Last month, I interviewed marketing coach Terry Dean. I went in with 6 questions, expecting to come out with a nice little blog post. What I got was amazing. Terry gave the kind of in-depth answers that a lot of gurus would package up and sell you as MP3s with an upsell to get the [...]

My house turns 100 years old next year. With the weather turning cold again, the annual draft hunt is back in session.

Some of the draft sources drive me absolutely crazy — like a storm window in the basement that had probably been left open for several years. Last winter, I taped over the edges of [...]

There are two types of messages you can send to your list: “follow-ups” that are sent to each subscriber in a scheduled sequence, and “broadcasts” that go to the entire list at once. Each type has its strengths and weaknesses.

Follow-Up Messages

Follow-ups are ideal for sending a coordinated sequence of messages designed to turn new subscribers [...]

There are four ways to make more money from your website:

Increase the amount of targeted traffic coming to your site.

Convert more of your traffic to paying customers.

Increase your revenue per paying customer.

Decrease your costs.

Let’s work through the list backwards.

Decrease your costs

In some ways, this is the least important of the methods I listed. For one [...]

One of the worst mistakes I ever made in my online business was waiting too long to start building a mailing list. The next biggest mistake waiting too long to start using it right.

For several years, I gave away a free version of one of my products without capturing email addresses. Thousands of copies were [...]

One of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion is reciprocity — when you do someone a favor, they tend to feel obliged to return the favor. I’ve heard this plenty of times before, but I recently read an article that got me thinking about it again.

A few days ago, Dr. Cialdini tweeted a link [...]

Offering freebies as incentives to join an email list is standard practice in internet marketing. Most marketers focus on getting as many signups as possible by focusing on the freebie and downplaying the email subscription. But is that the best approach?

Amanda Gagnon wrote:

Mentioning email first weeds out people who are only interested in freebies. If [...]

Harris Fellman picked the wrong day to bug me — I’m in a bit of a ranty mood (hmm, my spellchecker doesn’t like the word “ranty”. I’ve got a few choice words for that spell checker! Just kidding.)

This morning, I got an email from Harris promoting somebody else’s webinar. I clicked a URL in the [...]

In a guest post on Clayton Makepeace’s blog yesterday, Daniel Levis revealed the results of a split test between single and double opt in mailing lists. The results were surprising.

First, he showed how many subscribers each list got, and how many of the original subscribers were still subscribed a year later. Single opt-in won both [...]

When I read the headline “Sponsored Tweets Launches: The End of Twitter As We Know It?“, I fully expected to read the article, say “yep, bad idea that will surely fail”, and go on with my day.

Turns out it’s an interesting idea. It might still fail — definitely an uphill battle ahead.

I’m sure there’ll be [...]