Publish or Perish

While the concept of "publish or perish" is certainly true for a
college professor, it may not be the case for the fledgling
entrepreneur. Many of the pundits say that to get known on the
Web, you should publish a newsletter. What you quickly learn
however, is that subscribers are not easy to come by, and that
many of the startup publications go away as quickly as they
began.

Some feel that if you accept free ads in your publication, it
will help build your subscriber base. If you do decide to accept
free ads with the hope of quickly building your subscriber count
or a mailing list, you just might be in for a big surprise.

Realizing that spamsters will most likely harvest their email
address, many advertisers get a free "throw away" email address.
They use this in their ads, so they don't have their permanent
email address inundated with offers from other advertisers. When
their offer changes, they get a new one and the "beat goes on".

Statistics show that almost 8% of all email addresses submitted
by advertisers, are undeliverable each and every week. That means
that in about 12 weeks or so, many any of the original addresses
you gathered are no longer valid. If you are not getting new
subscribers at a higher rate than you are losing them, you will
find that the work is not worth the effort required.

The free ad route is a difficult "row to hoe", so why do it?
Some people offer free ads with the hope of converting them to a
paid advertiser. Many people who rely on free ads as their
primary method of advertising however, are just not serious when
it comes to their business, When they don't achieve immediate
success, they either give up or try something else.

While some publishers may consider an "affiliate arrangement",
whereby they provide free advertising in return for a split of
the profits, most won't. While it sounds good on the surface, in
practice it seldom works out. This also applies to offline
advertising such as telemarketing or list services. Most
publishers have learned a long time ago that giving away
advertising space like this is not cost effective.

It is possible though to earn income on the web. Some will
achieve a high level of success, and others are happy to simply
supplement their income. The first thing any potential publisher
must determine is what level they wish to reach. If this is
simply a part-time effort, you can reach the lower levels and
supplement your earnings.

If you wish to reach the higher levels however, you must approach
your online venture like every other business, and devote your
full time and energy to it.

The collection of email address, from "freebies" however, is a
valid method of building a data base. But if you do, remember
that there will be undeliverables as time passes. Some ISP's
servers will automatically go into a "self protect" mode and shut
you down if the bounces reach a certain level. For that reason,
you must have an emailing package that automatically removes bad
email addresses from your database.

It is simply too much work to attempt to do this manually. Your
standard email packages, in addition to having a limit on the
number of emails that can be sent at one time, don't have the
ability to automatically remove bounces from the database.

Once your mailing list exceeds a thousand or so subscribers, if
you are sending out a newsletter or bulk "opt-in" email, your
best bet is to use a commercial List Server. To prevent
spamming, many of the List Servers however, use a "double opt in"
procedure that requires the potential subscriber to verify their
subscription request.

If you publish more than one, they make the prospect "jump
through hoops" to become subscribed to each one, and many people
simply won't do it. We use Topica", and they require the "double
opt in" procedure. We found that a very small percentage of
people requesting to be subscribed, actually wound up doing so.

To counteract this, we designed a web page that potential
subscribers could simply select the publication(s) they wished.
This is sent directly to "Topica", and subscribers are sent one
confirmation that will add them to multiple lists. Since
implementing this, we found that the rate of subscribes is right
back where it should be.

If anyone would like to use this form, you can see it at:
http://adv-marketing.com/business/subscribe2.htm - feel free to
use this for your publication, changing of course, our
information to yours.

For smaller lists, consider a software package such as "Aureate"
which resides on your computer, and allows you to automatically
manage your bounces and unsubscribes.

If you do decide to follow the publishing route in an attempt to
build your business, it can be done. If you do it the right way,
perhaps the concept of "Publish or Perish" does make some sense.