You’ve got an email newsletter and you’re gathering email addresses from folks that want to hear from you. But that’s not enough.
While you have the attention of these people, make a pitch for more information.
More specifically, ask them for their instant messenger name, so you can send them special updates, deals, news or whatever.
You’ll notice that people have IM accounts from a variety of places, such as old school ICQ, IRC, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
But you don’t want to have open chat programs for all of those different types of IM clients. So get yourself a copy of Trillian.
There is a free version, as well as a paid Pro version, which runs $25. I’d suggest the paid option, as it has more bells and whistles.
So after you’ve gathered IM names for all of these people that want to hear from you, and you’ve got Trillian, what you do is set up all of these IM subscribers in a group. So when you have something to say, you can blast it to all of them instantaneously.