I hope I don't disillusion you but I don't run my website or publish this newsletter out of the goodness of my heart. I do it because, like many of you who have a full-time job, I would one day like to work for myself out of my home. To do this, I have to find an alternative source of income. Ergo, I have a profit motive in bringing this newsletter to you.
I haven't been in this business very long. I only started this past July, in fact. I started out small and, slowly but surely, my business is growing. I am now able to supplement my salary with several hundred dollars a month from my online business. There is no secret to making money in this business. Like anything else, it takes hard work and commitment. Like many of you, I make my money by promoting affiliate programs and charging for paid advertising in this newsletter.
The past few months since I started AHBBO have been a great learning experience. Like anyone, I have made mistakes along the way but I also got some things right too. In this article, I would like to share with you my greatest lesson from 1999. It is this ... profit is not a dirty word.
From time to time since starting this newsletter, I would be approached by advertisers asking me to send out an exclusive mailing. This is a mailing sent out, BY ME (of course I don't make my subscriber database available to ANYONE else), containing a single advertisement. I am paid by the advertiser for sending this message to you. Initially I was in two minds about exclusive mailings. I received my fair share of them because I am subscribed to a lot of other newsletters. Most of the time I didn't read them and they went straight into the trash bin without being opened. "I didn't sign up for this newsletter to get THAT", I would sometimes think to myself. So, not wanting to generate unsubscribe requests to my own newsletter, I resisted these approaches.
Over time, as I started receiving more and more of these requests from advertisers, I began to realize that exclusive mailings obviously worked. If they didn't, people wouldn't want to pay me good money to have their message reach you. That meant that many subscribers obviously read them and some bought what was being offered. But the one thought that would always stop me was that I may alienate some of my subscribers and they may leave me as a result.
But then I realized that although an exclusive mailing would sometimes prompt me to unsubscribe to a newsletter that I didn't particularly enjoy, it NEVER prompted me to unsubscribe from a newsletter I DID enjoy.
So, I decided to try an experiment. A few weeks back I sent out an exclusive mailing for a paying advertiser. I coded the unsubscribe instructions in the special mailing so I could tell which unsubscribes came from the special mailing and which were just natural attrition. I received, I think, 19 unsubscribe requests as a direct result. Out of a total database of something like 1600 back then, that was, in retrospect, a very small number.
I also received a couple of very irate unsubscribe emails from people who expressed their "disappointment" in me for having the temerity to be seeking to make a profit from my business! How dare I! These individuals obviously thought that I was putting in all this work and all these hours for purely altruistic reasons and for their personal benefit alone.
So, I concluded that my experiment was a failure and put it down to the vagaries of human nature, bemoaning to myself how people would take whatever you had to offer so long as it was free ...
I made this point in a disgruntled email to an online friend of mine, muttering that never again would I send out an exclusive mailing. That friend did me a great service. She told me to rethink that decision and pointed me to a wonderful article on exactly this point. I've lost her note to me now so I can't pass it on to you but the gist of the article she referred me to was that the author, a newsletter publisher, actually welcomed the unsubscribe requests that followed his exclusive mailings because exclusive mailings were his way of weeding out, as he called them, the "freebie- seeking tire kickers".
These were people who signed up for his newsletter only because it was free and he figured losing these subscribers was no loss at all. He preferred to retain only those subscribers who valued the information he provided to them enough to be willing to accept an occasional exclusive mailing from one of his advertisers or, on occasion, himself. The people who unsubscribed on the strength of one exclusive mailing were, he reasoned, never going to do business with him anyway.
I thought about this. Then I thought about it some more. He's right! I finally thought to myself. I should WELCOME losing those subscribers who leave just because they receive an exclusive mailing from me. This is not a hobby, it is a business. I am in this business to make money ... correction ... a PROFIT. Why should I apologize for that? I am doing so by honest means. I am doing so by way of hard work and by giving value to my subscribers.
So I began to think of exclusive mailings as a way of culling the "freebie seeking tire kickers". THEN I began to think of exclusive mailings as a way of actually CLEANSING my subscriber database. Why, I should send out exclusive mailings on principle! Why should advertisers spend money sending advertising to people who have no intention of buying from ANYONE? And why should I apologize for trying to make a profit out of my own business? I shouldn't and I don't! Because profit is NOT a dirty word!
With every exclusive mailing I send, I receive a small number of unsubscribe requests as a direct result. As the man in the article I referred to earlier said, "And that's the way I like it."