If you read my earlier post on acquiring visitors’ email addresses, you understand how important it is to build an email list, and how a newsletter can be a great way to get value from those subscribers. But how can you promote products in your newsletter series without sending your subscribers running for the “unsubscribe” button? How do you promote newsletter loyalty and, at the same time, monetize it to the max?

Let me share with you my 7 steps to a killer newsletter: How to grab readers’ attention, hook them, and sell to them. We at Affilorama employ this strategy quite regularly with our newsletter lists, and with subscribers topping 100,000… we must be doing something right!

Step 1 – Refer to it as a ’6-day mini course’ instead of a newsletter

• Firstly: It’s more exciting than a newsletter – Essentially it’s the same thing but it sounds a lot more interesting. And, because you usually pay for a course, subscribers will feel like they’re getting something of value for free!
• Secondly: It lowers the commitment barrier – By signing up for a 6-day course, subscribers will not feel like they’re being added to a list they’ll never get away from.
• Thirdly: It builds trust – By creating a 6-part series of high quality emails, you build a good reputation with your subscribers and get them used to opening your emails.

Step 2 – Build an inviting sign-up box

You need to make it really obvious how to subscribe. A good idea is to have your sign-up box display “above the fold” and appear on every page of your site.

Your sign up box really has to pack a punch. Don’t just shove a little form in your sidebar and hope for the best. You need to sell your newsletter – almost as if it was a paid product.

We’re not saying that you have to create a huge sales letter for it; a few bulletpoints covering what people will learn in each lesson is sufficient. But don’t give too much away. Create a bit of mystery, and make it enticing!

Step 3 – Make sure your content is the very best you can offer

It’s an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and it’s true for your newsletter. If you don’t capture the attention of your readers from the start, there’s every chance they will unsubscribe and you will have lost them forever!

Conversely, if they haven’t unsubscribed within the first 10 to 15 emails, then they will probably stay on your list for good. Fantastic! Another reason to make sure that your first 10 emails are first class.

The quality of your content also sets the tone for how much readers will respect you as a source of trusted advice. If the content has obviously been copied, scraped, or lacks substance, it’s likely your readers won’t view you as an authority and your product recommendations will be far less successful.

Step 4 – Include affiliate promotions, but leave the hard sell at home

While there’s nothing wrong with including relevant affiliate links to ClickBank products in the body or signature of your emails, the focus really needs to be on valuable content. So avoid the hard-sell in your mini-course.

One technique is to just say “if you’re looking for the best guide to XYZ, I really recommend ABC. It gets right to the heart of 123 and will teach you XYZ in no time” and then return to your main content. You need to remind yourself that you are trying to build trust. A constant sales pitch will undermine that.

Step 5 – Day 7 promotional email

After the 6-day course has ended, your subscribers are ready to get a hard-sell promotional email. This could be a product review or talk of a recent product launch. Pull out all the stops and sell, sell, sell. Include limited, time-sensitive offers or create truly unique deals by adding your own bonuses that you’ve put together for this promotion.

Step 6 – Keep emailing them every 3 days

At this point you need to decide which direction your newsletter will take:

Option 1 – If you want to build loyalty and have long-term subscribers, then offer a mix of informative and promotional emails, emailing every 3 days, with every 3^rd email being something promotional like a product review.

Option 2 – If you’re not interested in building up your email list as a long-term asset, you can take the option of ongoing, rapid-fire promotion. Product reviews, launch offers, YouTube reviews and affiliate links should feature heavily in all your emails. True, your subscribers will probably end up growing tired of it but hopefully by then they’ve bought from you at least once!

So, is emailing every 3 days too much? Surprisingly, our tests proved that emailing two or 3 times a week was optimal. There are reasons for this and why email frequency is a vital part of your newsletter strategy but the key is: don’t be afraid to email people frequently. Chances are they won’t be opening all your emails so in reality they aren’t actually getting 3 emails a week after all!

Step 7 – Track your newsletter performance like a bloodhound

Don’t fire and forget. Know which newsletters are helping and which are hurting.

• Check your autoresponder statistics to see which emails are generating the most unsubscribes. Look at what might be offending your subscribers in these emails. Can you fix it and keep them hanging on?
• Use ClickBank’s tracking IDs (TIDs) to see which promotional links are getting the most clicks. Create a new tracking ID for each newsletter. If nobody is clicking the links in a particular email, can you see why that is?
• Don’t forget to use redirects or other link-rewriting services to make those nasty affiliate links look pretty and inoffensive to click on!

Hold up just one minute – Is your niche newsletter-worthy?

Before you even start down the road of building a newsletter and getting sign-ups, you need to determine if a newsletter would be helpful or appropriate for your niche. Not every niche works well with a newsletter series. Dog training, World of Warcraft, and dating niches are good because people have a passion for these topics. On the contrary, I am yet to meet anyone who has an ongoing interest in yeast infections or hemorrhoids. Nobody wants to be reminded of these problems every three days!

Don’t underestimate the value of a good newsletter

Many affiliates find that a large portion of their earnings comes from their newsletter series. Sometimes they earn more from their newsletter than their actual website! Rolling out a killer newsletter strategy is one of the most profitable exercises you can undertake – you just need to make sure you do it right!

Have you used this newsletter strategy? Did you modify it to boost its converting power or did it not work for you?

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend you review the Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing before kicking off your next campaign!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Do’s and Don’ts of Using Email to Promote ClickBank Products
2. Introducing ClickBrief, the Weekly Newsletter from ClickBank
3. 5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Even though a lot of marketers are turning to social media to ‘tweet’ their message, email is still a powerful way to promote your ClickBank products. With over 100,000 subscribers on our mailing list, Affilorama has to wield the power of this medium carefully. Emails that are overly promotional quickly turn potential customers into irritated readers who won’t think twice about hitting the delete button or, worse, reporting it as spam.

By providing value to subscribers we’ve been able to prove the ‘money in the list’ axiom true (we can’t release exact figures but sales improve around 300% with a good email newsletter) and we’d like to share a few secrets we’ve learned along the way that you can use to market ClickBank products or create newsletter collateral for your affiliates.

Beware of these 3 dangers!

Before we talk about what you should be doing to promote products using email, here’s a little checklist of things which can help you avoid being tagged as a spammer. Sure, they might be common knowledge, but they are important enough to be repeated.

• Beware of honeypots – Honeypots are a form of spam traps. Spam traps are specifically set up with the aim of catching spammers. They are email addresses “hidden” on a web page, but which can be found by address harvesting programs, commonly used by spammers. Unfortunately it can affect legitimate email marketers, too. In one case, a prominent email marketer lost 100,000 email addresses after a honeypot email address was added to their list by a competitor. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, choose an email service that offers a double opt-in option. This way any email address has to be verified with a confirmation email before being added to your list.
• Get familiar with the law – Laws on emailing people vary from one country to another so make sure that you are familiar with the legislation that governs electronic messages. For example, the CAN-SPAM act introduced in the US in 2003 dictates how businesses should follow certain protocols when sending emails to avoid prosecution. The FTC provides a good explanation of what it means for commercial email marketers, such as affiliates.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe – Sure you don’t want to actively encourage people to leave your list after you’ve worked so hard to sign them up, but if you make it difficult, complicated, or hide unsubscribe options, not only will you lose them mentally but instead of unsubscribing they’ll probably report you as spam. And make sure your process unsubscribes within a week (most email services do it automatically).

Enough of the ‘shalt nots’, time to move on to some good ideas for getting ‘bang for your buck’ out of your email newsletter.

4 secrets of effective email marketing

I’ve picked 4 because it’s a nice even number, not because there are only 4. In fact, there are plenty more and I invite you to add your own in the comments, but for now here’s a quick rundown of four ideas that will get your email promotions off to a good start.

• Kick off with a fantastic subject line – Some people have to deal with so many emails that they often make a decision on whether to read an email based on the subject line – so think of it as your one shot at glory. Give them a great reason to read your email, such as “1-day 50% off sale” or “5 reasons why your dog doesn’t listen to you.” The better you know your audience, the more effective your subject lines will be.
• Remind them why they signed up – Sometimes people sign up in a moment of weakness. To keep them on your list, you’ll need to regularly remind them that it was a good choice. By listing reasons why it’s good to be a subscriber (exclusive offers, secret links to valuable resources, etc.) you’ll not only make them feel good about being a subscriber, they’ll actually look forward to your next newsletter and may even encourage their friends to sign up.
• Create valuable content – This point probably suffers from a bit of overuse but it can’t be stressed enough, particularly when you have a commercial overtone. Some successful email marketers will only send a sales email every 4^th or 5^th email – the rest will just be useful content that they give away for free. When promoting ClickBank products this should be easy, since you quite likely have good information on the niche from the merchant, PLR content, or your own research. This can easily be packaged into an email to give your readers value.
• Set an expectation for frequency – The key with frequency is to strike a happy medium. With email frequency, this is more about setting expectations, rather than a particular interval. For example, if you offer a free six-day mini-course then obviously your subscribers will be expecting an email a day for the next six days. Beyond that, a weekly email might be the right frequency, particularly if your emails are short, relevant, and to the point. The other extreme is not emailing them for weeks, then surprising them (not in a good way) with something out of the blue. By that time, there’s every chance they will have forgotten they subscribed in the first place!

Build, test and tweak!

As you spend time writing your emails, you may run into questions about whether to include direct links to the vendor or send people to your own website. Like other issues you may face with your emails, there’s often no right or wrong answer, and it may well depend on your audience. If they don’t click through to your website, then it may be better to try sending them direct to the vendor instead (remembering to track your HopLinks with a unique TID so you know how effective your emails are).

It’s all about testing to find out what works, and then tweaking so your emails hit their target.

Using email to promote ClickBank products is a great investment for times when organic traffic to your site drops off. This could be due to any number of reasons, from increased competition to poor ranking for an important keyword.

If you have a list to promote to, you won’t just be sitting back hoping buyer traffic will find your site – you will be proactively reaching out to them. Do it right and you’ll find it an effective way to increase your ClickBank sales.

So if you don’t already promote ClickBank products by email, what’s stopping you? Have you found a winning formula for writing effective emails that provide value to the reader but also promote your ClickBank products?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Acquiring Leads: How to Capture Visitors’ Email Addresses Before They Leave
2. 7 Steps to a Killer Newsletter Strategy
3. Choosing the Best Keywords to Promote ClickBank Products Using Search Engines

Disclaimer: Please don’t take any of this as legal advice. I’m not a lawyer. I would always recommend seeking professional legal advice if you are unsure on any areas.

Nike, iPhone, Google, ClickBank – these words catch your attention because they are strong brands and are instantly recognizable. So why not use that to your advantage and include these names in your advertising? Could you get into trouble for using a brand name?

With a pretty decent AdWords spend each year, our own advertising here at Affilorama needs to be highly effective yet fully compliant. Let’s talk about some ways you can safely use trademarked brands in your advertising, and some dangerous pitfalls you want to avoid.

Vendors – Protecting your brand

If you’re a vendor, you know how important it is to develop a strong brand and look after your reputation. As your success grows so will the number of competitors, affiliates, and resellers interested in using your trademarked name(s). But the internet is a massive playground to patrol – how can you effectively monitor your brand?

• Register your brand – You can choose to register your brand for added security in key markets. For example, in the US you can register with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This can be a powerful asset to have when you need to prevent someone using your trademark without your permission.
• Google Alerts – A great way to monitor online activity that involves your brand name is to set up a free Google Alert.
• Traffic Travis PPC Analysis – Monitor advertisers who are using specific keywords, such as your trademarked names, using the PPC Analysis tool.
• Social Media search – Some social media sites are “walled gardens” and won’t appear in a standard Google search. This means you will need to perform manual searches on sites like Facebook.

What can you do if you come across what you feel is misuse of your brand?

• Is it misuse? – First, make sure your brand is actually being misused. Google has recently relaxed the use of trademarked names by advertisers, particularly in the US. It’s also possible that the use of your brand by someone else is actually to your advantage, in the form of free publicity.
• Contact the offender - If you are still unhappy with the use of your trademarked name, then the best course of action is to attempt to contact the offender directly and resolve the matter. Beware of “burning bridges,” as the offender may not have been misusing it intentionally and could be a powerful advocate for your product.
• Legal recourse – If the matter is still not resolved to your satisfaction, you can turn to a third party for assistance. Google has clear guidelines on its policies for trademark usage and ClickBank has its own trademark policy that all clients must adhere to.

Affiliates – Using trademarked names the right way

Using a trademarked name can be a very effective method of promoting a product, but done outside proper usage guidelines will only create problems. So what’s the best way to use a trademarked name?

• Work with the vendor – Cooperation and openness is the best policy to gain maximum advantage from using a trademarked name. A vendor can provide extra support and resources to boost your promotion. For example SaleHooReview is an affiliate website that promotes our popular wholesale directory service, SaleHoo. He contacted us and thus began a productive relationship that works for both parties, an arrangement that allows him to use our trademarked SaleHoo brand on his site and in his domain name.
• Avoid negative intent – Some affiliates have been known to use a trademarked name in a negative way, such as advertising a poor review of a product to grab attention, or to switch to a competing product. If you intend to use the trademarked name in a way that casts the vendor in a bad light, then expect to be challenged for its usage.
• Keep it ethical – Trademarked names are often used in a negative way to trick consumers. Counterfeiters are notorious for tricking consumers into believing they are buying the real thing by using names that closely resemble the original product name. Other unethical uses include impersonating the actual vendor and directly linking to their site with an affiliate link. Some of these practices are thoroughly policed and banned by Google.
• Check advertising guidelines – Google updated their policies in June 2009, relaxing its rules on the use of trademarked names in selected countries including the US and the UK. Trademarks can be used in your targeted keywords and AdWords ad copy if you sell or review a product. But just because Google allows it doesn’t mean the vendor will – it pays to check if they place any restrictions on using their trademarked names.

Vendors and Affiliates working together with Vendor Spotlight

There’s a certain synergy that comes from vendors and affiliates working together. Rather than a vendor spending their time hunting down the “bad guys,” they can focus on working with the majority of affiliates who are genuinely interested in promoting their products in a legitimate manner.

An excellent way to build bridges with affiliates is for vendors to create their own Vendor Spotlight. The Vendor Spotlight is a good way for vendors to communicate with affiliates, and potential affiliates, about what support and resources they offer affiliates, current promotions, sales trends, and other news and tips for selling more product. We use the SaleHoo Vendor Spotlight for keeping our affiliates informed of new material we add to the affiliates area on SaleHoo or special promotions that we run.

If you need to ask the vendor questions about use of their trademarked names, and seem unable to find a way to contact them, talk to ClickBank. They may be able to mediate on your behalf.

Using trademarked names when promoting ClickBank products can really boost your sales, increasing your profile and your commissions. But when the rules of fair usage are ignored, the resulting conflict is not good for anyone.

Do you use trademarked names or brands in your promotions? What’s worked best for you? Do you feel the policies on brand name usage are too relaxed?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. ClickBank Vendors: Create Your Vendor Spotlight Now
2. Getting the Most Out of Affiliate Tools
3. How Not to Use Twitter for Affiliate Marketing