Using the Newsletter for Profit
The good news about doing business online is that online Internet users are now conditioned to search, point and click. Tapping that instinct is the webmaster’s job. Tapping the webmaster’s talent is the domainer’s job. One way domainers can extract value fro their hosting dollar is to produce a blog. But many domain name buyers and sellers can’t leverage value from the blog or reap benefits. They try and try, but something gets lost in the mix. Yet domainers have profit and cost targets just like everyone else. Every blogger does.
Websites intend to communicate using words and images. Software to produce easily changeable websites were produced to ease this communication path to HTML publication online. Blogs, basic message boards with one or a team of authors, became functional for users to read and authors. Then blogs for profit started, to attract visitors and showcase ads, but few writers can garner the audience or channels the resources to turn a profit. The Internet is indeed full of dead blogs.
An online blog actually increases value over time, as its content get more clicked, more integrated into SEO databases and linked up elsewhere. But revenue hungry blog writers are constantly on the prowl for hosting-account-paying cash. And now newsletters are an option. Newsletters are publicizing marketing tools popular among savvy blog webmasters. The HTML templates are found everywhere. Mail servers, hosting accounts, or online sites can distribute them for you. Newsletters can be fun, satiric, comedic, newsworthy, or merely advertorial. The trick is how to implement them.
Newsletter distributions can hurt and help you. Not everyone who once read your domain (or any other type of) blog, and liked it enough to sign up, feels the same today. Not every past reader wants to get daily reminders you exist. Some days the inbox fills up too quickly and the guilty parties are an object of scorn. But a good way to split the difference is to address some of your best stuff, (in this case, surgically topical domain industry or SEO writings) to a subset of the readership audience. And bloggers should time the release to spike the readers’ interest, and salt and pepper the blog audience, not dump a pile of unread code in their spam folder.
Where is the profit for blogging and sending out newsletters? This can be done for a fee. But instead of limiting your readership (or membership) by implementing some kind of mechanical flytrap, use the power of suggestion. Gently (and only occasionally) remind your readers of the effort needed to fulfill their entertainment or information needs. Provide the supplemental or in-depth material only to those who sign up. Then follow up to your readers with a subtle suggestion and a Paypal address. If your readers have even 20% of the goodwill you think they have, then for every hundred signups you might get perhaps $5 a month.
Let’s look at the metrics. For a blog with two thousand signups, that’s twenty groups of readers who might each generate (for a newsletter) ten out of a hundred reader signups. Ten times twenty is two hundred. Out of two hundred putative signups, using the 80/20 rule, 160 people will decline the opportunity to fork over any ducats, and maybe forty people will consider it. If forty people send you $5 even once, that’s $200 toward your enterprise hosting costs. And maybe publication of an eBook. If they make this decision over a year’s time, the blogger still clears costs and pays their way to a coffee or two.
Any any further offers, special content, or ideas and communication exchange between the subscribing parties is at the blogger’s (webmaster’s) discretion.
Why this web site do not have other languages support?
This is a very interesting point of view. Your blog is refreshing, but I wish one could find more content, though. I am looking forward to reading more from you. Keep up the good work. thanks.
Super stuff! This was a really helpful post.
haha
I would add that if you do not have enough material for a monthly newsletter (daily and weekly are very hard to consistently submit) do a quarterly or seasonal newsletter.
I understand how a newsletter can give site fans something to read. But how am I supposed to come up with content for it?
I would like to say “wow” what a inspiring post. This is really great. Keep doing what you’re doing!!