In the course of my travels on the web, I sign up to a lot of email subscriber lists. I do it if the site interests me, and I also do it to learn. You can get some great ideas from other people’s approach to email, as well as some great pointers about what not to do!

One common issue is what I call the “front loaded” follow up. You join a list, and for three or four weeks you get a well thought out sequence of emails, with good content and sales pitches in turn, and then…….nothing.  Until weeks later, you’ll have a broadcast selling something appear in your inbox. And then more….nothing.

That’s why it’s important to task yourself with adding to your follow ups regularly – I add at least one a month to most of my lists, giving them even more added value stuff than sales pitches.

Your objective is to keep people engaged on your list, so that when you do pitch something to them, they remember who you are and that you do add value to their experience.

Check your email account now – how long has it been running for? When did the follow up emails stop? If the gap is big,  get something in there now, and make a note keep adding to the sequence.

If you aren’t building an email list, then you should be. Here at Beyond Blogging, we use and recommend Aweber.

Gabriel is Nathan’s son – the one you see in the background of this video and in the photo below. It was his eighth birthday the other day, and we were talking and decided we wanted to celebrate it here on the Beyond Blogging site.

So we came up with the idea of the $8 blog critique!

Nathan and I have developed our skills over the last few months in recording critiques of blogs belonging to our Beyond Blogging Project students, and also doing the same for private coaching clients.

Normally we record these together, using a screencast of the blog we are talking about, and simply send the finished video to the client, with a series of recommendations.

Our regular charge is $145.

But to celebrate Gabriel’s birthday, we’re going to do 8 site critiques for 8 people, at just $8! And we’re going to bring the winners into the screencast call, and let them see the process we go through live, ask us questions and be a part of the whole process. It will be like a two on one consultancy! And they’ll get the video to keep.

All you have to do is convince us that you should be one of the 8.

So get busy in the comments here and let us know why we should choose your blog.

We’ll get back to the winners in a few days and schedule a good time to do it.

It feels like I’ve been blogging for half my life, but actually it’s only been about a year and a half. I just totted up across the three main blogs I write on and I’ve written over 800 posts in that time, which is around five full length novels!

I was looking back through some of my early work this morning, and it occurred to me how many of the people I was talking to and sharing comments with in those days have simply faded away from blogging. And it made me kind of sad. At least two of them – Gordie Rogers and Jamie Harrop were quite exceptional writers.

But they both lacked an essential ingredient to make it online – tenacity. (And Gordie, Jamie, if you do read this, I hope one day you will rediscover your tenacity, because the blogosphere is a poorer place without your talents.)

Staying power is that dogged “I’m going to keep going” attitude that keeps you writing, keeps you planning and keeps you focused on your objectives, even when they go awry, which they undoubtedly will.

It’s an undervalued trait in successful bloggers, and one which you should nurture and develop. There will be times when you just don’t want to write another post, times when you really don’t want to check your email, and times when you despair of ever breaking through the next financial barrier. Those of you that dig in during those moments will come out the other side stronger and better.

Don’t fade away. Dig deep, or call a friend.

There’s a lot of stuff around the net at the moment about outsourcing, and I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve been having on the subject recently.

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There’s no question that outsourcing some of your work is sensible, and in time, essential for a blog based business – it simply doesn’t scale to try to do everything yourself as the business grows.

I’m going to look at two aspects of my work, share my initial thoughts about outsourcing, then explain why I changed those thoughts 100% after giving them some real consideration.

Email

Email is the bane of my life! You would be amazed at how much I get, across several accounts. I try to clear the inboxes several times a day, but as soon as I come back, they’re full again.

When I first started thinking about outsourcing, email was top of my list to go to someone else.

Accounts

I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the business – I want to know how much I’m earning and spending, and I actually enjoy sending invoices and measuring how I’m doing. I was also nervous about sharing accounts information with someone else.

The accounts were staying with me!

I’d made those decisions based on what I liked doing and what I didn’t like doing – a mistake!

Fortunately, I had a rethink and I realised some things:

Email

Whilst I don’t like handling email, I’m actually pretty good at it. I can turn it around quickly, and often turn general enquiries into business. I’m also good at dealing with problems or complaints and can usually find a way of making those people happy too. Outsourcing email could cost me business and happy clients.

I decided to stick with my emails, and work them better, using some canned responses and unsubscribing from several lists to reduce volume.

Accounts

As I said, I actually like doing the accounts. But if I’m honest, I’m not productive when I’m doing them – I’m not the greatest with spreadsheets and accounts programs, and I have been known to make mistakes, which take ages to unravel.

So in the end it made sense to outsource this element.

The message is this: Don’t base your outsourcing decisions on what you do and don’t like. Base them instead on what you are good at and most effective at.

One final note: Don’t assume you have to use strangers to outsource stuff. My wife is a qualified accountant. Guess who’s doing my accounts now?