I was on the telephone last night to a client advising them about the best way for them to go about setting up a business project they were considering.

During the conversation we got on to discussing my email bulletins that I send out regularly to my clients.

As I am quite new to list building, there has been a lot of trial and error, with some pretty big disasters. About four weeks ago my first disaster happened. I had made an innocent change on my WordPress blog to allow my RSS feed to have up to 100 blog posts available to clients. I had previously only had 10. What I didn’t know was that because I had automated my Aweber account to automatically send out an email bulletin to my email list whenever there were three new posts, that Aweber would then send out 100 of my most recent blog posts to all on my email list.  This ended up being something like 35 emails in one hit!

Well, you can imagine my dismay!  I quickly sent out an apology email and offered a free music track from my shop as a softener.  Suffice to say, I lost five off my email list through that one mini disaster.

Now I’m sharing that with you so you can understand my journey…this incident rocked my confidence somewhat and I was starting to think is it really worthwhile doing this because I didn’t have much of an idea what to say to people.  All I knew is you add an email capture form to your site, then you do a host of follow-up emails.  But even as I was sitting down to work out what I wanted to include in the follow-up emails I was thinking about all those emails I get from people about stuff that’s not really interesting to me and I guess I was projecting both these negative attitudes onto the whole process.  Result – I was seriously considering abandoning the whole thing.

But then last night as I was talking with one of my clients and we started to discuss list-building my client told me that my emails had been keeping her business vision alive!  That they were full of interesting new ideas and encouraged her to keep going.

Long story short:  You just never know how what you are doing is affecting another human being and just because you don’t see a monetary return in the short term, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t have value!

So I would encourage anyone in business to build an email list and to send out your regular bulletin full of great information.  You don’t know who you will be inspiring and if someone is on that list who is not meant to be there, then they will soon unsubscribe if they are not happy.

One person that’s keen is far more valuable to you than 10 who are not!