The idea of creating a first newsletter, or what can be referred to as an ezine, can be daunting to some… what do you write, how do you send it out, how often do you send it, how do you manage it with all the other tasks that are calling for your attention during the day?

The term ezine simply means an electronic magazine or newsletter that people can subscribe to, much like a print version. Technology has made this process fast and easy that with just a click of a button you can send your list a message or even pre-schedule announcements.

What do you send?

The best piece of advice I ever got was very simple

“Make It Them Centric”

Simply meaning, give them something useful that will directly and quickly benefit them.

A few tips:

• Always keep it informative and not just a sales pitch
• Add interactive bits like polls and surveys of the reader base
• Share product reviews and links to other informative sites for your readers
• give away freebies, like ebooks and eclasses as a free gift to your subscribers
• Keep an eye on industry related news and share and discuss it with your readers
• Add in sponsor ads with other like topic ezine publishers to grow your subscriber base and add another revenue stream

Spam Filters Are Your Enemy Too!

We all hate spam and like it or not, whether you call it a newsletter or an ezine, you could be considered a spammer!  If you find this as offensive as I do, then there are a couple steps you can take to safe guard your reputation.

First, it is highly recommended that you require a reader opt-in. This will prevent any backlash of the spamming laws because they, your subscriber, confirms that they want to receive updates from you and you are not randomly sending them unwanted mail.

Include your privacy policy and an easy opt-out option for them to unsubscribe at the bottom of all messages.

Most autoresponder services take care of this automatically for you. I personally use aweber because of another very important point of ezines…making sure they actually get to where they are supposed to go.

What good is putting any effort into an ezine if it never reaches the subscribers eyes? Email spam has made many isp’s spam trigger happy, and if you are using a free autoresponder..well, it’s a big risk if they think you are a spammer.

The monthly fee associated with a quality autoresponder, may seem like an extra business expense, but if you are serious about building your list and using it to increase sales- both front end and back end- you can make it pay for itself plus some in a very short time.

http://www.moms-business-coach.com/recommends/autoresponder

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Tips For Your First Newsletter Part 1

Spam has become the biggest downside to blogging for me. Although, I know that a blog is getting some decent traffic when all of a sudden I’m getting a fair amount of un-wanted messages it still takes up time and energy to delete.

WordPress blogs come with Akismet pre-installed but you do need to activate it.  Since I just completed reading and reviewing the step by step guide to blogging, Atomic Blogging, I thought I would share one of the tutorials.

What you see above are the number of Spam messages I get so far on my blog! It’s HUGE! Aren’t they annoying? To avoid and prevent all this spam you must use Akismet – A Free Plugin to avoid spam for your blog.

Before I start, Akismet is a free open source spam program online to help fight spam for wordpress owners.

Just follow the following steps to get started to prevent Spam on your blog.

To install & setup Akismet for your blog first you need to go to your Plugin panel in your Control Panel in wordpress found at http://www.(yourdomain).com/wp-admin/

Follow the steps above to activate Akismet.

After you have activated all the Plugins you should see the above message just click on the link enter your WordPress.com API Key.

To get your API Key, all you need to do is go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account, the API Key will be email to you when you sign up a free account.

When you have sign up for a wordpress.com account you can find the API key when you click on My Profile. Example how a API Key looks like is fbd655933fa6. Please use your own API Key and don’t ever share your API it is like a password for you =)

So once you got the API Key from WordPress.com, just key in the Key in the box and click on Update Options in your own blog!

You will know you have successfully installed Akismet when the green word appear as above. And you are done! NO MORE SPAM for your blog!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How To Use Akismet