E-mail newsletters compound the return on your advertising investment

Everyone hates spam. Oddly enough when I set up my first e-mail account spam was a rare occurance (but not for my friends using AOL, or so I heard.)

Today I've had to take drastic measures to prevent from being overloaded by spam. For example, our e-mail address on the left column. Its actually an image.

This little trick prevents automated "robots" from harvesting our address and adding it to a spammer's mailing list.

I still get spam. Fortunately, it is no more than 5 or 10 e-mails a day.

Do you subscribe?

On the other hand, I subscribe to several excellant opt-in e-mail newsletters. One of them, Early To Rise, I read every single day. If its not in my e-mail inbox when I wake up in the morning I get frustrated. (By the way, the name, Early To Rise, does not describe me in the least.)

The guys that run Early To Rise sell things -- thats how they manage to send out an issue every single day of the week except Sunday. Every issue has a few short articles and one long one.

In each issue there are a few short ads. I also get an occasional promo e-mail from Early To Rise regarding some product they are selling. It doesn't bother me in the least. Its a small price to pay for a great business newsletter.

The guys that run Early To Rise have done very well. They know just how profitable running an opt-in e-mail newsletter can be. (For them, that number is in the millions of dollars.)

Imagine this: I could have stopped by their website for my first time over a year ago. Suppose they didn't have an e-mail newsletter. Instead they just published their newsletter on their website.

Its possible that I would have gone back and read their daily newsletter on occasion. Worst case scenario, I would have checked it out and completely forgotten about them.

Because they have an e-mail newsletter I am reminded about them every single day. Even better, their e-mail is always in my inbox when I wake up (or when I go to bed on those really late work nights.)

What this means for you

Being able to send out an e-mail newsletter 6 days a week a lot of work. Without a full time staff to help, it is downright impossible.

Fortunately, you don't need to send out an e-mail every single day to run a successful e-mail newsletter.

Weekly, Bi-weekly, or even monthly will be sufficiant for 99% of us.

How to set up an opt-in e-mail newsletter

There are several ways you can create an opt-in e-mail newsletter.

Setting up a newsletter is not that difficult. The first e-mail newsletter we set up was running by the end of the day.

With a little bit of research we were able to find an excellant company that specializes in opt-in e-mail.

With the technical part out of the way, the copy writing and implementation was left up to us.