Publish a lively, useful newsletter
Let's say you have 3,000 people a week - or month - visiting your site. Most of them are going to look at one or two pages and then disappear, perhaps never to be seen again. You need a way to persuade them to return. Writing your own newsletter is an excellent way of boosting repeat traffic. A newsletter reminds readers that your site exists. To encourage repeat visitors, you can tell your readers about new articles you've added to your site. You can also remind them of articles they may have missed. You can tell them about a survey you're running on your site, a special report, or interesting new posts on your forum.
While you're writing your newsletter, keep asking yourself, "Is this item useful? How can I make it MORE useful?" If you're not keen on writing, you can outsource the writing or simply publish brief notes which let your readers know that your site has been updated. My
newsletters tend to be long, but yours doesn't have to be.
Newsletters enhance your reputation, add to your credibility and - best of all - give you repeat opportunities to make a sale. Another advantage of publishing a newsletter is that when you want to launch a second or third website, you can give it a flying start simply by mentioning it in your newsletter.
If you haven't published a newsletter, you'll find that the technical side of it is much easier than you imagined. A good, reliable way to publish a newsletter is to use Aweber to distribute it. Aweber takes the hassle out of newsletter publishing. Using a professional service like Aweber and a double opt-in sign-up process gives you protection against spam complaints. Aweber has been around for years, has an excellent reputation and one of the highest - if not THE highest - successful delivery rates online. It automatically handles subscribes and unsubscribes. It gives you a form you simply paste into your website to start collecting email addresses, and it even provides newsletter templates. It's a wonderful service. I use it for two of my newsletters and highly recommend it. It's much better than a more expensive distribution service I also use. It's tricky switching one from service to another. Because of inertia, you're
likely to lose a large percentage of your readers if you have to switch to a new service. So make sure you start with a well established, reliable company that's here for the long haul.