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HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR EZINE 1 Robert Middleton Interviews Linda Claire Puig

Copyright ©2009 Robert Middleton, Action Plan Marketing - www.actionplan.com

Robert: Welcome, everyone. This is Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing and the Action Plan Marketing Club. Today I’m interviewing Linda Claire Puig of Claire Communications. Welcome to the call, Linda.

Linda: Thank you so much, Robert. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Robert: What we’re going to be talking about here today is how to make money with your ezine. Everyone has heard about ezines. Everyone on the call gets my ezines.

People have done ezines, but a lot of people don’t really understand how to make money with ezines.

Before we start, I want to give people a little background on you.

Linda Claire Puig is on a mission to get human-potential professionals to CONNECT regularly and consistently with the people who need their services—growing their own business while making a difference in the world.

In her unique, action-oriented training programs, Linda teaches coaches, mental health professionals and other service-based business owner s how to attract buckets of ideal prospects and nurture those relationships through high-value newsletters. Students in her programs create their attraction tools or ezines (for a whole year!) WHILE learning how to strategically use them to grow their business.

An award-winning journalist and professional writer since 1983, Linda's Ready2Go article and Ready2Go ezine services also provide busy personal development professionals and small business owners with high-



quality, customizable, education-based marketing content, removing one of the key barriers to business growth.

Linda's writing has appeared in newspapers, magazines and newsletters throughout the world. Her company, Claire Communications, has produced newsletters for associations, small businesses and solo-professionals since 1990, and she has trained thousands of individuals in "the way of the newsletter."

Linda, I know you are an ezine and newsletter expert. How did you get started in newsletters?

Linda: I wrote my very first newsletter back in my early 20s when I moved from Missouri to California.

Robert: That was a long time ago.

Linda: It was a long time ago. How did you know? (laughter)

I wanted a way to keep in touch with a lot of people at one time and let them know what was happening with me. That was my very first one.

Not too long after that, I began doing them professionally. I was a journalist for a while. Then when I went into business for myself, I started working with various clients. I did a newsletter for a women’s surf shop. I did a newsletter for a prosthetics company and for a liberal arts college. It’s a real variety of them. There was a private school.

In the beginning of the 2000 decade, actually 2002, I started doing newsletters specifically for what I call “people in the human potential arena,” mental health



professionals, coaches, consultants, etc. and small business owners of that nature.

Robert: Were your first newsletters hard copy newsletters?

Linda: Yes.

Robert: Or were you already going into email newsletters?

Linda: Well, now I’m really going to date myself because my very first one was a cut-and-paste one where you actually pasted the typography.

Robert: Oh my god! It’s technology that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Linda: Exactly. The first newsletters I began doing professionally were all print newsletters. Only when I started working with the coaching arena did I begin doing electronic newsletters, which are called ezines, as you know.

Robert: Right. So you’ve had a lot of experience with this over the years. What did you discover or what did your clients discover about newsletters? How did they help their businesses?

Linda: They help in a huge variety of ways. I call them an all-in-one marketing tool. First of all, they keep you top of mind.

They keep you in front of and in the face of the people that you want to be known by and who you want to purchase what you’re offering, your service or products. The first person they’re going to think of when they need what you have is you because they’ve been getting your newsletter.

The other thing they’re great at is building relationships. That is so key, especially today with all the social media



whatnot and all of what we’re learning with all the social media stuff and how important that relationship building is. A newsletter is a strong way to keep people in your sphere of influence and build that relationship with them.

They also position you as an expert, which is really key as well. Any time you publish something people automatically have a perception of you as the authority in something. They bring you lots of opportunities. There are a variety of ways that they work on your behalf.

Robert: I have also found with an ezine that they get you more word-of-mouth business. People pass on the ezine. It’s probably easier with ezines than newsletters. There’s probably more word-of-mouth with ezines. That’s how I’ve grown my list over the years.

Linda: As that happens, it brings you more opportunities with joint venture partners, etc., etc. It snowballs, really.

Robert: I’m going to talk a little about lists and ask you questions about lists later, but I’m curious. For your first clients you were sending newsletters to, where did their lists come from? Who did they send to? Was it just past consumers, or did they develop a list of prospects for you?

Linda: Are you talking about print ones?

Robert: The print ones to begin with.

Linda: I actually have a really great training around print newsletters. There are so many ways to use print newsletters that people don’t know about. One of the first things you do is have them in your store or office or with



you in your briefcase wherever you go so that they’re always there at the ready to hand to somebody.

They did send them to past clients. They send them to current clients and other related professionals. I always recommend that to people who are using print newsletters, and they are actually quite effective. I just want people to know that. Ezines are not the only way to go, but they’re completely different animals.

Robert: It depends on your business.

Linda: Actually, even as a coach, unless you’re exclusively building a business that is international and done only by phone. Then you would not want to use them. If you want to build any kind of a local geographic business, you could use print newsletters quite effectively.

One of our clients is known in her little town in Oregon as the newsletter lady. She puts her print newsletter in employee break rooms, in natural food stores, and she goes into her bank and they say, “There’s the newsletter lady.”

Robert: What’s her business?

Linda: She’s a coach. Her target market is women in the workplace. She looked at any place that there are women in the workplace that congregate and started putting her newsletter there. It’s even in the teacher’s rooms where the teachers congregate in between classes. There are so many ways and places to put your newsletter that people can snatch up and read.



Robert: It’s interesting. She took that newsletter and really made it her prime, central marketing tool, right?

Linda: Absolutely.

Robert: As we talk about ezines, I think we’ll emphasize that. My ezine is my prime focused marketing tool, and then I do other things that are promoted through the ezine.

If I didn’t have the ezine, I couldn’t do teleclasses. If I didn’t have the ezine, I probably couldn’t promote my workshops. It really becomes central.

Linda: Yes, and you could have a list that you send to. If you only send them promotional things, they would quickly tire of you. Because you’re sending an ezine with educational content that is helpful to them, they’re going to stay on your list.

Robert: Yeah. Is this a good time to get into content?

Linda: Any time you’re ready.

Robert: I’ve talked to a lot of people about ezines. Given that I’ve been doing it successfully for years and years, the biggest question people come up with first is, “I don’t know what to write about. I don’t know what to put in my ezine. It sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know how you come up with ideas every week. That sounds impossible, blah, blah, blah.”

People generally talk themselves out of it because they don’t think they have enough content. I know you have a business that helps people with content, which is a great thing. We’ll talk about that later, but some people I think



can do it themselves, but they just don’t know where to start. Where do they start with that?

Linda: I love this question, and yes, I do have a business that helps people with content if they’ve decided that they’re definitely not going to do it themselves. For those who have decided that they want to but they don’t know where to start, I have some great free resources. I will give those toward the end of the conversation.

Basically, what you want to do is work with lists. Start with lists.

Put down everything you know about and everything you work with clients about and then start breaking those items into smaller lists and those items into other lists. Then you can take those and reformat them into full articles that maybe address three of the items that you came up with, or maybe come up with a quiz that incorporates three of the items.

It’s stunning how much information and how many articles you can come up with just by starting this listing process. That’s one of the things I have audio tips and some written suggestions on that people can get for free. We’ll give that URL at the end. It’s actually not as difficult as people think.

Robert: It’s the same thing as something I say. “Make a list of every problems that any client has had that you’ve worked with.”

Linda: Absolutely.



Robert: Then the newsletter or the ezine article is an answer to that problem.

Linda: You’re right. That’s the place to start. That’s where the listing starts; what are the problems of the people you’re working with?

Robert: How have you helped them? What ideas, strategies or tips? It’s endless.

Linda: It’s really surprising. It’s one of the biggest steps that somebody has to make. It’s the step outside themselves to realize how much they know. When we’re doing what we do, we’ve been doing it for so many years that we think everybody knows what we know.

Robert: Yes.

Linda: I think everybody knows about newsletters, and the truth is that they don’t.

Robert: Exactly. I think everybody knows about certain things. I teach it, but I think, “They should know how to do X.” But of course they don’t, and that’s why they hire you.

The more you write about this, the more you realize that you know that other people don’t know. People hire you for that expertise. It’s quite an interesting process.

Linda, I just have to insert this. I started doing my ezine in 1996. I guess that makes it 14 years.

Linda: You are definitely a grandfather of newsletters.

Robert: I’ve been doing it for a long time, almost every week for 14 years.



Linda: That’s amazing.

Robert: It really transformed my life and my business. Something happened that had never happened before in my business in that I started to create momentum. More and more people heard of me over time.

There was more word-of-mouth, and maybe even the biggest thing was I started to gain more confidence about what I knew. I was always writing about it. I started to not only pretend I was an expert, so to speak, I actually started to feel like an expert. I really knew more than I realized.

That ezine morphed into The InfoGuru Manual and other products and things. This process of writing is a magical process. It’s hard for people to really get it until they do it, but it will change your life.

Linda: You’re absolutely right on, and I’ve had the very same experience myself. You mentioned something that’s very important for people to really understand. Once you get in the groove of doing all this stuff, out of that naturally flows all these other products.

It’s amazing. There are teleclasses and workshops. It just starts flowing.

Robert: Exactly. So, you should do it, if for no other reason than clarifying your expertise.

The other thing I’ve also found is if you write something down, you’ve thought it out, you’ve organized it, and you’ve put it in a good, readable format. Then you become more articulate about that subject.



When someone asks you about that subject, because you’ve written about it, you’re better at talking about it. I’m astounded by the number of people in business who, when you ask them a question about their business, often they’re very poor about articulating how they’re different, what exactly they do, and how their services are structured. It’s usually a person who hasn’t written a lot. They haven’t really thought through the whole process.

Linda: Yes.

Robert: You’re going to be better at talking about your business just by writing on a regular basis.

Linda: It just completely helps clarify all that you do. You also will probably start charging more once you really get a good feeling for the value you bring.

Robert: You can think of this as kind of an all-purpose tool that helps you in so many ways. It gets the word out. It gets you visibility. It builds your credibility. It builds your confidence. It gives you a foundation for new products and services.

Often people want to start and say, “I want to write an ebook,” and they’ve never written an article. You’re going to have a hard time writing an ebook if you’ve never written an article. It’s a great place to start.

Linda: I would like to address the confidence-building thing that you brought up because what I’ve found is that a lot of people are initially very shy about putting themselves out there as an expert, as somebody who knows something, even though they are completely. They’ve been doing whatever they’re doing for 20 years.



But there’s this shyness factor, and you feel kind of vulnerable about putting yourself out there. That can be a hurdle to overcome for some. But once you do and live through the discomfort and work through it and continue doing it, it really does build your confidence.

Pretty soon you’re talking before people. You’re leading and conducting teleseminars and blah, blah, blah. It’s a personal growth tool as well, is what I want to say.

Robert: Yeah, you have to realize that you can be an expert without knowing everything. You’ll never know everything. But if you know a little bit more than your clients, you’re ahead of the game. If you know one strategy, one approach or whatever it is, if you’re a coach, consultant or other service professional. It just sort of fixes that knowledge in you. It really does that.

Tell me, what are some of the mistakes you’ve seen people make with newsletters and ezines.

Linda: There are three big ones that I see people making fairly frequently. One is to send them either too infrequently or too irregularly.

That happens when people start something with great gusto and they don’t have a plan for it, or life takes over or something and they just let it fall by the wayside. It ends up that every time they send out a newsletter, they have to reintroduce themselves to their list.

Robert: The last newsletter was six months ago... There’s no continuity in that.



Linda: We can talk more about that if you want, but I think it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people know and have experienced that already. It’s a best-laid plans kind of thing.

Another mistake is the wrong balance of education and promotion. For some people it’s really difficult initially to get that you just give away this educational content and that it is truly educational.

Yes, there is a place for promotion, but the article itself needs to have its own legs and can stand on its own with regard to value. Some people just find themselves writing promotional stuff instead of education, or the opposite. They just give away all this stuff, and they don’t put an ounce of promotion in their newsletters. That would be the wrong balance as well.

Robert: An adage might be that people are afraid to be rejected. If you promote, you might get rejected.

The guy that inspired me to do my ezine was doing an ezine back in 1995. It was a really good ezine with great articles and zero promotion. As his marketing consultant, I said, “Why not put a little promotion about your services? I can’t really assume from your newsletter exactly what the heck you do.”

It was that sort of a blinding flash of the obvious. So he put something in the next week, and he came back to me and said, “I’m so upset. Someone got the newsletter with the promotion in it, and they said how crass it was and how terrible it was and how could I possibly do that?”



I said, “That’s a person that would never buy your services anyway. You’re not in the business to entertain people, although that will happen as part of it, as well as educate people. Don’t worry about her. Forget about it, but you’ve got to have some promotion or you’re creating great content that will never generate any money for you.”

Linda: I actually did an experiment where I sent out a series of free things and articles without an ounce of promotion. I had people writing me back, “I’m ready, but I don’t even know what you’re offering.”

There is a place for pure education. There is a place for pure promotion, and there’s a place in your ezine for a good balance of it. I like to tell people just in general it’s maybe 75/25 or 70/30, with the bigger side being the educational.

Robert: I always have my article at the top, and then I have various promotional things at the bottom. I don’t like ezines that have two pages worth of promotion before you get to the article either.

Linda: I mix it up. I put some helpful tips at the beginning, and then the promotion, and then my article, and then some promotion.

Robert: There are a lot of different formats. I think it’s important that you find a format that you feel good about and then people are familiar with it. Then they’ll accept that format, whatever it is.

Linda: There is one other thing I wanted to say that is probably almost the biggest mistake that anybody can do, and it’s



not just with their ezine; it’s with their business in general. That’s not focusing on growing your email list.

I have clients. I talk to them. I have special little sessions just for clients and I tell them about the importance of growing their list, and they’re still not doing it. They’re still just sending a newsletter to 150 people.

That, to me, is definitely a better thing to do than not, but there’s so much being left on the table that they could be claiming.

Robert: I did an interview with someone a number of months ago on growing your list, but why don’t we talk about a few of your favorite and most effective ways that you’ve found to grow your list. I think in some ways that’s harder than doing the ezine itself. It’s a mystery to a lot of people.

Linda: It is, and it does need to be amost its own separate strategy. It’s a business strategy that is connected with the ezine, but it’s not the ezine.

Robert: They’ve very, very connected.

Linda: They’re very intertwined. My favorites are working with partners. Ther e are two different things. I like to give free teleseminars, and I like to give free resources in a variety of formats.

For me, one of the best things I’ve found is by joining with other people who are also serving the same community and asking them to offer these free resources to their list.

They are almost always willing, well, not almost always. They have always been willing because they’re high-value



material that their list would want that they’re not able to offer themselves.

It looks good that they are providing it to their readers, too. It’s beneficial material. Whatever your topic is, there are other people working with the same audience that you’re working with that are not covering the topic that you’re covering in your business.

Robert: Same audience, but not competitive.

Linda: Exactly, it’s collaborative. Basically, collaboration is the key.

Robert: How many times a month might you do something like that? Me interviewing you is actually an example of that because people will go to your website and some people will sign up for your ezine, as they should.

Linda: How often? Gosh, as often as possible. It really couldn’t be too often. You could do a couple of calls a week.

I have a list with about 150 to 200 people who are all working in my industry. I haven’t contacted all of them, but I have some relationship with many of them. Any opportunity that exists or that I can calendar on my calendar, I’ll take it because it’s all in the name of list building.

I also think there are some fun ways to go about it, but primarily it’s through the giving away of helpful information. That’s what I’ve found to be the biggest thing.

If you’re going to have a newsletter, I believe you have to have a freebie to offer as an exchange for people’s email



and for them to be willing to have you send to them. There is no longer any value in just putting up a subscribe form on your website saying, “Subscribe to my newsletter.”

Robert: That’s the first thing, “Get this free report,” or whatever, “and you’ll also get our newsletter,” instead of vice versa.

Linda: Yeah, those free reports have a lot of different names. I call it a “pink spoon.” You know, like Baskin-Robbins, just to give a little sample of yourself.

Robert: Right.

Linda: It makes you want more. I didn’t come up with that, by the way. Andrea Lee did.

Robert: Right.

Linda: Also, people call them “lead magnets” or “pulling people to you,” etc. That is one of the very first things that I recommend to people who want to get started with an ezine. Pull that together and come up with something that is just as irresistible as you can make it.

Robert: It could be a small ebook. It could be some kind of report. It could be an audio on a particular thing.

Linda: Yes.

Robert: It could be something you use for a long time or to change up once in a while.

Linda: Yeah, I have probably three or four different ones. It’s even for a call you’re doing, if you have a program you’re going to be offering and you have a call at the beginning of your sales process. You give a lot of great, valuable



information and also sell the program at the end. Then that is another example of a kind of lead magnet.

Robert: Right. This morning I got an email from Poland, from a colleague who is in Poland. They subscribed and got the article. They love the article so much they asked if it could be reprinted in a magazine.

Linda: In Poland?

Robert: I don’t know if they’re going to translate it into Polish, but they might.

Linda: That’s great.

Robert: You never know where this stuff will go, but if you don’t have content, nobody can share it.

Linda: You’ll stay the best-kept secret that’s doing great work.

Robert: I call it latent marketing energy. You have all this great information, but if no one gets it, it’s just latent. It’s not active. You’ve got to get it out there.

Linda: I call it field-of-dreams marketing.

Robert: Right.

Linda: If I build it, they will come... No… not exactly.

Robert: But you’ve got to build it first.

Linda: That’s true.

Robert: One of the other big problems or objections about ezines is that there are already too many ezines. “Everyone else is doing it. Why bother, because I get ezines and I don’t even look at all of them anymore, blah, blah, blah.”



Honestly, my observation is that people seem to be reading less because there are more. Nevertheless, I still think they work, but what about that objection?

Linda: I totally agree with your assessment, and I understand the objection very much. We all get a lot of email. We all feel probably inundated by it, so why send an ezine?

First of all, there are plenty of people who are not on anyone’s newsletter list. For a lot of people, this is all very new, getting a newsletter in their inbox.

I get a ton because it’s my business, but there are a lot of people who don’t. That’s one thing.

Another is that even if they are just seeing your newsletter come in, but not reading it. Even if that scenario took place, that would still be a touch.

Robert: It’s a marketing blip.

Linda: It’s them noticing you.

Robert: Exactly.

Linda: If it’s tied with your picture coming into their inbox. Or maybe just the subject line is what they see, but there’s still something of you coming in so that when they do have the time and they do need the service, then you’re the one that they think of.

Robert: Someone says, “Do you know someone that helps with newsletters or small business marketing?” Even if they haven’t read your every issue of your newsletter, they’ll say, “This guy Robert,” or “This woman, Linda, is really great at that. Check them out. Here’s their web address.”



Linda: Right, exactly.

Robert: But not if you don’t have that visibility.

Linda: And there are lots of people who do read your newsletter. They’re not going to reply, so you’ll never know, and every once in a while they will. I actually got the most response to my newsletter when I told everybody that I was turning 50.

Robert: That’s funny. Sometimes you do real, sort of human- interest type newsletters or ones that touch the heart or something that is peripherally related to business and you get a lot of response on those. Sometimes stuff like that is what does it.

Linda: It doesn’t mean that people aren’t reading them. There’s all this stuff about open rates and blah, blah, blah. Just because your open rate says 35%, which is pretty darn good, doesn’t mean that only 35% of the people who get your newsletter are looking at it.

Anyway, I just think that the ship is still in for ezines.

Robert: Yeah, so let’s look at ezines versus some of the other hot things these days. The hottest thing these days seems to be social media, Twitter, Facebook and blogging.

Some people go, “No one reads ezines anymore, so I’ll just blog, and I’ll do a million Twitter tweets.” I think that can be part of your marketing mix, but I don’t know many people who are building their business in the way that I have from using social media.

I’m sure there are some exceptions. What’s your experience or ideas about that?



Linda: My take is the same as yours. I think that there is value to social media. I’m not a huge player, but I do play in it. I see it more as one of the strategies to build your list that you would then send a newsletter to. That’s how I view that stuff.

My ultimate goal of interacting with people in social media is to get them to come to a website of mine and sign up for something and get on my list.

I think that they’re intertwined and they can certainly be mutually supportive, but when you’re doing something on Twitter, it’s catch-as-catch-can with whoever is on there or who remembers to go look at your stuff.

It’s not the same as you pushing out this newsletter to your list. By “pushing out,” I just mean the act of sending it out to your list.

Robert: It lands in their email box, and it sits there. With a Twitter tweet, you have the Twitter roll. I may look at it at 10:00 a.m. and only look at it for 15 minutes.

Linda: You’ve missed 23 hours and 45 minutes worth.

Robert: Everyone else misses it. When I got into Twitter and learned about it, I got kind of obsessive about it. I spent days learning it, and then one fine day I thought, “It’s just not doing anything!”

Linda: I know.

Robert: It was kind of fun, but I’ve scaled back Twitter to almost nothing. Once in a while, I put a comment or something on Facebook and then people respond to it. There can be



more response and more words than 140 characters, which I think is good.

It’s just another side of me and some other ideas. It’s sort of like a micro blog. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help as much as the ezine, for sure.

Linda: That’s part of the relationship building. That’s part of getting personal and letting people get to know you.

What I find so interesting is as we get more and more into our computers for communicating, the need for relating in a personal way is growing too, or seems to be, so that people want to know more about you as a person.

Robert: Right.

Linda: I find it fascinating that it’s growing up together like that. I think it’s having a plan for social media. I’m kind of like you.

I do it a little bit here and there. I do it when I want to go play and procrastinate. (laughter) I do it when I just feel really social, but I’m not on there every single day.

I kind of aspire to have the kind of discipline to get on there once a day for so much time, but I’m not there yet. I think it’s good to have a plan. I don’t think in any way that any form of social media, even blogs, is a replacement for a newsletter because again, people have to take the action of going to your blog.

I suppose there are RSS feeds and stuff like that, but for the most part.

Robert: Most people still don’t understand how that works.



Linda: Exactly.

Robert: What I do is I do my ezine and then I put it up on my blog. If someone comes to the blog or wants to read it on the blog, I have a link to the blog, because it looks nicer to read. That’s why I did it originally. Some people might go to the blog. There’s a link back to my site, so it does work, but it really doesn’t have the impact of an ezine. There is an exception, and we see the exception and think it’s the rule.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, someone who is a great writer and blogs continually can get a certain buzz with people who are really into blogs. All of a sudden, thousands of people are looking at that blog, but it’s such a rare phenomenon. It’s like having a hit TV series. Not too many people are actors on TV either.

A lot of people saw the movie “Julie and Julia” where this woman named Julie did a blog about her doing every single recipe on Julia Child’s book on French cooking. It got a certain amount of notoriety and a lot of visitors and ended up in a book and a movie, but the chances of that happening to the average person is one in 2 million.

Linda: I completely agree.

Robert: It’s a great idea, but it just is not going to happen for most people.

Linda: You have a lot more control over your marketing. You have a lot more control over the results you get in your marketing with an ezine than you do with some of these other things.



I agree. Sometimes you can hit it really big and become a phenomenon, but your average Joe and average Jane isn’t. There are still valuable things to do, but you have to be really conscientious about the time you’re spending for the return you’re getting.

Robert: Exactly, so why don’t we get into our plan for an ezine? What do you recommend to people just getting started in publishing an ezine?

Linda: I mentioned the first one already, and that’s the good pink spoon or lead magnet. Make sure you’ve got that in place.

If you have a list already, I wouldn’t even wait for that. Start sending to your list and get in the habit of doing your newsletter and get in the swing of it. Don’t wait around for your lead magnet and pink spoon to do that, but that is a key first element.

Robert: Can I underline that with an example?

Linda: Yes.

Robert: I’ve said this a million times, but not everyone has heard it. I used to just offer the ezine. “Sign up for the ezine. Here’s the ezine,” and I got X number of subscribers every day or every week. Then I offered a free report or free marketing plan workbook, and overnight, my subscription rate doubled.

Linda: Wow.

Robert: It was that much of a difference. It’s not just a nice thing to do that you’ll get around to someday. It’s a very important thing to do, to have that magnet so they’ll want that and then get on the list.



Linda: If the subscriptions are not coming in the quantity that you want them to come in, try a different one. Your point is to measure it.

Robert: Yeah.

Linda: And know what’s happening with that. I recently put a new official pink spoon, the one that’s on all my different websites. I instantly started getting more than the old lame one that I had from years earlier.

Robert: What was the new title?

Linda: “75 Best Newsletter Success Strategies.”

Robert: Uh huh! People like “10 Things” or “20 Things” or “7 Things” or even “75 Things” because it’s tangible. It’s real. It’s something they can get and use right now. That’s good.

Linda: You know, I heard something really interesting yesterday that I’m going to be thinking a lot about. That is that people are now more inclined to be interested in “The 1 Big Thing” or “The 3 Big Things” but not “The 100 Things” or whatever.

Robert: I’m a little more attracted to that myself. I think, “I can absorb that quickly.” The truth is that everyone is looking for a silver bullet.

Linda: I was just going to say that.

Robert: Although there’s no such thing as a silver bullet, people like “Top Tips.” They think, “Okay, that will make a difference.” You see these ads and the web on various sites, “The 1 Tip to Lose 20 Pounds of Belly Fat



Overnight.” I’m exaggerating just a bit. You keep seeing those ads. They must be successful.

Linda: “The Only 2 Things That You’ll Ever Need to Know About” blah, blah, blah.

Robert: Exactly.

Linda: That’s one of the things about getting started. The other thing is, plan! You’re the Action Plan dude, so you’re all about planning.

Here’s a great way to deal with your newsletters. That is to come up with an editorial calendar and plan your newsletter out. This is one of the steps that we go through in my Ezine Success Academy. We take a look at a year in advance. You don’t have to do a year in advance.

Robert: Oh my god, a year in advance?

Linda: You could, or you could do three months or six months, but a chunk, not just a month. That’s too small.

You want to really get a chunk planned out, and you want to look at what to plan to promote during this period of time. If you’re going to have a particular program you’re promoting, you might want to schedule in some articles that support that promotion because of the topic matter.

Robert: Right.

Linda: But anyway, if you look at this upcoming period of time that you’ve selected for yourself and scheduled in everything, not just the topics of the articles you’ll be writing about in this issue, but also, “This is the item I’m



going to be promoting, these are the tips I’m going to offer.”

You won’t always know what your personal note is going to be about, if you have a personal note at the top of your newsletter, which I like to have. Sometimes it just summarizes and contextualizes the content of the newsletter, and other times I actually am talking about the latest musical that my son has been in, or whatever.

Robert: Sure.

Linda: If you happen to know some key personal notes, like turning 50 or whatever, your son is in a musical, you can calendar those in. So what that does is an editorial calendar will increase your ability to be on task with your newsletters.

You don’t come up to the newsletter deadline and say, “Oh god, what am I going to write about?” You’ve got it already laid out. You have to set about writing.

Robert: Linda, I’m the exception here. Don’t do what I do, because essentially, I write my ezine every Monday. Sometimes as I sit down, I have no idea. I’m lucky. Ideas just come. I never worry about it. I think, “What am I going to write about today?”

Sometimes I’ve been thinking about it for the week and it sort of gels, but that’s probably not good instruction for most people. Linda’s way is definitely better. I really like that, and you don’t have to have every single idea for every ezine that is complete, but you have a basic topic or theme, right?



Linda: Yes. At the very least, you have a skeleton and it helps so much.

Robert: In a few hours you could say, “On this date, I’ll talk about sales tactics. On this date, I’m going to talk about this kind of marketing thing. On this date, I’m going to talk about blah-di-blah-da.”

There you have it. You have a basic outline of them. Sometimes I do series. You have a series of 10 newsletters over a period of time on a particular topic in more depth.

Linda: When you do some article brainstorming, that’s one of the first products from your article brainstorming that I talked about earlier. You’ll probably come up with a whole lot of titles. They may not be what you end up with for your headline or whatever, but you’ll have a working title for your article.

You can just slot those in, and you’ll see the trends. You’ll see, “Look, there are a whole bunch of articles on this, and they really fit well together.” You just slot them in.

The other thing I was going to say was to line up your resources. Either commit to yourself that, like Robert, you’re going to do your newsletter every Monday or whatever day of the week or every 15th of the month. I always tell people with ezines the least amount of time that you want to go between newsletters is monthly. That’s really pushing it to the limit.

I do mine every other week right now. I think that a weekly one is probably the best. I just haven’t lined up enough of myself to do it on a weekly basis.



Robert: I think every other week or twice a month, the second and fourth Tuesday or something like that, is very good as well. It’s workable.

Linda: One of the things I like to do is use the intervening week for a standalone promotion.

Robert: Yeah, exactly!

Linda: That’s another opportunity.

Robert: We’ll talk about that a bit later.

Linda: Line up your resources. What that means is what are you going to use to send your email newsletter? What email service provider? Are you going to have somebody else put it into HTML? (which is the fancy newsletter)

I just want to distinguish between the fancy newsletter and a plain newsletter. What Robert is sending is a text email, and I’ll just call that plain, without any judgment. That’s a plain email, and then there’s the one that looks like a web page. It’s color. That’s HTML.

Robert: Right.

Linda: Decide if you’re going to do that. If you’re going to have an HTML newsletter, you’re going to want to have a template made that matches your website branding or you’re going to perhaps choose a template from your email service provider.

If people are going to send an HTML newsletter, and we can talk about some of the pros and cons about that in a little bit, but if you’re going to send one, I really like it to be coordinating with your web branding. I can always tell



when someone is using a pre-made template from an email service provider.

I still think that they’re adequate. I would never let that be a stopper from you doing a newsletter.

Robert: That can be a starting point.

Linda: It can be a starting point.

Robert: There are a number of different email service providers. Let’s mention a couple of them. Which one do you use?

Linda: I actually use several different ones. For myself, I use AWeber. For some of my clients, I use Campaigner.

Robert: You just go to www.Campaigner.com.

Linda: That’s right. And the two that I really like that I kind of wish I’d known about earlier because I might be using them today are www.MailChimp.com.

Robert: One of my clients uses that.

Linda: And www.MyEmma.com.

Robert: Another one a lot of people use is www.ConstantContact.com

Linda: That’s true.

Robert: I’m a big AWeber fan. I’ve been using it forever. I like it. It’s easy. It’s reliable. But you might want to take a look at some of these others. It’s a little tricky when you start because you really don’t understand all the features and what they do and what they mean and the advantages.



Linda: That’s one of the reasons I really like MailChimp and My Emma is pretty good at this, too. They’re both extremely articulate, both verbally and visually, in their assistance.

Robert: Good customer service is an important thing. The other thing is to remember that you do not want to be sending your ezine from your desktop, your email, from Outlook for instance.

Linda: Definitely not. Thank you for mentioning that. That could get people into so much trouble.

Robert: Tell us about that.

Linda: I don’t have any direct experience with myself or any of my clients, but a woman that I know through one of the coaching forums I participate in told me about a nightmare experience that she had sending stuff out through her Outlook.

She got blacklisted as a spammer, and it was just really an ordeal to correct. I don’t know all the technicalities of that and how and why it happens, but I just know that it is definitely a no-no.

Robert: All these email services have relationships with the ISPs. They make sure to protect the subscribers and make sure people are not sending out spam.

They can intervene on your behalf and say, “This guy has a good opt-in list,” etc., etc. and you can’t do that. The other thing is some ISPs, it depends on which one you have, won’t let you send out more than 25 emails in a group at a time. They’ll just start bouncing on you.



Linda: What I’ve heard of people doing is creating multiple groups of 25 or 50, however many.

Robert: It’s more work than it’s worth.

Linda: It is totally. I think with MailChimp you can have a free account for maybe up to 100 or 500. I think it might even be 500 names. If you’re a beginner and that’s where you’re starting with a list, I think it’s 500 or less, don’t quote me, but you can get in there and do what you need to do, and it doesn’t cost you anything else.

That way you’re learning the system, and as your list grows, you would just move up into a paid category.

Robert: Right. I think the fee for AWeber.

Linda: It’s $20 a month or something.

Robert: It’s $20 up to 10,000 names or something like that. Because I have more than that, I pay more, but you know it’s nothing compared to the return I get.

Linda: Twenty bucks is really great, especially for up to 10,000 names.

Robert: Sure, there are not many people who have lists that big.

Linda: No.

Robert: Okay, that’s how you get started. Sometimes it helps to have an expert to get you going here and help you format it, etc. Where do you find people like that?

Linda: I’d find somebody like myself.

Robert: Linda, you’re somebody who can help with that, right?



Linda: Actually, we have a full spectrum of newsletter services. We have a website where you can just come and get a template. One of our designers will work with you to design your own template.

Robert: Cool.

Linda: We can do your newsletter top to bottom. We can provide you with articles that you can use as your own. You can change and modify them and use them as your own in your newsletter. We have quite a few offers that can help you get what you need in the area of newsletters, including the training that I mentioned as well.

But there are also a lot of other places that you can look to for that. If you have a virtual assistant, there are many virtual assistants who are at least competent enough to put your content into an HTML template and send it.

Robert: Right.

Linda: Also, I was talking about lining up your resources. If you’re just so allergic to writing that you can’t deal with it, you can hire a ghost writer.

The tips that I’ll be mentioning at the end have some good tips on a variety of places that you can go to find a writer that you can work with. As I said, you can work with our articles and modify them as you like.

Robert: Right, so there’s no excuse for not doing an ezine!

Linda: That’s the bottom line.



Robert: You can do it yourself in many cases. But if you need help, there are all kinds of ways. There’s a good place to check that out.

Linda: If you wanted to have zero input in your newsletter and just have it go out and provide that touch to people, you could still make that happen. However, there is no excuse. I sound like a mom. (laughter)

Robert: It’s a funny thing because it’s so powerful. It’s not really that hard. It can be done, and I can’t imagine my business without it. Having a website without an ezine is like having a car without gas.

Linda: That’s good analogy.

Robert: It’s not going to get you very far, so people aren’t just going to discover your website. You send people to your website through your ezine, and it creates a certain momentum.

We’ve mentioned HTML and text a few times. Let’s make sure people are clear about the difference and what do you think is better and why?

Linda: The difference is if you’re on Robert’s list, you receive his each week and it will be just simply the writing. I don’t even think you can do bolds or anything like that. You have to come up with unique ways of making the text readable to the eye.

Robert: Yeah.

Linda: So it’s not just this big block of text.

Robert: I do short paragraphs.



Linda: You’ll have short paragraphs. You can use the equal mark or all these different symbols.

Robert: To divide things.

Linda: Yeah, to divide things, to put little borders around, subheads or whatever. Just look at Robert’s for a lot of different ways to do that.

An HTML newsletter, as we talked about, is the colorful one that looks like a web page. In fact, some people even call them web pages, which is pretty silly. It’s cute silly, you know, but really it’s done in web coding so it will come into your inbox looking a certain way.

Robert: What percentage of people can read HTML newsletters and what percentage can’t?

Linda: I don’t know the exact figures, but I know that three years ago, five years ago, there were a lot of people who were not doing so well with that. Pretty much, today most people can. There are probably some old grannies that are not yet updated on their computers.

Robert: I’m revealing myself as a Luddite. I turn off certain things in my email so that I don’t get strange-sized text. I just get plain text in my email. I find it easier to read.

Sometimes I get an HTML newsletter, and because of that, I can’t read it too well.

Linda: One of the things that is so important to do, because we’re in this, and we may be forever in this transitional period, where some people like text and some people like HTML and whatever, you kind of have to make accommodations for both.



When you send out a newsletter, you’re going to do one of two things. You’re either going to replicate the newsletter as a text email, which I find too cumbersome, so what I’ll do is put a little bit of an introductory thing. This is in a text email.

In the AWeber section, you can put HTML, and then there’s a place to put text. I’ll put a little introductory paragraph, a list of the different topics that are covered in this newsletter and then a link to the online version so that people can click on that, and then they can go and see the newsletter.

That covers the people who either have their images turned off for receiving things in text like Robert, etc., but what’s interesting is in my research, the special reports and whatnot I get that show statistics. They’ll do it in pie charts or bar graphs and whatnot. They show that people pay more attention to HTML newsletters.

It kind of makes sense. Everybody takes in information a little differently, but when you think about texts coming in to your inbox versus a pretty picture that immediately populates in your inbox, your eye is probably going to be attracted to that pretty picture first.

Robert: Right.

Linda: I say that, but I also want to remind people that it really is the content. I do get a few text newsletters, and I read them because I so value the people that are writing the material.



I know what they send is valuable, and I’ll read it. The subject line is always well-written. It tells me what’s going to be in it or makes me interested and intrigued, etc.

I will read those, but I think my personal opinion is you’re going to look more professional with an HTML one and you’re going to get a higher rate of attention.

Robert: Yes. I tried it a couple years ago, and I got all these emails back saying, “I don’t like it. Don’t do it!”

I said, “Someday, I will go to HTML.” I just wanted to wait for the technology to settle down a bit. I may be going that way at some point. It definitely is the way of the future.

Linda: One of these days, this is probably getting a little too much into the tech stuff, but it’s a bit of a bear to create templates that lead to all these different email programs. They’re called email clients.

Robert: Right.

Linda: Don’t necessarily go to your web designer and say, “Could you build me an ezine template?” Your web designer may not know the requirements for ezine templates.

It’s tricky. You have to do really old-fashioned web design in order to get an ezine template that looks good in as many email programs as possible.

It’s almost impossible to get an ezine template that looks good in 100% of the ezine programs that people use, but really, how many people these days use Lotus Notes?



Robert: Not many, so the largest percentage use Outlook and then there’s Mail from Macintosh. I use Eudora still. I’ve been using it forever.

That makes sense. Get an expert that really understands that and then once you have that template, you’re able to continue to use it.

Linda: Over and over again.

Robert: You just plug in your content to it, right?

Linda: Yeah.

Robert: So that’s not too hard. We started talking about newsletters, printed newsletters and does anyone do those anymore? I can’t imagine doing a printed newsletter, because I’d go bankrupt doing it. Forty five thousand hard copies at $1 a piece every week would be $180,000. You get the idea.

Linda: I would not recommend that. There are lots of people who use print newsletters. The mental health professional side of my business almost exclusively uses print newsletters, but they have a little bit of a different setup going.

They have an office. They can put them in their office. They’ve got other colleagues with offices. They’ve got doctors with offices. If you use my program for getting a print newsletter out there, it will work really wonderfully.

We had a client who moved from one town eight hours away to a new town and didn’t know a soul. Within nine months, just using our newsletter [inaudible] practice, so there are definitely ways to do that.



Linda: Use a print newsletter only if you’re interested in building a local clientele. If you’re interested in building a local clientele, then go whole hog.

One of my clients is in Maine. This is all the different places she puts them. She puts them in a natural food store, in the library, in the doctors’ offices, at a medical building, everywhere. Take with you a little stand-up, acrylic literature holder and just stick them in there. They can really work well.

I think if you’re going to be mailing a bunch of printed newsletters, I wouldn’t do it. I would try going to ezines.

Robert: But if you have a smaller list, it’s more focused. It’s more local. Maybe if you’re more of a bricks and mortar type business as well.

Linda: Yes.

Robert: It could fit more.

Linda: Yeah.

Robert: For a few people on this call, that might be appropriate. I have a couple more things before we wrap up. This has really been useful.

One thing we’re trying to do, not so Linda can make money for you as a client, is just we really want to help you succeed in your business. The newsletter is such a key piece, so put it high on your list.

Let’s talk briefly about subject lines. When an ezine comes in, that’s what people see. It’s the subject line. That gets them to open it and read it or not.



I hope I can learn something here because sometimes I’m not thrilled with my subject lines. I don’t like hypey subject lines either. It’s kind of tricky. I like something that’s kind of intriguing. What’s that about? What have you learned in this area?

Linda: I think there are some people who are just brilliant at creating subject lines. I have moments of brilliance. I’m not sure I’m completely there, but some things that are important to know about subject lines that anybody can do, regardless of your level of brilliance with the words, is to keep them short.

The latest information is that if you can have a subject line that is 35 characters or less, that’s better. It used to be 54, but now it’s 35. I don’t know why it’s changed. Essentially what’s happening is that means that the whole subject line will appear in most people’s email programs.

Robert: Right.

Linda: So they’ll know everything. Your subject line may be a little bit longer than that, and plenty of times it will be. It’s not like it’s a rule and you’re going to go to jail if you have a longer subject line. If you do have a longer one and you need to have a longer one, put the keywords closer to the front if you can.

Rather than something like “How to Build Your List so That You get Lots of New Clients,” maybe you want to say,” New Clients, New List,” or, “New Clients, Build Your List.” It’s something like that. You keep the more weighty words on the front end.



Robert: There’s got be some kind of an implied or direct benefit in the subject line.

Linda: You know I’m a student of subject lines. There are some people who have very conversational relationships with their lists that they’ve developed over time. It is almost like they’re having a one-on-one email with that person.

The subject lines are that, it’s not so much that they’re personalized as in they have their name in the subject lines, but they’re just reflective of that level of relationship. That’s a great place to be. That’s a great place to get to.

You also need to remember that you don’t want to obscure the matter of the email, of the content that’s in the email. You don’t want to, what’s the word I’m trying to think of? You don’t want to play with anybody.

Robert: Or manipulate people.

Linda: Manipulate, yeah, you may want to play with them, but in a fun way that they’ll enjoy. You don’t want to manipulate them.

Robert: You see those kinds of subject lines on spam that are kind of offensive, you know? They never deliver the goods.

Linda: A lot of people think that just the straight poop is what you put in there. I think there’s a lot of validity to that.

I, as a marketer, am always trying to think of, “How can I say it in a straight way that’s also energizing or makes them feel a feeling of curiosity or enthusiasm?” It’s that sort of thing.



Robert: That’s definitely something you have to work on, and there’s an old saying in the ad business, “The headline is the ad for the ad.” If you don’t have a good headline, no one will read the advertisement. If you don’t have a good subject line, no one will read the email.

It’s tricky. You’re never going to bat a thousand on this. There is no such thing as a headline that everyone opens, even if it’s “We Have Deposited $10 Million in a Swiss Bank Account for You.”

Linda: Especially that one.

Robert: That one is manipulative, because obviously it’s not true, right?

Linda: Yeah.

Robert: Even if it was true, not everyone would respond.

Linda: Yeah.

Robert: Let’s wrap this up with one more question. This is the other big issue that I see. How do I make this process easy, not so time-consuming and not so stressful?

I can come up with ideas. I can fit it into my schedule. I can get the basic stuff, but then they look ahead and see it’s such a commitment. It’s such a process. It will take so much time and so they never embark on it.

How can we talk people into realizing that it doesn’t have to be that hard? I have some comments on this as well.

Linda: Sure, well for one thing, you might want to just consider it an experiment and maybe you experiment with an every-other-week newsletter for six months. I would prefer an



experiment for a year, but let’s just say that you would even see a noticeable difference in six months.

Sort out what your goals are, both personal and professional. Then just treat it as an experiment. Commit to it and treat it as an experiment.

Try to be fun with it. I think that rewards are really good. If I do my newsletter this week, I get this.

Robert: A hot fudge Sunday!

Linda: A massage or whatever. Schedule that into your week and consider an experiment for a period of time. Then reflect on it and see what’s happened that’s different for you.

I also think that some processes around your newsletter are really important to implement so it doesn’t become this stressful, last-minute, “Oh god!” kind of thing.

Robert: Right.

Linda: That’s learning how to write your articles fast and how to come up with your material.

I like to talk about batching. That’s doing a lot of work of the same kind of work at one time. You might sit down and write 10 articles at one time that are all kind of related, but it took you a lot less time to write 10 articles than to write one article 10 times.

Robert: Right.

Linda: Batching can work. I sometimes, believe it or not, check myself into a hotel in my local area for two days, and I just use that time. There is nothing else clamoring for my



attention. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I don’t even do it as often as I’d like to.

There’s no laundry to do. There are no kids. There’s no business phone to answer. There’s maid service.

Robert: I love it.

Linda: You can get so much done, so batch as much as you can and get as much as you can done. Find what works for you and don’t beat yourself up.

If you find after six months that writing articles is just not for you, it’s not going to happen if you have to keep writing articles, look for these other sources.

Robert: Get help.

Linda: Contact me. I’ll tell you all of what we offer. I tell you what other people offer. I am really all about, “How can I support you?” If I’m not right for you, then somebody else is. I’ll let you know. Just get help.

I think Robert’s point is that ezines are really transformative to your business, and I totally agree with that. Whatever it takes, set it up and make it happen.

Robert: That’s very good advice. The one thing that I would add, you definitely have touched on it, is put it in your schedule, like an appointment, to work on the ezine, whether you do it in a batch or one at a time.

It’s a funny thing. I found it easier to do a weekly ezine than a monthly ezine. Several years ago, I went to once a month for a while, and because it wasn’t so regular, I



would get behind on it. When I do it weekly, I always designate Monday to work on it.

Linda: Especially if you’re a creature of habit, I happen to not be a creature of habit.

Robert: We have different types. It’s true.

Linda: But if you are and that’s in your nature, that will serve you so well just to designate that period of time.

Robert: I support that by not having any client appointments on Monday. I have a lot of things I do on Monday. One of them is the ezine.

I catch up on my email. I catch up on various projects so I’m not thrust into the week by immediately having to meet with three people, which is really intense work. I sort of ease myself into the week, and I always have fun writing my ezine every Monday.

That kind of schedule might work for you, but if you make it a low priority and say, “I’ve got to do it this week,” and you’ve booked all this stuff, then you’re just going to feel frantic. It’s like, “It’s got to go by Tuesday, but I have all these appointments, blah-di-blah-da.” Then you find you’re late all the time. Then it will be stressful.

You’ve got to find a system that works for you, whether it’s my system or Linda’s system or your system. It’s got to be some kind of a system, and then it will happen.

Robert: Any final comments or words of wisdom on newsletters and ezines?



Linda: I wanted to say one other thing and that is because I get a lot of questions on this. We talked a little about promoting in your newsletter and how you definitely should, but not too much and blah, blah, blah.

I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that your newsletter is not the only place that you’re going to announce something. If you’re promoting anything, somebody to sign up for a new coaching program you’ve got or a new business service, whatever it is that you want to promote, you want to make sure that you do an email that’s devoted exclusively to that thing.

Robert: Right.

Linda: And not rely on your newsletter to get you the clients, participants, whatever, that you want. Your newsletter will support you in that effort, but should not be viewed as the thing.

Robert: Right, and the thing is to not overdo it. I think some people do. Some get away with it, and some people send something every day or a couple of times a day. For me, that’s overkill.

Linda: I agree.

Robert: But what I do is send the ezine on Tuesday morning, and then if I have something to promote specifically, I will almost always send it on a Thursday.

If I’m doing a sale that’s time limited or something, I might send out a few extra ones, “Just a reminder, it’s going to be ending by this date,” but I don’t do that all the time or people would get really tired of it.



I find that I get much better response if I’m signing people up in a teleclass and I mention it in the ezine. Then on Thursday I double or triple the amount of people that sign up, compared to just the Tuesday ezine.

Linda: Absolutely, same here.

Robert: You get a lot more response, and the subject line is “Teleclass on XYZ coming up next week.” It’s just about that, and it’s clearly not the same kind of headline that you use for your ezine.

Linda: Right. I think you’ve heard my passion about newsletters. I don’t want to overload people with that, but I am enthusiastic about them.

Oh, I know. I wanted to give out the web address where they can go and get some good free resources that will help in the process of doing your newsletters.

Robert: Okay, great.

Linda: You can go to www.EzineSuccessAcademy.com. That is the sales page for a program that I run periodically through the year.

It may not be running at the moment that you get this or it may be upcoming, but toward the top of that you’ll see a place where you can sign in to get some really cool resources. There are some audio tips and some of what I call my “Easy Ezine Content Creator,” etc. You’ll get some good stuff there.

Robert: We’ll have that link in the transcript. We’ll also have that link on the web page right below the audio so it will be easy for you to find.



Linda, thank you very much for taking the time to share all this valuable information about ezines. I really sincerely hope it motivates more people to jump into this because we both know the difference it will make. Until you’ve done it, you don’t know, so trust us!

You have to do it on faith because the first two ezines your business isn’t going to double, I promise you. But over a period of time, the impact can be huge and it really is worth the time and effort.

Linda: That’s a good thing to mention because I do have people say, “I just want to send out one a year.”

Robert: One a year? Good luck!

Linda: Even one a quarter, again, you’re going to have to be reintroducing yourself over and over again.

Robert: I hope we have given people enough reasons to make this work and enough tips for everyone to get started. I think we had a really good interview, and I’m really happy with it. Linda, thank you.

Linda: If anybody really wants to ask me some questions directly, you can contact me at my email address. I’m happy to provide that here, Robert, if that’s okay.

Robert: Go ahead.

Linda: It’s [email protected].

Robert: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Claire, appreciate it.

Linda: You’re so welcome, Robert. Bye-bye.

Robert: Bye-bye.

how to make 1money with your ezine robert middleton ...actionplan.com/pdf/lpuig_10.pdflinda claire...

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