The weekly newsletter we put out from www.kirstydunphey.com is currently circulating to over 5,000 people weekly. We’re often asked how we’ve built our database to that size in just a few years given that this newsletter started as just an in house newsletter to around 20 staff! To follow are some of our best success tips on building your newsletter (or blog) database.

26 Ways To Build Subscribers

1. Have a sign up button or form on every page of your website.

2. Don’t make it too difficult for people to sign-up, people get bored if they have to jump through too many hoops. All we ask for is first name, surname (optional) and email.

3. Set up a facebook fan page for your email and encourage your friends / family and current subscribers to join.

4. To attract those ever present Gen Y’s have a presence on myspace. Some of my favourites:

• http://www.myspace.com/jackcanfield

• http://www.myspace.com/thebaileynetwork

• http://www.myspace.com/jimrohn

• http://www.myspace.com/thatguywiththenametag

• http://www.myspace.com/kirstydunphey (and mine of course!)

5. Link your facebook, myspace and linkedin pages on your website and newsletter.

6. Any time you speak at a public event, mention your newsletter and encourage people to sign up. By public event I mean everything from a keynote presentation in front of 2,000 to a networking group of 5 – just mention it!

7. If you do any regular public speaking, grab a box, bucket or any receptacle and allow people to simply throw a business card in at the end of any of your talks if they want to subscribe.

8. Promote your newsletter on the bottom of your email (in your signature)

9. Make it easy for people to recommend their friends signup and mention that you’d like them to join in your newsletter (in ours we say we’re aiming for 10,000 subscribers – can they help?)

10. I regularly submit articles to be used in other newsletters. Our two most exciting contributions to date have been multiple entries in Zig Ziglar (www.zigziglar.com) and Jeffrey Gitomer’s (www.jeffreygitomer.com) newsletters.

11. Allow people to reproduce your articles in their newsletters – and make it easy. We do this by having a statement telling people they can reproduce our articles in every newsletter and a whole page of articles they can use here: www.kirstydunphey.com/usemebaby.html

12. We submit our articles (which reference our newsletter) to online articles. Try www.ezinearticles.com and www.articlesbase.com, www.goarticles.com

13. Solicit testimonials from the people who currently read your newsletter (even if it’s just 5!) and use them on your website.

14. Allow people to see archived copies of your newsletters – to give them a better idea of what they’re signing up for.

15. Don’t sell or loan your database and make it clear on your website that you won’t.

16. Mention your newsletter as often as possible (media, tv interviews, social events, networking).

17. Consider mentioning your newsletter on your business card / letterhead.

18. Link to your newsletter in your blog.

19. Oh yeah – have a blog (see: www.kirstydunphey.com/blog) and if you don’t think you have time to blog read: http://kirstydunphey.blogspot.com/2008/02/are-you-already-blogging-and-you-just.html

20. There are lots of online ezine directories that you can register your database at (we’ve not had a great response from these – but hey – if you’ve got a spare 10 minutes go for your life!)

21. Ask your friends / colleagues if they’ll mention your newsletter on their website (see: www.kirstydunphey.com/recommendations.html) More links to your website can also do great things for your search engine optimization.

22. You can pitch your product in your newsletter – but it can’t all be a sales pitch. Find a happy medium that works for you in terms of selling vs educating.

23. If you write a book (www.unleashedknowledge.com), mention your newsletter in it.

24. Make your database feel loved – have special offers that are only for those people who subscribe.

25. Use a reputable email marketing service to ensure a good delivery rate, we use icontact but there are several other options available.

26. Finally, the number one (and most simple) way to get more people subscribing is to put something out there that’s of value to readers. If people like a newsletter they’ll forward it on and it’ll grow without you having to concern yourself too much!

Kirsty Dunphey is an author, speaker and entrepreneur who started her first business at 15, opened her own real estate agency at 21 and retired a self made multi-millionaire at 27. To sign up to Kirsty Dunphey’s weekly email, go to www.kirstydunphey.com

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Are You Using One Of The Most Powerful Tools On The Internet – Twitter? If you’re not, then I hate to tell you but you’re missing out on something that can have a massive impact on your online success & help to spread your marketing message out all over the web at the same time.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing phenomena on the internet & it’s not just for the celebrities & politicians.

Lots of companies are now achieving great results by incorporating Twitter into both their marketing & their day-to-day online communications.

With people now spending more & more of their time on Social Media, it’s important that real estate agents & property managers start to become part of the online conversation.

What is Twitter & Why Is It So Good For Real Estate Agents?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows messages (tweets) of 140 characters or less to be posted up onto the web in real time.

It provides the convenience of text messaging but with the additional advantage that the messages are posted up onto the web for others to see, plus it’s without the costs involved with SMS, because Twitter is free to use.

How Can Agents Leverage Their Marketing By Using Twitter?

Did you know that one single message posted onto Twitter can also be automatically sent out across to numerous other Social Media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Plaxo, MySpace, Blogger, WordPress, etc… all from just one single tweet.

Also, if other people on Twitter like your message then they will often share your tweet with their followers as well, and your friends on Facebook could share the message with their friends on Facebook too, etc, etc.

Which means that one tweet can not only be leveraged out across a number of your own Social Media accounts but they can also end up being shared amongst the Social Networks of your friends & followers to help you get your message out across the web.

For instance, there have been lots of times where I’ve posted a message onto Twitter which other people on Twitter have found interesting & subsequently they’ve shared the message with their followers by Retweeting my message.

And likewise there’s  lots of times where I Retweet other people’s messages that I think my followers may be interested in.

Here’s an example of how a retweeted message looks.

RT @GregVincent: Suncorp says Thank You Mr Hooker as they sell LJ Hooker to LJ Hooker ~ http://ow.ly/qQ6d

Sometimes, the people who retweet your message have only a handful of followers & others have thousands of followers who can potentially see your message.

And, this is only a small part of how Twitter can spread your message.

Here’s a snapshot of how Twitter works for me & how it could work for you.

As well as writing articles & posting them onto sites like GenYre = energy, each week I write the Real Estate Agent Newsletter for the Real Estate Agent Success Club & send it out to agents via email.

Prior to using Social Media, email was the only way that I could share my newsletters out across the web.

But now I can also share each of the Real Estate Agent Newsletters with my followers & friends across all of my Social Networks via a single tweet.

For example, here’s what I do each week.

Once I’ve completed my newsletter I email it out to my database. Then I simply post a tweet with a link to the Real Estate Agent Newsletter up onto Twitter for my Twitter followers to read. And then within seconds, that same tweet automatically appears as an update on my Facebook profile, Facebook Fan Pages, plus it also appears on my other profiles like LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Plaxo, etc.

On top of that, I also have a Twitter feed appearing on my websites which means that if someone is visiting my site then they can also read my tweets & potentially read the newsletter too.

Should Agents Have More Than One Twitter Account?

You may have noticed that the Twitter feed for this site appears on the right hand side about half way down the site & features updates from Twitter.com/GenYRealEstate & not my personal Twitter account.

Twitter also allows you to have multiple accounts & I’ve created a separate Twitter account specifically for this site.

The reason I’ve done this is because the GenYre site has been set up for multiple contributors & the contributors will also have access to update the GenYRealEstate Twitter account which enables them to share tweets that they feel may be helpful to the Genyre = energy readers & followers.

(Real Estate Agents could easily do a similar thing by having a personal twitter account for each staff member  & a company twitter account that each of their staff could tweet interesting real estate related content to.)

Since the Real Estate Agent Newsletter provides helpful tips for real estate agents which is good information for GenYre = energy readers & followers, I also send out a Tweet linked to each week’s newsletter via the Twitter.com/GenYRealEstate account simultaneously.

If you think this sounds a bit hard to do or really time consuming, check this out…

Now that I have this set up, all I have to do is write an article, email it to my database & tweet a link to the newsletter and within seconds I have shared my newsletter out to thousands & thousands of people amongst lots of different networks over the internet.

When I think back to what I had to do years ago to get thousands of people to read one of my articles & the expense involved, I have to say that spreading a message doesn’t get much easier or any cheaper than this.

Plus, there’s also an extra added bonus.

Because my articles now sit up on the web forever, people also come across them via Google, Bing, Yahoo and other Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon & Delicious, etc.  People will often quote from my articles & link across to them from their own articles too.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can create a similar marketing strategy within your agency and how it all works, you may want to come along and catch up at one of the Social Media for Real Estate Seminars.

Here’s something else that works really well…

Before I go, there’s one more thing that I do with Twitter that I’ve found works really well & could work well for real estate agents too.

In a previous post I shared a YouTube video I did about The Password To Help You Achieve Your Goals & whilst it’s really easy to create & upload a video onto YouTube, the hardest part is getting a large number of people to watch it.

So, what I do is, anytime someone follows me on Twitter they automatically receive an email from me saying,

” Thanks for following me. Here’s a quick video tip I made that may help you to achieve your goals http://tr.im/lQg1 “

I set this automated email response up from my Twitter account about 4 – 5 months ago & before doing this I’d only had about 20 people who’d watched the video in the previous 2 months. Now the videos had over 650 views & I haven’t touched it since setting this automated response up.

So much of my marketing happens automatically for me now.

Note:  http://Tr.im is a URL shortening service that makes it easier to link to a website within the 140 characters available on Twitter & the links are trackable.

As of today I’ve had 339 people click open the link directly from the automated emails sent to my new followers. I don’t know where the rest of the other 300 views have come from. They could be from the previous blog post or from people simply watching videos directly on YouTube.  I’ve done the video once & the rest just happens.

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In this week’s figures directly from Facebook, it appears that there are now 6,025,120 people in Australia on Facebook & the stats show that there is a larger percentage of the Australian population on Facebook (27.6%) compared to the US (26.1%) with 79,986,100 users.  Source: Facebook Advertising Creator 1st Oct 2009 & Neilsen Global

And in Nielsen’s March 2009 report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint, their research showed that “time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing at over 3x the rate of overall Internet growth & the total amount of time spent on Facebook increased by 566%.”

Yet with such overwhelming statistics, it’s surprising to see that there are still a lot of real estate companies that don’t appear to be embracing Social Media at all.

If you’re not currently part of the conversation on Social Media you may think that ignorance is bliss, but it’s not.

With over ¼ of the US & Australian population now using Facebook, then I’m sorry to say that by ignoring it, agents are missing out on an opportunity to engage personally with an enormous part of their market.

For example, I recently did an internet marketing campaign that was sent out exclusively via both email & Social Media and the results were quite staggering.

43.4% of the traffic came from Social Media sites like Twitter & Facebook and the remaining 56.6% came via email.

Whilst email is probably the only thing that hasn’t changed very much over the past 10 years, there are now much better ways that you can re-purpose the same email marketing message & leverage it out to a much larger audience.

And in a recent experiment conducted by Nielsen, “it actually appears that Social Media use makes people consume email more, not less.”

If you’re still not convinced about embracing Social Media, then check out this incredible insight from Socialnomics.

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