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Setting up an Email List with MailChimp

What Was I thinking?

All the gurus out there in the Internet marketing world such as Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income talk endlessly about email lists and how, even though email is kind of going out of style in favor of other forms of social media, it’s still huge.

I think it’s maybe because it’s something that gets delivered directly to your audience instead of them going out to find the content and also because people often take email more seriously than they do other forms of media.

Anyway, I didn’t have a list until a couple of months ago. Shockingly. I didn’t even do the simplest of things like keeping track of everybody who had emailed me through my blogs over the years. And I totally regret it.

Like it would have been so awesome to have a list of even a couple hundred people to message and let them know about the first book that I wrote, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams.

Better Late Than Never

It certainly is better late then never to start something that you’ve been neglecting. So thanks to the encouragement of two friends, I’ve started my email list with MailChimp. I’m happy to report that I’m almost at my 100th member, and I have a slow and steady sign-up of around 2-3 people/day, mostly thanks to this other site of mine: ESL Speaking.

Monthly Newsletter=Fail

The way that MailChimp works is that you can have a certain number of free sends for lists up to a certain size, so I started that way by offering a monthly newsletter. But, the results were not fabulous and almost nobody signed up. I just wasn’t offering something amazing that people wanted.

ESL Speaking Activities and Games= Success

My friend and I were brainstorming about what I could offer for free and he mentioned ESL games and activities. I thought about this long-forgotten book that I had never gotten around to publishing: ESL games and activities. I decided to give it away for free in a series of automated emails.

To set up the automated series requires a paid membership at MailChimp, but it’s reasonably priced at $0.02-$0.03/send. The huge advantage that automated lists have over something like a monthly newsletter, is that it happens automatically and that’s what passive income lovers are all about. The second advantage is that you can build a relationship over time with your subscribers.

If you’re interested in 40 free ESL speaking activities and games delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here. Or, even if you’re not, sign-up and check out how it works:



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