I was over by Jim Edwards blog this morning watching a new video he’s posted - actually, as a sidenote, I have a couple of his products and they have been very instructive to me.

It’s Jim who really drove home a system for writing articles to generate traffic and profit. It was also Jim who inspired me to work on minicourses and to create www.minicourse.info which is a directory for listing minicourses. The directory is still a work in progress - feel free to add your minicourse / ecourse.

In this blog entry though… Jim spends some time on a couple of points that I don’t hear emphasized enough. This is my paraphrase with embellishment:

• Make sure that the minicourse delivers content that people really, really want to know. Something novel and very useful - saying the same thing that everybody else is saying won’t make them think you have anything special to offer.
• Don’t send daily messages in your minicourse. Too many messages and people will complain. Do the immediate message on sign up with substantial content and then space the others out well.
• The primary goal of the minicourse is probably going to be to get people on your newsletter (ezine) so you have to deliver heavily upfront so the minicourse subscriber loves it and jumps at the chance to be on the newsletter.
• Again… Don’t waste the subscriber’s time. Prove that you can deliver.

So to summarize - to get lots of people on your email list (newletter / ezine) set up a minicourse with valuable content and prove to your minicourse subscriber that getting more information from you by means of a newsletter would be the smart thing to do.

Sounds simple huh? But from my experience as a subscriber and a publisher, it’s not always practised. Guess I should go fix some of my ecourses.