The secret to building a successful small business is in your mailing list. Communicating with a targeted list of potentially interested clients who may be prepared to spend money with you at some point in the future will ensure you have a constant and consistent flow of revenue 12 months of the year.

One sure fire way of encouraging more potential clients to trust you with their email address is to offer something for free in return.

Opt-in offers can create enormous opportunities to build your list … but the problem is that so many of you doing it wrong.

It’s easy to convince yourself that just because what you are offering is free, your potential clients give a damn.

They don’t!

Getting people to sign up for free stuff in today’s market place can be harder than actually selling your products and services. And anyone who has decided to follow the sheep and merrily stick a “subscribe to my newsletter” link on their home page will probably left scratching their heads wondering why no one is signing up.

People are more reluctant to share their email addresses because of the threat of being spammed with promos after promos. The offer of receiving a free email newsletter worked five years ago … but not now!

Yup, your opt-in offer needs thought, needs work and needs some careful planning.

Here are some key questions to help you come up with an opt-in offer that is going to have potential clients queuing up to hand over their email addresses.

1. What are your target clients’ BIG problems? There is no point guessing here. You have to know exactly what keeps them up at night because what you are going to offer needs to help solve at least one of them.

2. What quick fix solutions have you got? Trying to solve all their problems in one free CD/EBook/Video is just not going to work. You’ve got to give your potential client something that will enable them to see results immediately.  The more specific and focused the benefits are, the better. If they see results immediately, they are going to come back for more … and this time be more prepared to invest in what you are offering.

3. What name are you going to give your opt-in offer? It may be feel cheesy to call your offer “The 5 Deadly Secrets to XXX” but headlines sell! If you are after inspiration, get yourself copies of any of the women’s weekly mags. Those front pages sell and it’s because of those carefully crafted – if not incredibly cheesy – headlines. Use their formulas and see how you can apply it to your opt-in offer.

4. Will what you offer solve all their problems? Now don’t go too mad and give them all the answers too quickly! Give enough away to help them to stage one but offer the whole process and your potential clients won’t have a need to spend any money with you.

5. What format should your offer be in? A PDF report or ebook is by far the easiest and simplest product to create, but is that the best format for your potential clients? A five part video series or downloadable MP3 audio may be more useful.

And why not consider posting something they touch & hold? The cost of production, post and packaging may be worth the cost of getting that postal address, rather than just an email address.

6. What different offers can you make to different types of people? Having a one-size-fits-all offer may not work across all of your marketing. You will find that within your target audience, there will be smaller niche problems to address.

For example, a fitness instructor may have a 5 part video series on offer on their home page, but targeted marketing to pregnant women can be made more effective by directing them to special landing page where they can download a report on “The 6 mistakes most pregnant women make when exercising”.

7. What is your follow up going to be? It’s all very well collecting email addresses but if you don’t plan out how you are going to build a relationship with your new subscriber, they will just be a number on a database. What other valuable stuff can you send them? What offers are you going to make to them to give them an opportunity to spend money with you? How are you going to ask for referrals?

The money is in the list … but only if you communicate with the people who are on it!

Summing up …

Don’t opt for a blah blah offer. Forget about offering that dull and boring monthly newsletter. It will waste your time and any money you spend marketing your website.

Think, do some work on creating the right opt-in offer and plan out how you are going to direct the right people to your opt-in offer page.  It will make all the difference!

P.S. If you want to check out my latest carefully crafted opt-in offer, then head on over to my Facebook Page. Once you like my Page, you can choose to receive a rather fabulous interview on how to go about constructing your own Facebook Landing Pages.

There’s nothing new about personalised marketing.  We’ve been able to mail merge for a long time now but this particular campaign from Cancer Research caught my eye the other week.

I’ve been meaning to video it and show you, so here it is.  What do you think?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5gRBsxQumQ

Most small business owners who use email newsletters in their marketing don’t send enough emails!

I bet most of you who use email marketing stick to sending out a monthly newsletter, don’t you?  ”I don’t want to annoy my subscribers”, I hear you say.  But, here’s the problem.

An email newsletter that goes out once a month is, well, just 12 emails a year!  That’s right … only 12 emails a year!

But not enough time to write email newsletters!

Now if you came to me and explained that you struggle to find the time to write one email newsletter a month, let alone two, three or even four, then that’s another issue.  If you decide to embrace email marketing, then either make the time (coz you certainly won’t find it!) or delegate the setting up and scheduling to someone else, such as a virtual assistant.

But if you are worried about over emailing someone 12 times a year, then I’m afraid you may be wasting your time.

Your potential clients and customers need reminding.  They are all time-poor individuals who would love to have their problems solved by you.  But if you are not there reminding them – more than 12 times a year! – then I’m afraid they are just going to forget who you are.

The spamming dilemma

Back to this spamming dilemma.  If you were to send out an email once a day, then yes;  your subscribers will probably be unsubscribing in their droves and probably report you for inappropriate emails too.  But one person’s spam is another person’s essential reading.  If you are sending your subscribers valued content along with your promotions and events, then keep sending them great stuff.

An email has such a short life span that once received, it is either read and actioned on … or deleted.  It’s not like a letter or postcard mailed out which can hang around on someone’s fridge door as a reminder.  An email is usually gone as quickly as it is sent.

Once someone has had enough of you, they will unsubscribe.  They don’t want to buy anything from you, so why would you want to keep sending them stuff.  But for the people who would love to read more of your stuff but sometimes (and quite often!) don’t have the time to read more of your stuff, keep sending more of that stuff to them.

Be there at the right time

I promise you that, one day, they will take the time to read it. And that’s usually the day they’ve made a decision to have their problems solved by you.  If your email doesn’t arrive, how are they going to remember you?

Quick example: I ran a Web Tech phone-in clinic last week.  Recording available to members, but free to attend to anyone on my newsletter list.  The people who showed up on the day where the ones who responded to my “Last chance” reminder.  And boy where they pleased they made the effort to show up because the session was a fantastic.  They all agreed that if I hadn’t sent out that one last reminder they would have missed out.  And I would have given them a poor service!

Yes, I got un-subscribers from that last email, but the ones who responded where pretty pleased I had sent it. They read and actioned it … there and then.

Don’t be afraid of spamming

Of course, measure your successes and if you over-send you will notice your subscriber numbers dwindle.  But for goodness sake, think beyond a monthly newsletter!  12 times a year is not enough.

Photo Credit: Arnold | Inuyaki

Do you change your business to suit your tech tools? Or your tech tools to your business?

As you start to embrace technology within your business – whether it’s a new email marketing system or web based accounting package – it’s easy to feel unsure about whether you are making the right decision.

Perhaps you have a website built on flash by your teenage son. It’s looks beautiful – and it didn’t cost you anything apart from a month’s worth of washing when he was back from Uni – but it can’t be found on Google (Flash can’t be viewed by search engines, hence its inability to get found!).

Perhaps you are feeling pretty chuffed with your free shopping cart system. You’ve not shelled out any cash, but you are getting frustrated with setting up your new workshop. You’ve now delayed the date three times because you can’t the system do what you want it to.

Sticking with the wrong tools?

How many tech systems are you sticking with just because you haven’t got the time, energy or mental capacity to work out if there is a better system out there?

Is it better to keep using the same systems and just fit your business around them? Better the devil and all that, especially when you are not paying out much for them. But when certain tools and systems are stifling our creativity and growth, then surely it is time to change.

Email marketing systems are one of those tech tools that it is easy for a small business to out grow. When I first started using email newsletters in my business in 2004, I went with Constant Contact. It was – and still is – a great newsletter system. But even with the recently added new features, it still isn’t an email marketing system to support selling products and programmes online. It misses the power of a decent autoresponder system.

Autoresponders are my number one recommended web tech marketing tool. They allow you to put your online relationship building in to turbo drive. So when I started using 1ShoppingCart for my workshop and ebook selling, I was able to start building a set-and-forget marketing system. But I loved Constant Contact’s email newsletters so much that I stuck with them and ran both systems side by side for more than 18 months.

When enough is enough

Cracks started to appear. It wasn’t a surprise. I was running my email campaigns on one system and starting to build my customer list on another. When someone unsubscribed on one system, I had to manually check that they were taken off the other! Duh!

Finally I took one of the leaps of faith, sucked in my breath and got it sorted. Delegating the project to a Virtual Assistant was the key to success.

5 years later and the change of email marketing system happens again. Not part of my big plan, but this time it was 1ShoppingCart that was stifling my business. No matter how hard I tried to understand why, 1ShoppingCart refused to work their recurring payments with PayPal. One off payments, not a problem. But monthly recurring payments for my Web Tech Club membership site, nope!

I came up with a sticking plaster (Completion NOT perfection!). Send new members directly to PayPal. It worked beautifully with Wishlist Member (the WordPress membership plugin that I use), but my VA still had to manually add new members to 1ShoppingCart to get the system to work. I could have stuck with it. No one seems to notice this sticking plaster. But I knew it could be better. I knew people wanted to use their credit cards, rather than just their PayPal accounts. And even though I could do this with PayPal Website Payments Pro, it still wouldn’t work with 1ShoppingCart.

Plus my other big problem was that I couldn’t use the 1ShoppingCart affiliate programme. Without the orders coming through the system, affiliates would have no way of the system allocating their recommended members to their account. And when you have person after person asking you how to sign up to your affiliate programme because they love your product so much, it can get you down when you have to admit you can’t offer one!

Turning away business because your systems can’t offer it?

So here where these web tech tools were, helping me run my business. But stifling it all the same. It had to change.

I could have gone down the merchant account route, but after an awful experience of trying to get Worldpay to work with 1ShoppingCart the previous year, it was 1ShoppingCart that had to go. My tried and tested shopping cart system that I had recommended to my clients for the past 5 years was on it’s way out.

I’ve ended up with Premium Web Cart and Aweber (PWC doesn’t offer an email marketing system so you have to set up a system such as Aweber along side). The system is still not fully set up, but finally my affiliate programme can be launched very soon.
It’s not easy. I am not advocating changing your email marketing systems – or any other web tech tool – just for the sake of it. But if you are “making do” just because you haven’t got the time, energy or mental capacity to change it, make the time, energy or mental capacity to do it.

I know I may well be giving you a huge project to think of here. However, what would be the difference to your business this time next year, if you did change one of your web tech tools?

Web tech tools can make us more productive and increase our marketing power, but when certain tech tools stifle our business, then surely its time to invest and change.

Do some emails drive you mad?

How many email newsletters have you signed up to over the years? Whether it’s a free report you’ve asked for or to get the latest news, it’s become the norm for many businesses to be capturing those all-important email addresses.

But how many of those email newsletters that you’ve signed up have been any good? How many have added any real value to your day?

And how many have been nothing more than clutter and spam in your inbox.

When an email subscription works, it can work very well in deed. Take note: email marketing should become a critical part of your business strategy. But when done badly, your emails can be causing your potential clients problems.

And problems ain’t what you want to be offering, are they?!

These are the 5 most complained about problems that emails can cause. And I bet you have found yourself cursing over one or more of them yourself. So, check to see if you are offering any of these problems. And if so, sort them out.

Get added without being asked – Top of the Pops and coming in at Number One, is my favourite email grip. Business card dumping and website mining. There are still plenty of you out there who feel it’s acceptable to upload lists or manually add email addresses to your email newsletter, without having asked permission from the person.

Email marketing gets the best resulsts when it’s permission-based, so don’t be lazy. Work out a real reason why someone would want to receive emails from you and offer your emails as an opt-in service only.

Can’t read them – As more of us are using smart phones and tablets to read and send emails, our screens are getting smaller and smaller. Fancy, graphic based newsletters may look great on a 13” screen, but when squashed in to an iPhone it just makes you want to hit that delete key.

Your subscribers may prefer text based emails, too. Images can work well for designed based businesses, but if certain email servers block certain graphics, you’re left with pretty ugly emails that may not be able to be read.

Keep your newsletter design simple. Keep it to one column. And avoid those magazine styles, unless you’ve done your research and found out that this style actually works for your business.

Too many – You must have come across this one! You’ve signed up for a free report and before you know it, you’ve had 4 emails in the first 24 hours … 3 of which have been recommending (selling!) affiliate products. Wooooooh there!

Yes, you can’t be shy about selling your business. You’ve got to make your offers to your subscribers as you aren’t a free publishing house (are you?!). But watch your scheduling, especially at promotion time.

You may find you have to spend some time and emails to build up the trust from your subscribers. Give some value before you go for the sale – make friends first – and you’ll find you won’t need to go heavy and “make the sale”. You are not a hormone-induced teenager trying to score on their first date!

Too few – On the opposite end of the scale is not receiving enough. A lack of consistency will dilute your efforts and will only make your subscribers wonder who you are. They may well have forgotten who you are if they signed up for something over a month ago before getting any follow up.

In fact, I got an email from such a business today. It must have been at least 2 months since I had heard from them last and yet they were obviously gearing up for a promotion. Hmmmm.

Be in touch with your subscribers regularly – at least once a fortnight if you are serious about marketing your business. Little and often goes a very long way.

Can’t unsubscribe easily – Grrrrr! Another common problem that really shouldn’t be here if businesses used proper email marketing systems. Replying back to an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject heading really is a pain. And as for having to re-submit your email address once you click through to a web page … well, talk about having to jump through hoops.

Once your subscribers have had enough of you, make if easy for them to leave. A “one-click” unsubscribe button is offered by all the major newsletters systems, so there is really no excuse for not being able to offer this. You don’t want your subscriber clicking that “spam” button do you?!

Any more common complaints you would like to share? Do add your thoughts below.

The Perfect Storm!

You’ve typed out your marketing plan.  It may even be stuck up on your wall or scrawled across a NoBo board.

You’re feeling very pleased with yourself that you have committed to some daily and weekly actions to ensure you are chipping away at generating potential leads for future business.

But then…

A client project goes wrong – you have to spend an extra 10 hours on it because the client has changed their brief.

Your laptop switches off.  No warning!  It’s go to the shop to be fixed and you won’t see it again for at least 4 days.

Your child care changes.  Your au pair has hurt her back and she can’t come to you for the next few weeks.  And your mother, who is always on stand by for you, is away on holiday.

Then your partner gets ill.  You have to run around organising doctor’s appointments and picking up prescriptions.

And to finish your whole week off, you get hit from behind when you are waiting at the traffic lights.  You are OK but the car needs some serious garage work.

The Perfect Storm!

No amount of planning or mental preparation can help you avoid this.  Your contingency plans just can’t cover this amount of chaos and you have to focus on the here and now.

What’s happened to your marketing plan?  It’s disappeared under the pile post-stick notes, garage receipts and client notes.  That’s OK for a week or two.  It’s easy to catch up.  But what if your au pair doesn’t make it back to work and you have to start the whole child care planning again? What if your partner gets seriously ill? What if something else and then something else and then something else happens?

Ignore your marketing plan for for more than a few weeks and your business is going to start to suffer.

So how do you keep marketing during a perfect storm?

The trick to this is not in what you actually do on a daily or weekly basis, but the systems you spend the time creating.  And the one thing that many small business owners don’t spend the time or the money investing in, is their database.  A database of potentially interested clients who may want to spend money with you at some point in the future.

I’m not talking about the proposals you’ve sent out.  Or the consultations you have had.  Or even the database that you’ve bought to send out that promotional offer.  I’m talking about the people who aren’t ready to pick up the phone to you but are interested in what you do.

Permission based marketing!  Offering interested people the opportunity to subscribe or sign up for something on your website so that they can receive information that is valuable to them … and gives you the opportunity to stay in touch with them over time.

And the more you automate this process, the more effective and efficient your marketing will be.  Especially when you are in the middle of the Perfect Storm.

My Perfect Storm lasted about 6 months.  My dad died of Lymphoma almost 2 years ago and we had an 18 month roller coaster period before then of 3 lots of chemo.  My business had to move a peg or two down.  I still ran some events and still worked with a few clients, but during the summer of 2009, I basically “shut down” for about 6 months.  I put my marketing club on hold (which turned out to be a good thing because it morphed in to the Web Tech Club) and spent that time driving up and down the A303 from Hindhead to Devon most weekends, being a mum during the week and a daughter at the weekends.

When I came back to work in the Autumn of 2009, I knew it would be a hard slog to build my business back up.  But it actually wasn’t as hard as I imagined.  My email newsletters and blog had carried on periodically.  I was able to continue with writing articles and schedule stuff to go out.  And it was this constant drip feed of valuable info that allowed me to pick back up again and ride out that Perfect Storm.

So if you haven’t planned for the Perfect Storm yet, then I recommend you do so.  Make sure your marketing plan includes some form of email newsletter or sign-up offer via your website so you can build up a database.  Because if you do, you’ll find it far easier to pick up from where you left it.

Photo Credit:  Nebraskasc

You may know that I rant on quite a lot about the importance of capturing email addresses from your websites and blogs.  Building up a list of email addresses of potentially interested clients is one THE most essential marketing activities you can do as a small business owner.

But how much would you be willing to spend on getting just one email address?

I was clothes shopping in Guildford at the weekend with my 10 year old daughter.  After waiting in changing rooms in Primark and doing my very best to avoid the likes of Jack Wills and SuperDry, we ended up in GAP.

A few T-Shirts and pair of jeans later, we made way over the cash register where I was asked if I was a member of GAP VIP.  ”Here we go again”, I thought.  ”Another bit of hard selling to sign up for some loyalty card.”

But when explained me to me, I was most impressed.

They offered me a 30% discount on the spot for just writing my email address on a notepad that they took from under the counter.  GAP just gave me the best part of £10 off my purchase for handing over my email address.

£10! That’s how much they were willing to pay for my email address. (OK I know they didn’t actually pay out the money, but that was money that didn’t end up in their tills.)

And what about all the people who probably handed over a fake email address in exchange for that 30% discount.  I am sure there would have been plenty of people who would do this – I know I have in the past.  So let’s say that for every real email address, GAP would actually have to collect at least 5.

That £10 could easily become £50 that they gave away for just one perfectly valid email address.

GAP have obviously done their calculations and worked out that a brand new email address could be worth hundreds, if not thousands of pounds over a lifetime of one of their customers.  £50 is probably a small price to pay for them, especially if you consider the customer is spending money in the first place to get their discount.

So how much is an email address worth to you?  Are you doing enough to get email addresses from your potential clients?

I know I am probably not – and it’s given me plenty of food for thought to review my processes and offers.

Just wished I had ended up spending more money to get more value for my 30% discount. Oh wait, that’s what GAP wanted me to do!!

What came first?

What came first? The chicken or the egg?

This legendary conundrum can puzzle kids of all ages (and yes, I know I am still a big kid too?!)

This same conundrum can puzzle small business owners who struggle with deciding what to start with first:  a website, a blog or an email newsletter.

To be brutally honest, it really doesn’t matter.  To get all three of these marketing tools working well for you, you need to have them all up and running so they can bounce and link back wards and forwards.  And sideways and upways!

But that’s not very helpful and you’ve got to start somewhere.

So, here’s what I recommend to my clients.

1. Start with working out what house you want to live in

You wouldn’t walk in to an estate agency and tell them you need a place to live.  They just wouldn’t be able to help you unless they knew your price backet, the number of bedrooms you wanted or whether it was a flat of a house you were after.

So before you go calling upon the first web designer you meet at a networking event, decide on what you need your online house to be.

Who are your customers?

What are you selling online?

What’s the purpose of your website going to be?

IMHO, small business websites need to have one primary function.  Yes, you want to sell your goods and wares, but all in good time.  Your primary goal for your website is to build a mailing list.

2.  Do you want to be blogging?  And what room is it going to be in your house?

Not all of you will feel you are cut out for blogging but if you feel you are (and that’s good news!!), it makes sense to have your blog incorporated in to your main website.  It works better for the search engines and it keeps things simpler for you.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Your blog can be like an annex – attached to your website, with the same look and feel but essentially a separate site.  This may work better for online retail businesses selling stuff such as baby clothes, handbags or cosmetics.  The last you want to do is to jump on the blogging bandwagon and make your online shop difficult to find!

For more service based businesses, it makes sense to have your blog as your website.  The articles you write and publish, showcase your expertise and build that trust with the potential client cruising around your website.

3.  How you are going to manage your blog/website?

Blogging platforms such as self-hosted WordPress or Drupal or hosted sites such as Typepad or Blogger all give you the power to manage your own blog/website once it’s all set up without the need of a web designer.

WordPress.org is my personal favourite piece of blogging/website software but you have to decide what’s right for you and how you work.

If you don’t want to do any of the admin of your own site, you can always delegate this someone else.  It doesn’t always have to be you!

So get moving on your blog/website project first.  And then start on your email newsletter project.

(Notice that I use the word “Project” here – “Do Website” isn’t something for your to-do-list!!  This is a project that will need breaking down in to daily tasks, timescales, etc)

4.   What newsletter subscriber system are you going to use?

Whilst your blog/website is getting set up (I make this sound so easy don’t I!!??!), now is the time to start researching the newsletter systems and make a decision on which one to go with.

Do you want to stick to a basic newsletter package? Constant Contact is good for this.  Do you need autoresponders? ( my most favouritist web tech tool that most small business owners should be using in their online marketing).  Aweber and iContact are two systems to check out.

Are you going to be selling stuff online?  If so you may need a newsletter system that works with a shopping cart.  1ShoppingCart is the system I use – not the holy grail and sometimes it annoys the pants off me! but it works.  Especially if you find a Virtual Assistant who can manage the whole system for you.

5.  What are you going to offer?

Adding a “Sign up to my free newsletter” to your blog/website is just not going to cut it today.  Blah, blah, blah – so you offer a newsletter?  So what?

What can you create or offer that would be of value to your target audience.  It could a be a free report, audio recording, videos, discount coupon or even a taster product in the post.  Think about your clients and if in doubt – ask them! Don’t guess!

So before this blog post becomes the length of War and Peace, I’ll leave it there.  And, to be honest, if I give you much more information I think your head will probably explode :O)

Get to this stage and you will be well on the way to sorting out your online marketing plan.  I often find that if one looks too far ahead on these type of projects, the sheer size of the project is enough to put you off from starting.  And that’s not something that should be an option for you!

If you are serious about getting tools such as blogs and email newsletters working for you and you feel you really need some practical, hand holding through the whole process – this is exactly what I do for my clients.  Click here to find out how you get your blog/newsletter/website project fast tracked and less painful.

I got this message from one of my connections on LinkedIn today:

“Long time, no speak. I hope all is well with you. I tried sending you a XXXX newsletter last week and it was blocked. May I ask if there is any reason why you blocked it? I would very much like to keep in touch. XXXX”

Ooooo! How to make a girl feel awkward?!

You see, I have a few gripes about this message. It’s great that this contact of mine is asking for feedback, but it’s rather blunt and makes me feel like I have done something wrong … when I haven’t!

1. I didn’t block it. I unsubcribed – and there is a difference in my opinion

2. I didn’t subscribe in the first place. I am really strict about this but email marketing should always – I SAID ALWAYS! – be on a permission basis.  To receive marketing info via email, the person must either subscribe themselves via a website or tick a box on a piece of paper.  Businesses can only ever offer an opt-in and never an opt-out.

If I haven’t subscribed, then I’ll unsubscribe.  If I feel the email deserves it, I will report it for spam.

3. I didn’t even know that the newsletter I unsubscribed from was from my contact. I had to think back and ask myself which newsletter was it that my contact sent.  It turned out that the newsletter was a very corporate one – it was aimed at large companies with large number of employees.  I’m just me!  I would never, ever need their services.  And yes, I know that I may know someone who may – but I am not willing to have my inbox blocked up with emails from companies who may be right for one of my contacts … one day.  That’s what networking and LinkedIn is all about.

4. Ask for feedback but don’t come across as defensive. People come and go.  It’s OK for your subscribers to unsubscribe.  I see some of my subscribers unsubscribe but then become active followers on Twitter.  Not everyone likes to get email so don’t ever get offended if someone decides to go.  Quick note – if you are getting a high number of subscribers, you may want to check on what you are sending out! You may be getting some useful feedback

What about you?

How do you feel when someone has asked why they have blocked them?

Or would you ask the same question yourself if someone unsubscribes from your list?

So you started a blog … but you just haven’t got round to writing articles for the past few weeks.  Or is that months?!

What about your email newsletter?  You started with good intentions but things got … well, a bit busy.  And you haven’t sent one out for a few months.

It’s OK.  It’s a common problem.  Constant and consistent marketing is tough, especially when it comes to writing articles.

But the worst thing you can do when your blogging or newsletters have lapsed is apologise for it when you have finally taken your pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard!).

I see it time and time again.  An email comes through starting off with “Hi, it’s been a while. So sorry! It’s just business is so busy I’ve just had the time to write a new blog post/newsletter.   But it’s OK – I’m back!”

Never draw attention to the fact that you just haven’t made the time to blog or email.  Never highlight the fact that you, quite frankly, haven’t been able to prioritise this all important, value added part of your business.

For those readers and subscribers who have missed you, will be delighted to hear from you again.  But for those who haven’t missed you, will only realise that they haven’t actually missed out on your articles and content.  And may well be slightly peeved off that you haven’t made the time to do this already.  Now, where’s that unsubscribe link?!

And once you’ve apologised and told your readers and subscribers that you’re back … then you’ve set yourself up for a fall if you lapse once again!

No, never apologise!  Just get on and do it.  Don’t draw attention to your failings, no matter how guilty you feel.

Just get on and do it!