Welcome to a new month and a new edition of our Newsletter. This month we will be looking at how to use your newsletter to boost sale. Also this week we have included a few website for budget meals.

In this issue:

* How to Get the Right Subscribers for Your Newsletter
* Facts of Interest
* Websites of Interest
* Enrich your Vocabulary
* Quote of the month

How to Get the Right Subscribers for Your Newsletter
by Bobette Kyle

A key to successful marketing is to get the right folks interested in your products and/or services. You have to get their attention then convince them to buy. The "getting attention" part is not as easy as some would have you believe. Sure, there are ways to drive massive amounts of traffic to your newsletter. Unfortunately, most are a waste of your time and money because they do not attract the right kind of subscribers. This is a lesson learned well by Jeri Sires, owner of TowelBuddies (http://TowelBuddies.com).

Advertise Your Newsletter
Jeri took wise advice and advertised her newsletter on the TowelBuddies site. "I had a sign up on my site that said 'join our newsletter. Subscribers are automatically entered in our monthly drawing.'"

This worked - she got subscribers - thousands of them in a single month. Jeri was rolling in dough, right? Hardly.

Beware of Untargeted Subscribers
It turns out many of Jeri's new subscribers were only interested in the free sweepstakes. They had no interest in buying anything from Jeri or even reading her newsletter. In fact, most of them never even looked at her Website.

Jeri explains: "When I sent the newsletter approximately ½ of my subscribers bounced and about 25% unsubscribed. Also a couple of 'contest' Websites came across my giveaway and put a link to my newsletter sign up pop up window."

Identify Problems and Adjust
Like all successful marketers, Jeri recognized early that this was not working. She temporarily discontinued her newsletter and evaluated the situation. She decided to scale back and write the newsletter for her paying customers.

"I decided to give up upon the giveaway and start the newsletter back up. Now, instead of a lot of content I am making it just a 'sales' newsletter...I am getting much better results from it now."

Implement Persistently
Many times, folks have the false impression that successful marketers know "untold secrets" that allow them to magically get everything right the first time. Not so. Occasionally, someone "hits the jackpot". For most of us, however, successful implementation comes only through persistent problem solving.

Take a cue from Jeri and don't give up...

Identify the basic problems, adjust your implementation, and try again. Do this with persistence and you will find success.

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About the Author
Bobette Kyle has more than a decade of experience in Corporate Marketing; Brand and Product Marketing; Field Marketing and Sales; and Management. She is author of the Marketing Plan Guide "How Much For Just the Spider? Strategic Website Marketing for Small Budget Businesses", named one of the top 15 books of 2002 by NonFictionReviews.com. Read more about the guide here: http://www.websitemarketingplan.com/book_information.htm

Facts of Interest

* Up to 37 percent of all physicians now have some kind of Web presence, however rudimentary. And 25 percent of Net-connected doctors use e-mail to communicate with patients.

* 34% of internal business emails are unsolicited messages. 24% of employees spend more than one hour managing their e-mail. Only 27% of e-mail requires worker's immediate attention.

* A single web site called mail.com filled 28 terabytes of storage in 45 days earlier this year--equal to the total monthly traffic on the internet four years ago.

(Source http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/numbers/)

*Destitute Gourmet Aucklander Sophie Gray’s website is full of gourmet recipes and tips for people on a tight income.

* Freezer Cooking. If you own a freezer, here is where you can learn how to make the best use of it and save on food bills.

* Cook Cheap. “This website is dedicated to those that would like to eat like a king but have a budget of a starving student”
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Here are some interesting new words to add to your vocabulary. All these words came about with the advent of the Internet; test how many you already know.

* GIF (graphical interchange format): one of several formats used to present images (pictures) over the Internet.

* HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language): a standard for presenting information on the World Wide Web. Documents formatted for html include codes that allow text to be displayed with various fonts, sizes, and attributes as well as instructions to load pictures, sounds, and motion pictures.

* URL (uniform resource locator): The URL identifies to a Web browser the address and type of Internet resource to which your computer is connecting. Types of resources include HTML servers, gopher servers, veronica servers, and ftp servers, each of which has its own set of protocols.

We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)

Remember if you have any queries or would like assistance - please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Have a great month!

The Strobe Net team.