What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know (TM) - The Blog For Original Content Infopreneurs

E-zine Or Not To E-zine, That Is The Question

Back in 2001, when I started my public marketing efforts in support of my very first e-book about a popular legitimate work-at-home field, just the fact that you had a free e-zine was enough to make people sit up and take notice, and give up their e-mail address in exchange for getting that valuable content (well at least in my case it was valuable content, I can't speak for others).  I also carried that idea of an e-zine being a must-have through when I added my second topic in the healthy eating genre—Have Your Cheeseburger And Keep Your Health Too! which was my fourth book.

 

Now with my sixth book What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), I never even considered doing an e-zine as part of my marketing efforts.  Why?  Simple!  Now there are so many more other valuable offerings that can be used as an incentive for someone to raise their hand and opt-in to a list, or other ways that people opt-in to be part of your world, that in many cases, the reaction among those you're trying to entice to become a member of your list to an offer of an e-zine is likely "that's nice, so what else you got?"

 

Subscribers have become jaded, and you've got to offer quite a bit to get them to join, and more importantly stay on, your list.

 

In my case it's pretty easy to make a "subscriber to Melanie's list = totally worth your time" value proposition.  My subscribers never miss knowing about one of my podcast episodes, blog posts, videos, teleseminars, or media guest appearances, or getting access to the replays so they can check out my content on their own schedule in true Web 2.0 fashion.  They get a free copy of my Treasury of Infopreneur FAQs e-book, a free 3-chapter excerpt from my book What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), and subscriber-only discounts on that book and many other offerings.

 

Having An E- Book Doesn’t Make You An Infopreneur

Sometimes I find it amusing, and sometimes I find it downright scary what people on the internet will refer to as being an infopreneur.  From the monitoring I’ve been doing of the term on the internet lately, it appears that it can often be anyone who can create an e-book by either slapping their name on someone else's stuff through PLR rights (private label rights), or anyone putting together a few pages of “original” crap, who can’t spell or write, with a $47 to $97 price tag, is calling themselves an infopreneur. 

This bothers me for three reasons:

1.  Tainted Love

It taints the view of potential consumers of a legitimate e-book which is every bit as complete in content and quality as any print book out there.  If they keep seeing the term e-book associated with garbage, they’re not going to believe high-caliber e-books are for real.

An e-book is just an alternate method of publication.  It’s an additional delivery method to meet the needs of an author’s audience who wants to access the content right away, avoid shipping charges and save some trees.  For the author it provides a way to keep the content easily updated, and it yields a higher profit margin than a print edition ever will.

Bookseller Amazon even gives quality e-books a major push on its site by pushing its Kindle reading device and all the titles available.  So there’s further proof that the e-book is a legitimate and desirable format.

Take any of the 6 books I’ve written, like my new one What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM).  They are all highly regarded and available in e-book format, and four of them, including the new one, are also available as print paperbacks through any major online retailer (and yes I’m working on the Kindle edition)

URL Shorteners How Your Marketing Efforts May Be Sabotaged By Them

So I’m an absolute fiend for tracking data—I guess it comes from my Marketing Research roots.  The first job I had in my Marketing career straight out of college with my shiny new diploma was as a Marketing Research Analyst for one of the country’s largest banks.  It wasn’t my first choice as I was hoping for a more creative aspect at the time, but it paid big and I wanted that marquee name on my resume—at least back then when I used to care about that kind of stuff.

 

Today, one of my best friends for tracking responses to all kinds of marketing efforts is a URL shortener.  If you don’t know what I mean, here are two examples: http://Budurl.com/WhatYouKnowFacebook and http://BudUrl.com/WhatYouKnowPodcast. 

 

There are many such URL shorteners out there including TinyUrl (I have a client who calls them "Tiny Earl" which always cracks me up), SnipUrl and others.  Usually a URL shortener is the ally of the serious marketer who wants to know how to fine tune their efforts, or pretty up an otherwise lengthy and ugly longer URL.  But recently I discovered that using URL shorteners is actually throwing a bit of a monkey wrench into my marketing efforts, and I’ll bet you may be experiencing the same thing without even realizing it.

 

It all started a few weeks ago when I was preparing to send a message to my e-mail list to let them know about the latest What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), The Podcast episode, some new blog posts and other news, and I noticed for the first time ever, I was getting a SPAM assassin score back of 2 rather than my usual zero.

 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with using sequential autoresponder database systems, SPAM assassin is a helpful tool on most of these systems that pre-screens your intended e-mail message before you send it out to your database and lets you know how likely it is that it will get caught in a spam filter or even blocked by an ISP.  Any score below 5 is supposed to be okay, but this is one time that you actually want a grade of zero if you can achieve that.