It is important to have an optin box on your website. The main reason for having an optin box is to build a list of clients. Most people however just build a list of clients and do not do anything with them. This concept is called list going cold, which simply means that those people will be highly unlikely to respond to any of your emails.
The key to [tag]building a list[/tag] is quite simple. First of all, you are trying to gain your list’s trust by giving some advice or providing something free that can be useful to the [tag]subscriber[/tag]. This can go on for a week or two. During this period you will see if anyone unsubscribes from your list (basically means they are not interested) and you will end up with a list of people who are keen on the topic of your emails. This would be the moment when you can start offering products to them.
The best way to offer products to people would be via product reviews. This way you are not selling anything to them, but showing comparisons between different products which usually has a pretty good impact. Just think about what your subscribers are searching for and do the searching for them, add your affiliate links and your review will succeed.
The software that I personally use is called Aweber and it costs USD$19.95 per month. It allows you to build lists as well as setup followup autoresponders and do broadcast emails. [tag]Aweber[/tag] has also recently intergrated with [tag]Twitter[/tag] and [tag]RSS[/tag] (your blog’s) which does miracles. If you havent tried it yet, I strongly recommend you trying it by using the [tag]FREE test drive[/tag] offer they have at the bottom of their main page.
I personally love the followup emails. You get to setup the whole lot of emails straight away and set intervals between those emails. Once you have done this, you can forget about it.
Popular alternatives to aweber are – getresponse, 1shoppingcart and email brain.
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.