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It was once in style to claim that mailing lists no longer worked. The opposite seems to be true now: on every forum, marketers and business owners proclaim the power of using an opt-in form and a newsletter to make sales from follow-ups. I personally suggest this method, as it has been proven time and time again to produce higher conversion rates than attempts at direct sales.

With that being said, it is important to determine the best way in which you can create such a mini e-course to use for your given products. I personally suggest one of two ways.

Regardless of which you pick, you will want to start with a market research phase. Your goal here is to determine what it is exactly that potential readers would be looking for in an e-course. If you already have a site that receives traffic on this given topic or niche, you will want to setup a poll or send out surveys to your customer base. If not, you will have to conduct keyword research to determine what people are looking for most.

Once you have selected 5-7 topics for your e-course (depending on the length you want your course to be), you will then want to determine if you should create the course yourself. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the topic and do not feel comfortable with the quality of your own writing, you will want to hire a ghostwriter to complete the e-course for you. You can do this by soliciting a skilled professional on http://www.elance.com or http://www.guru.com. Clearly describe what you want in the course and which sources you would like them to use for reference information. This will help you to determine whether or not they are borrowing material directly from sources; it will also ensure that you get exactly what you are looking for.

Now, if you want to create your own e-course, you can simply research the information on the given topic, break it up into 5-7 articles; and then write those articles yourself. Once you have completed those steps, all you will have left to do is load the course into your autoresponder, setup an opt-in form, and then begin driving traffic to it.

When creating the course, there are a number of important things to keep in mind. Perhaps most important of all, you will want to determine how you are going to monetize your e-course and whether or not that method will be effective.

I personally suggest that you choose from one of these forms of monetization: 1) put the actual course on your site, send out links to it in emails, and put Adsense ads in and around the course; 2) sell advertising space in the course; 3) scatter affiliate links throughout the course in appropriate places; or 3) sell nothing throughout the entire course; at the end of the course, attempt to upsell the reader with some special offer.

Regardless of how much experience you have writing or working with autoresponders, you can create an e-course on any subject; and, in doing so, you can drastically increase your conversion rates.