, and so on.

However, that's not going to be cost-effective for new affiliates, so I would recommend that you have a minimum of 30 newsletters in place when starting out. The last five can just go out monthly.

When you start to make good money and you can see that you are getting lots of subscribers joining up each day, it's time to add more.

The critical detail here is to make sure that there is never too much of a time-gap between emails, because if your list doesn't receive an email for some time, then conversion rates drop dramatically.

In our experience, 2 months is the cut-off point.

If your subscribers haven't heard from you for 2 months then they'll forget who you are and see you as spam. So it's important to keep in touch fairly often just to ensure that you maintain your list.

Lesson Summary

In this Question/Answer lesson, we've addressed some of your burning questions, including:

• How effective is email marketing really? Aren't too many people worried about spam these days to sign up to newsletter lists?
• I'm not sure how to make a good newsletter. Can I still just make money from driving traffic?
• Should my newsletters be long, short, or a mix?
• Should I rewrite from Elance?
• How subtle should my promotions be?
• How long should my autoresponder series last?