You’ve heard it a thousand times: the money’s in the list. If you’re serious about getting results online, you need to build a list of people who are paying attention to you, typically an email list.
So how do you get people to sign up for your email newsletter?
You probably already know the answer to this one: Reward them. Give subscribers something great as a “thank you” for signing up. This is usually some form of content — a useful video, a killer PDF special report or white paper, an exclusive podcast.
Sure, everyone else does that. Because it works.
It works . . . if you do it the right way.
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About 80% of your blog’s success comes from “ass in chair” time. That’s the time you spend writing posts, editing posts, finding the perfect image, connecting with fellow bloggers, answering comments, shaping up your SEO, and all the other tasks we teach you about here on Copyblogger.
You’ve got to get that stuff right. But great blogs are not built by “ass in chair” time alone.
There’s actually a significant element to your success that you may be neglecting with all that work and focus.
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When I first had the insane brilliant idea to start a business and get out of the alleged safety of the corporate world, I started by reading everything I could find.
I wish I could remember where the thread started for me. It might have been Dan Kennedy, it might have been Michael Port, it could very well have been the Personal MBA.
Each good resource led to three more. At some point, I found Copyblogger and Problogger and Seth Godin.
Hundreds of books and thousands of dollars in information products later, I’ve given myself an education. Was it expensive? Sure was.
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Like everyone else on the social web, I just read Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin. It’s a big book, not so much in number of pages, but in number of ideas.
One core theme is the idea of emotional labor — bringing more human feeling and connection to your work, some essential part of yourself that can’t be automated or outsourced.
It strikes me that this gets to one of the key distinctions between different models for doing business online.
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Those of you who subscribe to the Internet Marketing for Smart People email newsletter found out on Monday what Brian and I have been up to for the past few months.
We knew it would be cool, because, well, we designed it to be cool.
We wanted to build something people would really get value from.
But still, when we saw what people were doing inside after the first day, we all looked around at one another and pulled a Keanu.
Whoa.
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Do you know this story?
A scorpion needs to cross the river. He asks a friendly-looking frog to carry him across.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” asks the frog. “You’re a scorpion. You’ll sting and kill me.”
“No I won’t,” says the scorpion. “That would be completely against my self interest. If I sting you, I’ll fall in the river and drown.”
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