A lot of newsletter publishers spend a great deal of time wondering why they are not making money with their newsletters. Most of them expect to make so much money on getting started but they become disappointed with poor results.
The reasons are not far-fetched. They are making the biggest mistakes that can only guarantee failure.
It is important therefore for you to know what these mistakes are so that you can avoid them. One famous writer once said, ‘Those who don’t know the mistakes of people who have failed are condemned to repeat such mistakes’.
You will agree with me that if you keep repeating such mistakes, you will keep failing.
The first mistake is trying to promote too many affiliate programs in one issue of your newsletter. It is a very grave mistake that most newsletter publishers make. They cannot resist the temptation of making as much money as they can from affiliate programs.
This drives them into promoting too many of the affiliate products at a particular point in time, resulting in a newsletter filled with affiliate links instead of quality content.
Such newsletters are real turn-offs for subscribers. Imagine going through a newsletter that is just filled with affiliate links instead of valuable content. How would you feel? Disappointed, I believe.
Subscribers want you to guide them into making the right decisions. They know where to get some of these products themselves but they are receiving your newsletter so that they will learn more from you and receive guidance from you.
It is wrong, therefore, for you to bombard them with dozens of affiliate products in one newsletter instead of quality advice and informative content.
Affiliate products are very good and effective when they are relevant to the information you are giving to your subscribers at that point in time. They lose their value when you overuse them in a particular newsletter.
If you have a lot of products to promote to your subscribers, it is important for you to spread them out in the different issues of your newsletters. This way, your subscribers will not be inundated with them.
In promoting affiliate products to your subscribers, always remember that ‘quality is better than quantity’.
The first and most over-riding reason for publishing your newsletters is not to sell anything to your subscribers but to provide quality content to them.
With this in your mind, it is necessary for you to face the task at hand of providing them with quality information, then occasionally introducing them to few products that will help them make more sense out of the information you have provided them.
Also, make sure that the products you are recommending to them are of high quality. In other words, make sure that you have used the products yourself and have been very satisfied with the results. This will make your subscribers to see you as a person recommending the product for the good of the product and not just for the profit you seek to derive from the affiliate point of view.
This brings me to the second biggest mistake that you can make as a newsletter publisher. That is, trying very hard to sell a product in your newsletters instead of preselling.
Like I have said earlier, your subscribers do not see you as a salesperson. They see you as someone who is out there to provide them with quality content that will help them make their lives better. If they needed someone to sell to them, they would have gone out there to the marketplace to search!
You should therefore avoid trying so desperately to sell to them through your newsletters. They will sense this and defiantly refuse to buy through your links.
You should know that most of your subscribers also receive other newsletters that probably do the exact same thing you are trying to do to them.
Remember too, that the product you are trying to promote also has a sales letter, which is prepared solely for the sake of selling. It will therefore be wrong of you to use your newsletter as another ‘sales letter’ only for your subscribers to click to the site and see another sales letter waiting for them.
This will be ‘double bombardment’ of sales attempt. At the end of the day this will be very counterproductive to you.
Instead, presell to them.
Preselling here means that you should spend more time telling them the benefits of the product you are recommending to them. By preselling, you are providing your subscribers with very valuable and great content that will be of extreme value to them.
This will make them to see you as a good newsletter publisher who is out to help. It will therefore make them to click through to your affiliate links with pleasure.
Many of them will know even before they click through that you are referring them to your affiliate link. But what matters is, ‘how do they feel about YOU before clicking on that affiliate link?’ Bingo!
The answer to this question is what will determine whether you will succeed in converting that click into a sale or not. This is because preselling is all about YOU and how your subscribers feel about YOU.
If you are able to get them to derive a lot of benefit and satisfaction from the value of your information, they will click through and BUY anything you ‘recommend’ (not sell) to them.
The third biggest mistake you can make is trying to use 100 methods all at once to promote your newsletter. This will result in a ‘jack of all trade, master of none’ syndrome.
Know that there would always be other ways of doing a particular thing. But the most important question you should keep asking yourself is, ‘what are the best methods?’
So, instead of using all the 100 methods you know for promoting your newsletter, it is important for you to pick the few best ones and use them.
When it comes to newsletter promotion, I highly recommend that you should settle for the most effective methods, which include joint ventures, article writing, search engines and buying leads. By spending most of your time promoting your newsletters through these few methods, you will make more progress.
A good proverb comes to mind here, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth!’
The forth biggest mistake you can make as a newsletter publisher is trying to use ineffective means of promotion like surfing for traffic, banner exchanges and posting to classifieds. Believe me, they don’t work.
Most people, in fact, hate these methods. Banners, for example, have been classified by the big names in Internet marketing like Ken Envoy, as a complete waste of time and money, as far as promotion is concerned.
Also, the classified ads sites and other FFA (Free-For-All-Sites) should be ‘no-go’ areas for you as far as promotion is concerned. Instead, spend your limited time and money in using effective methods that are sure to work for you. You could add as many as 1000 subscribers using just one effective method at once if you do it right.
Also, make sure you don’t fall for the hype offered by so many companies today. Many of them try to convince you that you can send an email to as many as 3.5 million recipients spam fr’ee for as little as $27.
Not only is it a big lie, but it is also very unproductive. You will end up getting your credibility badly battered and even getting the Merchants that you are promoting their products into trouble.
Most of such millions of email addresses were actually harvested from various sources on the Internet and other offline avenues like newspapers and magazines. This means that emailing them will result to spam because they neither know about you nor are expecting to receive any email from you.
Lastly, most newsletter publishers make the mistake of waiting until everything is right before starting off. You realize know that everything can’t be right all at once.
You need to start somewhere first. God Himself did not create the whole world at once. This shows that nothing can be perfect from the scratch. You need to start, learn more along the way and continue to strive until you reach the status of a guru.
All the so-called gurus you see today started from somewhere. They were all in this same position you are today, but they had the courage to get started. You should therefore start right away on making the best out of your newsletter! You own it to yourself to start right now.
About The Author
You can learn how to avoid the mistakes that newsletter publishers make in my website:
http://www.affila.com/
contact@affila.com