Build a mailing list to safe guard your business

The past few years have been very tough for online marketers and website owners, there is probably no online niche or vertical that has not suffered punishment from the Google Panda or more recently in April 2012 the Penguin. You no doubt have heard what the different updates targeted or what people believe they targeted and have probably read all kinds of tips to help you recover or keep safe from them, some of these assumptions carry some truth others especially the early penguin update tips were quite ridiculous.

Don't worry this isn't another post about the Google Panda or Penguin updates, this post is about a  way to safeguard your online or offline business from any kind of update, who knows what 2013 could hold in-store for online marketers.

The best way to safeguard your business and ensure you can still make money if you get penalized by Google or any other search engine is to build a mailing list, a list of loyal subscribers should ensure you keep making money even if your website gets hacked, don't store your subscribers information on there though, they might not be too happy about it.

Tips to build a mailing list

If you run a blog or some other kind of niche website many people interested in your topic will probably join your list for free, all you need to supply them with is useful information on a regular basis. Other visitors to your site might need a little encouragement, you could try tempting them with a free e book. Make sure your subscription box is prominent on your site and everyone will see it, there are plug-ins available for wordpress which will show all users to your site a pop-up inviting them to subscribe, pop-ups may put some people off though.

Don't despair if your subject is not that interesting or you don't think you could keep subscribers interested with a steady stream of industry news or other useful information, one great way to get tons of subscribers is by holding a competition.

Make sure the prize is in some way related to your industry, if you sell products or offer some kind of service why not make that the prize, that way you can ensure subscribers are interested in whatever it is your offer, if they aren't they won't sign up even if it's free will they?

It's important to keep your subscribers interested or they will just delete your emails or probably unsubscribe, it's also important to clean your mailing list, most email email marketing platforms and providers charge depending on the amount of emails you send so if you are sending 1000 emails and only 50 are getting opened you will be wasting money. It is better to check the reports and delete subscribers who are not opening your emails, with some platforms this can be quite a difficult task so take that into account when choosing your provider.

Wordpress users can use a subscription plugin for building a mailing list quickly.

Now go ahead and join my mailing list :P