What Are You Putting Off Doing Today that Could Significantly Improve Your Blog Tomorrow (And Beyond)?

Do you put off doing things on your blog that you know you really should invest time into?

I do.

Yesterday I was out walking and found myself thinking about my “I’ll do it one day” list. It struck me that there were a lot of things on that list, and that while some of them were just fanciful ideas, there are also items on the list that I know are potential profits that I’m just not earning.

One point on the list was updating the autoresponder sequence on my photography blog.

I’ve talked in the past about how I’ve structured my email strategy on my photography blog. It looks something like this:

For a full description of what all the elements are, have a look at this post. In short, people get weekly manually edited emails containing updates from the blog, along with a mix of bonus content (themed updates) and “promotions.”

The promotions are a mix of promotions of our own ebooks (discounted) as well as promotions of other people’s photography resources (affiliate promotions).

The weekly updates are all done manually but the “themed updates” and “promotions” are all done via an autoresponder. The autoresponder simply sends out these emails at predetermined intervals (around every 30 days). This means you’re doing mini-promotions every day, which creates long-term sustained income.

In many ways, when you add a promotional email into the sequence, you’re setting up a small passive income stream for as long as people keep subscribing to your newsletter.

The problem is that while I do have a number of these promotional emails in my sequence, I could have more. In fact, after you’ve been subscribed to my list for around 10 months the autoresponder sequence stops and you just get the weekly updates. Right now, more than 300,000 people have gone past that ten-month subscription duration—that’s a lot of people who I could be promoting quality products to.

So last night I decided to bite the bullet and create more emails for the autoresponder.

I added the first one last night—an affiliate promotion—and it’s already started to go out. All up the email probably took me a maximum of two hours to write and set up in Aweber.

The email will go out tonight to most of the people on the list on my list who’ve been long-term subscribers. It’ll then slow, to mail to just a few hundred people per day. As a result, we’ll see a nice big spike in sales tonight, and then it should slow down to a few sales per day.

Update (24 hours later)

The bulk of the list has now received the email, and we’ve had a good sales spike totalling around $14,000. Based upon open rates and sales generated, I estimate that, since long-term subscribers now have the email, this autoresponder should now generate around $50-$70 per day in income.

That’s not a massive amount when you think about it on a daily basis, but over a year it ads up to more than $18,000. Over the next five years, it’ll go past the six-figure mark—not bad for a single email, and a couple of hours’ work.

Key points

So the main points of this post are:

Firstly, I wanted to highlight a strategy that lets those who have email lists generate a longer term income stream from those lists. Keep in mind, we have hundreds of thousands of people on our list, so the amounts we’re talking about here might mot be achievable on smaller lists. However, the strategy will be the same. A simple email you write today that goes out on a daily basis to a segment of your list can generate daily or weekly sales for you over the long haul. And that’s income that you don’t need to do much work for after setting up the initial email.
The second reason for this post is to motivate those of you who, like me, like to put things in the “one day” basket. I could have created yesterday’s email 12 months ago. In that time I could have created 12 more of them that could already have been mailing to my list. Instead of an extra $50-$70 per day of income, those emails could have been generating 12 times that much for me by now.

So what are you putting off doing today that could be leading to a significant, long-term improvement to your blog and business?

Over the next two weeks, I’ll suggest something new each day that you could invest some time into, to generate this kind of long-term payoff (not all of them are financial payoffs). In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’ve been putting off that you’re determined to get done now.

Articles in this series: