If this is your case, you may want to consider one of these e-zine alternatives. These can still help you achieve your goal of establishing credibility, staying in touch with your prospects, and capturing your Web site visitors.

For first two alternatives, you'll need an e-mail autoresponder. This is like a fax-on-demand system that sends out e-mails automatically when others request them. (I recommend QueenCart.com, which has a FREE 30-day trial.)

The great thing about autoresponders is that you can set timing of a series ahead of time. For example, you can schedule message 1 to go out immediately once a person signs up for list. Message 2 could follow two weeks later. Message 3 would follow two weeks after that. Get idea?

ALTERNATIVE 1: THE "EVERGREEN" NEWSLETTER

If you don't foresee yourself writing fresh new content every week or month that you publish, why not make your newsletter "evergreen?"

This means that you write all your content ahead of time, and none of it can be time-sensitive. That is, it should be just as relevant today as it would be a year from now.

Evergreen e-zines are brilliant and easy to do. Here's how it works: Suppose you want to publish a short tip every week. That means you'd need 52 tips for a year's worth of content. Once you had these written, you'd just set them up on your autoresponder and tell it when you want them sent out. (For this example, it would be day 1, day 7, day 14, etc. -- each reader would get a message every week.)

It's important to realize that when you use a sequential autoresponder, these are sent as a SERIES. That means everyone who signs up goes through series in order, no matter when they sign up. For example, let's say you publish a weekly tip like in example above. If I sign up today, I start with tip #1. And in 10 weeks, I'll be on tip #10. But if Suzy Q signs up 10 weeks from today, she starts with tip #1 just like I did. Get it?

After some thought, I realized way we are holding these parties is wrong. In a previous article we talked about stepping out of wahm zone, and searching for your specific customers. When looking for guests for your online party, it should be no different. Instead of mass submitting party invites to wahm groups, let's take a step back and see what should be done FIRST.

1. BUILD a newsletter Before you have your next party or even start to plan it, set up a newsletter. This is something you should have already for your business, no matter if it's an informational newsletter or one that lists your specials - you NEED a list of potential customers. If you haven't started to build one, start now! I could go into detail as to HOW, but newsletters are an entirely different subject of their own.