You should always be honest with your customers because transparency is the foundation upon which good customer relations are built. So when several people have asked about my newsletter sign-ups, I have been honest about it. The bottom line is, I’m trying to convert clicks into sales. Clicks don’t always convert into sales immediately, so sometimes you have to settle on converting clicks into leads.

Shocked? I didn’t think so. Most people know when they sign up for a newsletter that no matter how useful the information is, there’s still going to be some pitch made.

When I originally started writing articles for my web site the goal was to attract visitors who would then click on through to the rest of the site and discover my wonderful product. Fat chance. This is the internet so most people (like me) are just interested in free content. My article-to-site click-through rate was about 5%. The conversion to sales was even worse. In the first 4 months after FlowBreeze was released, only 1 sales could be tracked back to someone who entered the site through an article.
So I decided that I would try to (1) improve the click through rate, (2) generate sales leads, and (3) make money off the articles through ads. Many people think (1) and (3) work against each other, but I can always remove the ads at a later date to test that theory.

1. I improved my sales copy in the About the Author section of the articles and my click-through rate is now about 10% - double the previous.
2. I added a newsletter sign-up a month ago and have gotten a 0.4% subscriber rate. Not huge, but each article I add to the site generates between 100 and 2000 visitors per month. So the more articles I add, the more subscribers I’ll get.
3. I added Google AdSense to my site. I’m not getting rich, but I’m making more in AdSense than I spend on Google AdWords. I don’t know why, but I get a perverse sense of satisfaction out of that.

If you look again at the title of this post, you’ll notice that there is no “How To” at the beginning of it. No. This is an open declaration that anyone who signs up for my newsletter is a sales lead. There, I said it.
Does that mean I’ll bombard you with spam? No. I will send out occasional emails consisting of…

• Diagramming, quality and/or documentation tips
• A listing of recent articles published on the site
• Product announcements - new product releases and version updates
• Once in a while, special deals just for newsletter subscribers

Not such as bad deal, is it?