4.Watch out for 'bugs'

Sometimes software can fail for no apparent reason. Your server might be experiencing a database issue, your site might be temporarily unreachable or your autoresponder script may be malfunctioning.

It's always a good idea to do periodic tests by subscribing to your own list to check that everything still runs smoothly.

Ultimately, conversion comes down to offering prospects enough benefits to make joining your list an obvious choice. Your copy should get them excited, motivated and curious. Make it as clear as possible that you are offering them valuable information for free.

If your copy is too much of a sales pitch and short on benefits, visitor will have a hard time finding a compelling reason to subscribe. People are wary of hype these days and too much focus on "buy my product!" mindset raises a lot of suspicion. Most prospects see that and immediately think "this site will spam me with a bunch of offers I don't want", and quickly click off page.

Treat your opt-in page as an honest invitation to start a mutually beneficial relationship, and you'll see your conversion rates soar.

That's what your email newsletter can do for you. It's your kung fu chain punches. They just keep coming until you win!

Now I want to be sure to specify here that we're not talking spam - we're talking permission marketing. We're talking about emailing to people who've subscribed to your newsletter from your web site.

Good self-defense is simple. There's no time to try to do complex, memorized sequences of dozens of movements! You just need a couple simple things that really work when chips are down and that are pretty hard to screw up.

In WingTsun Kung Fu that I teach, chain punching fills bill. You learn it pretty much day one, then you do about a thousand a day for next 40 or 60 years! Of course it will work, you know it as well as you know how to walk!

We're going to do same thing with email. Here are concepts and simple steps of Kung Fu Email Marketing:

1. The primary job of your web site is to get a visitor to give you their email address and permission to email them. You need to prominently feature your subscription mechanism. The mechanism can be as simple as an email link, a form they can submit, a popup/popunder/popover, or whatever. Just get email address. And be sure to tell them what you will do with it - you will send them your newsletter, ezine, occasional special offers, or whatever. It doesn't hurt to tell them in plain English that you're not going to sell their email address to a bunch of spammers either. And be sure to keep that promise! Since people are getting pretty protective of their email addresses, it may also be a great idea to give them a good reason to subscribe. Maybe you can give them a free ebook or report, or a free trial of your service.

2. You want your email newsletter to earn your subscribers' trust and respect, turn subscribers into customers, and customers into repeat business. You need to send your newsletter regularly forever, earning trust and respect old-fashioned way, and never letting your subscribers down. You can do this manually, but I recommend instead doing at least most of it with a sequential autoresponder. There are a number of good ones out there, and you can either go with one hosted on someone else's servers or you can run a script on yours.

That's it, you've now taken your first lesson in Kung Fu Email Marketing! What, did you think it would be hard or something? C'mon, this is just Internet marketing, not Kung Fu fighting!