How To Disappear Completely (And Still Make Money)

For those of you familiar with ViperChill, you may have recently read his excellent post on the benefits of email blogging. There aren’t many bloggers who consistently drop good information in this industry, but Glen is one of them. And this topic, I can tell you from my own experience, is worth a hell of a lot of money.

What is email blogging? Sounds like a more long-winded version of email marketing, right? I’ve always had an itch with the way most email marketers operate. Blessed with a sixth sense for detecting salesman tricks, my gut instinct rarely allows for me to stay opted-in to any mailing list for longer than the first message.

But is that because I’m a cynical bastard, or because most email marketers follow the same trodden path towards their goal of selling a product?

Forget blog subscriptions. Email is the most direct medium of communicating with your readership. It’s also the best way to generate sales and leads. As long as you’re prepared to temper your mailing campaigns with enough useful information to keep them relevant and non-spammy, you can bank a fortune from collecting email addresses.

So if a mailing list is the most profitable asset for generating profit, why do so many of us bother with blogs in the first place? Part of the reason screams ego (“Look, I’ve got a WordPress, I’m famous Mummy!”), and another suggests the following of convention.

Email blogging, as Glen calls it, involves removing the need for an active web presence and delivering 100% of your content via email. The idea being that by using a simple squeeze page to collect your opt-ins, you can save your best written blogs for the reader’s inbox where they are most likely to be seen – and acted on – in the most profitable way.

This isn’t a new tactic. I can think of a hundred marketers who follow the same principle of promoting their products and affiliate programs via email, without stopping to develop a full blog. But how many email marketers actually treat their mailshots with the same care and brand loyalty that they’d be forced in to conveying on an open blog?

No, most of the time, each email is treated as a stepping stone to the next. A chapter in a series with the end goal being a clearly defined conversion for Product X.

If you strip away the aggressive marketing edge, there are many benefits to be gained through distributing your content solely via email.

How many times a day do people check your site? How about their email? There’s a reason many affiliate programs offer higher payouts for their email marketers. The conversions are better. Period.

The problem, as Glen pointed out but didn’t entirely elaborate on, is that driving traffic to a squeeze page is so very 2006. The usual methods of Adwords whoring, and even Facebook targeting, are now riddled with complications such as Quality Score and the much maligned “gateway page” factor.

Nobody is going to want to deliver their content via email if they can’t attract the readership to give it a purpose. And this is a shame, because think about it.

Think about those early stages in the lifecycle of your blog. There’s nothing more disheartening than seeing a small trickle of 30 visitors a day with a flatlining growth chart. The only thing more disheartening is to notice that not a single one of those users is a returning reader. How are you supposed to get a blog off the ground if nobody ever comes back?

Your content may be to blame, but it’s often the simple reality that growing a new blog is a colossal pain in the balls. Like shoving shit up a hill, my new favourite phrase.

In contrast, if all of your efforts are concentrated on channeling visitors to your squeeze page, there is a clear and easy currency for measuring your progress. Each and every subscriber gained is one more reader that you can guarantee will at least see the headline of your next blog, even if he or she doesn’t decide to read it.

The post on ViperChill suggests article marketing, list trading and direct advertising buys as the best methods of driving traffic to your squeeze page. These are valid methods. But in my opinion, the single biggest weapon at your disposal – post Google and Facebook – is the freedom of PPV advertising on networks such as Traffic Vance and Media Traffic.

If you’re not familiar with PPV advertising (pay per view), you should probably get familiar real fast. It’s one of the cheapest methods of delivering laser targeted eyeballs to your website. And it’s the easiest way to massively increase the number of subscribers by putting your squeeze page out there on a large scale.

You can grab new subscribers for as little as $0.01 by advertising your squeeze page in pop-up form on other highly relevant URLs. There is no limit to the creativity that PPV advertising affords. And it’s a match made in heaven for any of you looking to create content distributed solely by email.

Once again, I highly recommend you read How To Build a Six Figure Blog Without Anyone Knowing on ViperChill. And once you’ve found the inspiration for email blogging, pair it up with the power of PPV advertising to create the perfect moneymaking scheme.

Recommended This Week:

• Before you can run an email blog, you need mailing software. For this, I recommend Aweber. There are other solutions, but Aweber is unparalleled in my opinion. Take a chance elsewhere if you dare.

• If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

• Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.