Free eMail Marketing For Small Businesses

eMail Marketing For Small and Home Based Businesses

I am sure that all of you already know that email marketing is a great way to communicate with your loyal audience and potential customers. It is how internet marketers keep their customers and prospects coming back.

However, and understandable, there are still many of you that still find eMail marketing a tedious task, because of the things you need to do, such as, building a list, creating your Opt in email marketing forms, formatting your email newsletters, scheduling, etc.. Also, let us not forget the matter of finding out which service we can use, and preferably free.

What if, I told you, that you can do a simple non-annoying email marketing, free, opt-out, while at the same time getting some backlinks, grow email list, and within the process increase traffic potential? Would that be of interest to you? If you responded yes, read on.

What Is Posterous?

I’ll keep this simple as it is not my intention to be very detailed about Posterous. In a nutshell Posterous is a blogging platform that is free, allows you to post your articles via email (via web is also possible), and autopost the same article to a variety of free services, such as Twitter, FaceBook, Tmblr, and more..

It is a great service as people can subscribe to your Posterous and vice versa (sort of “follow” or “unfollow” kind of thing). In addition, within the process of posting articles, you can create links to anywhere you want, thus improving your link building campaign and increase traffic potential. Posterous is a reliable and credible platform and has good graces from search engines.

Here’s a quick example. I reposted an excerpt of Optimize Your Content For Search Engines on Posterous?

So far I got 343 views. Not a lot, right? But hey, it still got that amount of views and most likely some clicked on continue to read the story, landed on my blog and who knows, maybe I did make a conversion

Obviously, you only want to repost only an excerpt of your latest blog post (or not, use your imagination) or simply write an article there, just like you would on any other blogging platform. Better, send an email of “something” to Posterous, and it gets posted and then sent to your subscribers. And did I mention that they can be reposted to some of the popular services out there? All this “domino marketing effect” is free!

email Marketing with Posterous

Recently, Posterous has introduced their simple email marketing engine. You can now automatically send your posts to your subscribers as instant email newsletters. Here’s how it works.

Step 1:  Add your friends, customers, etc.. email addresses as subscribers via the ‘People’ tab.

Hint: You can also import a list from a CSV file.

Step 2. finished, that was fast!

Posterous will then send invites to the people you sent, and wait for them to confirm. Once they do, they immediately get included in your email marketing list. Did this last week and I already got 172 subscribers, not bad!

Isn’t this type of Email marketing spam?

Well, I am sure you are part of some community that sends invite to join your group or something of the sort. Posterous email marketing is just the same. You invite people to subscribe to you. If they don’t want, they don’t confirm, period. Simple, active and effective. Nothing spammy there in my opinion, provided you continue posting quality content. Different from RSS subscription via email. In any event, you can always improve your skills with this free marketing training.

Don’t forget, just anything else, it is always good to re-promote your posts on Posterous and ensure that your content are properly optimized. The more promotion you get, the merrier.

Post an entry > subscribers receive email > they like > they read = you get more exposure and increase your chances to convert. Magic!

That’s it! What do you think? Is this something that you feel you can do? I am convinced that this is a good choice to start with, even if you only want to enhance your link building campaign. If you already have a list and using an existing email marketing service, then you should take care to ensure that you are not duplicating your efforts. Launch your email marketing campaign with Posterous, and to your success!