This is a wonderful guest post from my buddy Jason. Although this isn’t his main topic, he was willing to send over this great post on Internet Marketing. I hope you enjoy it, and you can check out Jason’s blog at Atomic Guitarist.

Hi One Man’s Goal readers!

Lately I’ve been noticing a larger scale fusing of e-mail marketing and blogging. As you might already know, internet marketers build e-mail lists and send free information and offers for their own products or affiliate products. Internet marketers use an auto-responder service like AWEBER that allows 1) for visitors to opt-in to your e-mail list, and 2) to pre-write e-mails that will be automatically sent to that list over time. Usually internet marketers offer a free product (like John Chow does with his Make Money Online E-book).

Anyhow, let’s talk about using internet marketing methods for the purpose of driving more traffic to your blog via e-mail. That’s what I’ve been doing for a while at my guitar blog, ATOMIC Guitarist. I offer 25+ guitar speed exercises, calling it “ATOMIC Key to Speed.” I get usually 1 new sign-up per 20 visitors to any pages of my blog. Instead of sending info in e-mails, the e-mails contain tasty blurbs and links back to the info at my blog.

How Much Traffic Can I Generate by Using an Auto-responder?

In theory, an unlimited amount daily, but let’s get real.

Think about it this way. For every reader who opts-in to your e-mail list, you can expect him/her to revisit your site a few or several times. There’s no telling. In my experience, a little over half of my e-mails are ever opened and around 1/4 result in traffic to my blog pages. Still, with an auto-responder you’re snagging what would likely be one-time visitors and directing them back to your blog for as many e-mails as you accumulate in your automatic follow-up messages.

How Do I Get Visitors to Sign Up/Opt-in?

Offer something of special value. Special value = mid/high-dollar amount of information + rare information on your niche.

You can bind your product in a PDF or you can do what I’ve done and spread the information out on content pages at your blog. For the sake of increasing traffic to your blog, over the course of a week or so, do the latter and provide links to these pages in your e-mails. Put your all in creating and naming your product, because that’s how you’re going to get sign-ups.

How Often Should a New E-Mail Be Sent?

When you’re setting up your follow-up e-mails make sure there’s not a large time frame in between each e-mail. Otherwise your list will forget about you.

I send mine out 3-day intervals. Internet marketing experts say you should send an automatic e-mail every 2 to 5 days. Generally you’re not supposed to send every day because of information overload, but there have been cases in which Internet marketers have sent 5 to 10 e-mails a day to their list, and the results have been astonishing! So, like any piece of advice, form your own strategy in regard to your e-mail intervals.

Should I Send Affiliate Links in My E-Mails?

Once the folks on your list warm up to you and begin trusting your word (based on your free info), you may want to start cashing in with affiliate programs. Since I know you’re going to do this, I’ve created this section to teach you common lessons I’ve learned from wealthy internet marketers.

Instead of sending a link to an affiliate program in your e-mail, send a link to a detailed review of the affiliate product on your website. It’s important that you first buy an affiliate product before you promote it with a review because the best sounding products are often the crappiest in quality. Don’t push affiliate products just because they have a high conversion rate. If people on your list buy the product, they’ll get their refund, you’ll get nothing, and you’ll have folks on your list unsubscribe.

What Do I Do After I Create My Product E-Mails?

After you create your product follow-up e-mails, you can do a number of great things to send traffic back to your blog.

One key is to accumulate more automatic e-mail follow-ups, so they’ll continue sending traffic to your blog over time. These can be e-mails that provide links deep into your blog, to pages that may or may not see much search engine traffic. It’s not often that a reader will gut your entire blog, but by using an auto-responder you can drive visitors to your older valuable posts.

Another key is to broadcast one-time messages informing your list of valuable information that will only be relevant at the time the e-mail is sent. For example, the other day I heard about a guitar lessons website called Guitar Alliance who was giving free access to their membership site for an entire week. I published a post about it, sent my list a link to my post, and I was thanked for it.

How Should I Treat My List?

Like they’re real people, with respect. Treat them as you would anyone who visits your blog. This should give you some insight:

Put yourself in their shoes. You signed up for a free product. You know you might be bombarded with advertisements and offers that you don’t want to see, but the freebie sounded so good that you opted-in anyway. You’re wondering whether you should trust this guy’s information before you receive it. You want to be treated like a human being, like you’re an actual person taking your time to open these e-mails, not as part of an entrepreneur’s equation.

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