[E196]Email List Management Software

Significant income on the Internet only comes from repeat sales to the same people, for which you need a continuing relationship with them, which in turn requires a mailing list. To get people to sign up for your mailing list, you must give them something. Offering free e-learning courses is one of the easiest ways to get people to give you their email addresses, to start building a relationship, and to get them interested in your offerings.

To create your free e-learning courses, you have to deal both with the mechanics and with the content.

First the mechanics: You need an auto responder to send out the lessons and a web site where you can put the sign-up page (also called the "squeeze page"). You set up a new list at the auto responder site, get the sign up form, and put it on your squeeze page. When people subscribe, you have the auto responder send them a message every few days containing the next lesson. You can put the lesson in a plain-text e-mail message, but that's rather ugly. You can put it in an email that looks like a web page, but that makes spam filters suspicious. It is better if the plain-text e-mail message contains a greeting and the beginning of the lesson content and a link to the web page that contains the entire lesson.

As for the content, you write it much like you wrote essays in high school. It's easiest if you lay it out on a sheet of paper: you write your topic in the center of the page. You surround it with subtopics -- you only need maybe half a dozen subtopics, give or take, but list a few more topics than that to give yourself a choice. For each subtopic, you list three points. Each subtopic will be a separate lesson. For each lesson, you write an introductory paragraph, a paragraph about each point, and the conclusion, each of two or three sentences. That adds up to five paragraphs and 10 to 15 sentences overall.

The mini course of course cannot go into detail. It should be a valuable, but it should aim for a broad understanding and appreciation of the importance of the topic rather than the nitty-gritty of how to deal with it. You save the nitty-gritty for your books and other courses, and you use the mini course to promote them. You can reuse the lessons themselves for a course e-book to offer as another freebie.

You should not devote the free e-learning course to hard-core selling, but you shouldn't omit sales entirely. Keep the first lessons strictly informational. Maybe by the third you can suggest that they buy a product. By the last couple of lessons you can be suggesting they buy your e-book or sign up for your course or hire you to speak or consult.

After the course is over, keep in touch with the people on your list. Invite them to tele-seminars. Send them more useful information. Keep up your relationship.