Prior to writing, designing and sending out an email blast for the first time, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. 

1. One of the most important steps is deciding who it's going to be sent to. Ideally, you should be sending this to everyone you've done business with in the past, including current customers and those who've previously contacted you for info. Keeping an email list of your customers and contacts is going to become a vital part of a successful email campaign. If you aren't doing this already, begin doing so immediately. If your business is new and you haven't compiled many contacts, ask new customers for their email addresses and keep them in a database. Every single contact is a possible sale regardless if it's today or two years from now, and a quality mailing list is priceless.

2. Choose a service. You can't use your personal or business email to send out an html email to 300 people - it just doesn't work that way.  You're going to have to choose a bulk emailing service which will allow you to properly format, test and send your email blast without worrying about bandwidth problems or other technical issues.  These services also allow you to monitor your results so you can see who opened your email versus who didn't, who clicked through and visited your webstie, and who unsubscribed. Most of these services are simple to use and relatively inexpensive, usually less than $20 a month. Two of the best and most widely used email marketing services are Constant Contact and Vertical Response. Choose the one that best suits the needs of your business.

3. Don't rush! Plan out what you envision to accomplish for this first email blast, and don't expect huge profits. If you don't take the time to correctly plan, the final product will show it. Remember, all it takes is a single click for someone to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. Sending out low quality material will ultimately lead to low quality results. Take your time, think creatively and put together a good strategy. Pretend that the recipients have paid you to subscribe to your newsletter and offer them the best material you are capable of. Plan to share information that people will truly find useful and strive to give the reader more than they expect.

After you have taken this all into consideration, you should move on to the content of the email itself. This is where articles, offers, images, and everything else comes in. The next article will give some examples of how a newsletter should be setup and what it should contain to keep a readers attention. It will also cover methods to get traffic to your website and how to use offers to increase your contact list.

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