A little over a month ago I wrote about my plans to build an email list to send out newsletters. The goal is to build an email list that I can use to (carefully) promote products in that specific niche market that particular website is operating in. I was busy with other stuff, but finally found time to pick up this idea again. This evening I checked how many users have subscribed to my newsletter and I was blown away by the results. If the list continues to grow like this I will have over 150 subscribers by the end of the first quarter of 2008. That is a small number considering that you’ll find lists with over 10,000 people from commercial providers. But keep in mind that this is a home-grown mailing list that I am building with absolutely no promotional efforts other than placing a link on my website to the sign-up page. No push to sign up, no real information on how former newsletters looked like.

Anyway – this evening I spend about 45 minutes to write my very first newsletter. The newsletter is short enough to keep the attention focused on the email. I am providing some useful information and then write about topic related books and how many books are going to be published very soon (neat trick I know of to find a list of book titles not yet published, but already in the official catalog). I might write a different post on how to get that information and how to use it for your advantage. Anyway – to test the waters I added two book recommendations to the email. I am using cloaked links to directly refer the readership to Amazon.com. This will allow me to track sales success fairly easily. I am not promoting these books anywhere else. Yeah, I won’t make much money from possible book sales, but this is not meant to be a huge money maker at this point. My plan is to let the subscriber list grow and treat them well. If this experiment works success will follow. Imagine a newsletter with 500+ users or maybe 1,000+ promoting products that generate much more revenue. Or imagine selling advertising in a mailing list of a decent size.

The one thing I need to be careful with is SPAM. The newsletter provides detailed information on how to unsubscribe. The last thing I want is to get into problems here. If I see success from this first newsletter I will probably sign up for an Aweber account and outsource the mailing list feature. So, tomorrow morning at 8 AM my server will send out my very first newsletter. Wish me luck. I’ll keep you posted about the success or failure.