Big money bloggers overseas who have been doing it for many years are making tons of cash by treating their blogs like a real business. By comparison in Hong Kong, too many bloggers are simply blogging very casually and many newcomers to internet marketing have been sucked up by temptation to try making quick money posting videos on Youtube. It is not like Youtube does not work in terms of making advertising money from Google. It is more that the money opportunities in blogging are still right in front of you, but you do not care enough to grab it.

All serious businesses have cost, and there may be expensive overheads. Hosting your invaluable email list is one of the expenses but is far more important than what you would have imagined in the beginning. Having a email list does not only mean you can send promotional messages to your contacts. It enables you to utilize Sendinblue automation with email marketing campaigns.

A mistake of the internet marketers who are into online business and/or blogging is that they would try very hard to save money. They would hosting all the emails of their contacts on some free software which have too many limitation for them to properly set up and roll out their effective email marketing campaigns. The initial hope was that by saving this money, they would quickly get their business into positive return on investment.

The marketers could have simply stored all their contact list in a database table that sits in their web server. The risk is certainly at the web host. When there is a security breach, they would have leaked all the contact list information including their prospects’ name, email address, contact number, company, job title, etc, i.e. They are the sensitive information that should have been well protected in the first place.

Both storage methods (i.e. web server or some email software) do not make one important thing easy. i.e. Email automation. One such simple email automation is just an auto-reply. When someone on your blog subscribes to your newsletter or one of your product offers, your email program should immediately be triggered to send this person an auto-reply email. This is the first step to retain an active reader or prospect.

The more sophisticated follow-up would be to set up an entire automated email marketing campaign based on the behaviour of the prospects. One such example is when the prospect receives your email, opens your email, and clicks on one of the embedded links in your email, the priority of this person should be increased automatically in your email program. Later when you are preparing the next email campaign that is similar to this first one, this same prospect should be the first one in your next mailing list.