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Welcome Small Business Canada readers. Below is a "reprint" of the article you read in the March/April 2003 edition, with links to all the resources mentioned ... plus much more! This is your opportunity to build your very own online success story with your own opt-in list.

Please feel free to skip directly to the ezine success toolkit or the sections specifically on delivery or marketing.

If you think that a website is all you need to succeed on the Internet, you will probably end up very frustrated. Your website is like a storefront. If you have a good spot at the mall, people will see you when they pass by. On the Internet, search engines are the malls. But passersby will often do just that ... pass by. Even if they stop to buy a widget from you, that $4.35 sale may be the last one you make to that person.

The secret to success on the Internet for most small and medium sized businesses is "the opt-in list". If you have spent any time listening to the self-appointed gurus of Internet marketing, this is perhaps the one thing on which they all agree.

What is an opt-in list? It is a list of contacts who have said, "Yes, I give you permission to send me emails." Most names on an opt-in list are likely to be at least warm prospects. And because they gave you permission to email them, you do not have to worry about damaging your reputation with accusations of "spam".

The secret of the opt-in list

There are two kinds of opt-in lists: the commercial list and the newsletter (or ezine).

The commercial opt-in list includes people who allow you to send them "amazing offers" or "product updates" from time to time. Generally, people don't sign up for those. Let's face it, how excited do you get at the thought of receiving more advertising by email?

A commercial opt-in list might work for you if a client bought a very pricy item and you are offering to email tips for best usage and product updates. Still, you open yourself up to angry customers if you start marketing other products to them without their permission. I keep a list of people who buy my Get In The News! media relations plan ebook, so that I can provide free annual updates. I might choose in that same email to mention something new that I am selling, but I would never dream of sending out an unrelated marketing pitch to that list.

A commercial opt-in list might also work if you have a very specialized product with a highly targeted market and very little competition. For instance, if you manufacture a product used only by greenhouses, you have a very small target market, possibly with very few competitors. Your clientele is likely to want to know about new products and would be willing to give you permission to send notices.

For the reasons enumerated below, I highly recommend option 2 - an ezine, even if you can get away with a commercial list. An ezine is simply an electronic newsletter sent out by email.

An email newsletter will accomplish three things for you

1. It will help you gather contact emails. People may not agree to be bombarded with advertising, but free information is quite another matter.
   
2. It will help you build a relationship with your prospects, who are now welcoming you into their lives and in many cases hanging on your every word.
   
3. It will build your credibility among your prospects, because they see you as the expert on your topic ... and we all prefer to buy from the expert, right?

FORMAT: First you need to decide frequency, length, and types of content. I opted for a daily ezine, which means I have to make it incredibly short to keep my readers' attention. Each edition follows the same format: introduction, sponsor message, a single mini-article, sponsor message, administrative items. Click here to see samples of Your Daily Dose of Happiness.

You will also have to decide whether to publish in plain text or pretty html, or both. Don't let yourself be dazzled into thinking that html format is less professional than text. I publish in text for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I want my ezine readable by ALL my subscribers. There are pros and cons for each method, and your decision should depend as much on your content as on your audience.

CONTENT: : You have to decide what content you want and how it will be generated. It does not all have to be generated by you. There is lots of free content available over the Internet from savvy marketers who demand only a short credit with a link to their website in exchange for their writing. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Idea Marketers
  
• Article Announce
  
• Free Content
  
• Ezine Articles
  
• Article City
  
• Go Articles
  
• Article Central

SIGN-UPS: You have several decisions about sign-ups. Should you accept single opt-ins, or do you insist on double opt-ins, where the person has to respond to an email to confirm that they really agreed to receive your email? Double opt-in is more complicated, but it protects you against Bob signing up his drinking buddy Doug, who later screams at you for "spamming" him.

You will have to decide what information to request of subscribers. Due to privacy concerns, the less you ask, the more subscribers you will get. Due to marketing desires, you might want to ask for more. I ask for the first name and the email address. Why do I ask for the first name? I want to build a more intimate relationship with my subscribers (one of the advantages of text ezines, remember?) and fend off some of the more aggressive spam filters, so I personalize every email. Also, a text newsletter comes across as much more professional when it is personalized.

You also have to decide where to sign people up. I include a form on my website navigation bar. I also sign up oodles of people who never even visit my website. More on that under marketing below.

** DO NOT FORGET to back up your list often. If you lose your list and have to use an outdated back-up, you will lose everybody who signed up since then. Worse, you will start sending again to everyone who unsubscribed, and you will be accused of spamming them! I upload my list twice a week to my web host for safe-keeping

DELIVERY: This may be the most boring part, but it is critical. Here is your wish list:

• You want to be able to send virtually simultaneous emails to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of prospects, individually personalized with their names -- and not accidentally reveal everybody's email address to everybody else (so DO NOT use your desktop email client!).
  
• You probably do not want to mortgage your children to pay for delivery (No, marketing over the Internet is NOT free.).
  
• You might want your ezine to be delivered overnight, while you sleep, as I do.
  

There are two basic options for delivery: pay for a delivery service or buy software.

I opted for software to minimize cost and maximize control. Delivery services often charge on a per send basis, which would drive a daily ezine under before it gets a breath of air. However, there are some good delivery services out there.

Please do NOT opt for a free delivery system such as Topica or Yahoo Groups. These advertising-supported services are wonderful ways for your local Toastmasters club or reading group to keep in contact, but your image will come across as very unprofessional to many of your subscribers.

Here are four of what I believe to be the better list host services:

• QuickPayPro
  
• List Universe
  
• EZezine
  

I opted for software on my own desktop instead. It was a close call between Gammadyne and MailLoop. I chose Gammadyne not because at just $150 it was less expensive (It was) and not because it was easier to set up (It was not), but because it is more powerful for personalizing messages and because it saves me time on repetitive tasks (very important for a daily ezine!). Once my system was set up, I just have to add the content for each edition and it pretty well runs itself. That's the beauty of it. Both Gammadyne and MailLoop come highly recommended.

MARKETING: How do you get the word out? Of course, you want every website visitor to sign up for your opt-in list. You may want to get sign-ups through other customer contact, too. For instance, a travel agency might slip a simple sign-up consent form to clients while the agent heads to the printer to collect the client's ticket.

There are many ezine promotion opportunities. A listing in any of the many directories on the Internet is a start. Here are a few of the more popular ones:

• The BIG Ezine Directory
  
• Ezine Universe
  
• Ezine Directory
  
• Amazines
  
• The Free Newsletter Directory
  
• and ...
  

One other nifty tool some people are using quite successfully is EzineAnnouncer. It saves you the time of manually submitting to all the directories on the Internet, and it also offers a number of additional promotional features for your ezine.

You can also get a lot of great targeted traffic through the search engines, if you do it right. Want some good news? Your competition is not doing it right. Almost nobody is. I wrote the manual on the most common search engine mistakes and missed opportunities. Pick up your copy of my SEO tips book.

By the way, the search engine manual comes with a free bonus list-building class, so you get two great ezine promotional tools for one low price.

By far the best marketing tool I have found, and you will see it after visiting any page on my personal growth website, is the free Subscription Rocket co-op. It advertises your ezine to visitors of other similar websites through a "pop-under" window. Half of my subscribers had never even been to my site, but were visiting other related sites when they signed up.

A lot of people hate pop-ups, but I have never had a complaint about this. Why? First, because this is a pop-under window that does not interrupt viewing. Second, people do not object to an offer of free information the way they object to someone selling porn, gambling and irritating little spy cameras.

To make this system work, you need a catchy title for your ezine (which you should have anyway). If your business is limited to a certain territory, say so. A caterer in Toronto might title her ezine "Good Taste in Toronto". Create a one-line description that's just as succulent. A description for Welding Tips Weekly might read "Advice from top pros, plus cash-prize contests".

This has been a short tutorial on opt-in lists, the key to building relationships with customers and potential customers over the Internet. Let me share with you one additional resource. There is a well-respected guide to ezine publishing called the MOE Manual. Please feel free to email me for additional assistance.

For more free website and webmastering articles for reprint, please see our article directory.

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