You know how sometimes you come across a website that’s offering a freebie you want, but they ask for your email address, so you change your mind? Mailinator is a wonderful tool for those situations.

Anytime you need a throwaway email address that you’re only going to use once, Mailinator can provide one. That saves you from having to opt in to a list, when you just want to get the free download.

It’s very easy to use. Go to mailinator.com. You can make up any email address you want, but I just use a random one. On the left side below “Can’t think up an address,” they’ll have a link to a random address. Right now it says jrcvdgesgazwa@mailinator.com. Click that link and it takes you to the inbox for jrcvdgesgazwa@mailinator.com. The account is automatically created, and you don’t need to sign up for anything.

Now, when you want to download a free report and you need to give them an email address, you just give them jrcvdgesgazwa@mailinator.com. Then when you refresh the Mailinator page, you’ll see you have an email with a link to your free report. Meanwhile, your real email address remains free of spam. jrcvdgesgazwa@mailinator.com might get spam, but it doesn’t matter because you’ll never use that address again.

But you only need this when dealing with a potential spammer!

Mailinator is very useful when you don’t know who you’re dealing with, and you don’t know what they’ll use your email address for. But there are plenty of legitimate email lists out there that don’t spam you. They may offer a free report as a sweetener, but the list itself delivers value, not just sales pitches.

I tend to trust real people a lot more than faceless companies. If you know a person, and they’re offering a free ebook, in exchange for your email address, and they tell you what they’re going to email you, that’s probably fine. I’d be likely to opt in, if I know this person and I like their work.

Many people with legitimate mailing lists use AWeber, which has a very strict anti-spam policy and guarantees that you can opt out at any time. I’m never afraid to give my real email address to AWeber, and that’s what I use for my own newsletter. Besides, AWeber is smart enough to know about Mailinator, so they won’t let you use mailinator.com addresses.

To see if a mailing list is run through AWeber, just click the submit button without entering your name or email address. You’ll get an error of course, but you can see if it’s an AWeber error. If so, you can click the back button and enter your info. I’m sure there are other services with strict anti-spam policies, but I don’t know who they are.

Mailinator will set you free! Go forth and download free reports with reckless abandon!

If you’re reading this post directly on my blog (as opposed to in your email or in your RSS reader), you should have seen a pop-up announcing my email newsletter. You’ll see that pop-up only once, at least in theory (if it ever pops up again, the Escape key will close it), but you can always find the newsletter sign-up on my contact page.

Many of you receive my blog posts via email, but my newsletter is completely separate from that. My newsletter is for the group of super cool people who want to be part of my inner circle.

I’ve been on a number of different email newsletters, and I’ve seen firsthand what annoys me as a subscriber. So before I had a newsletter of my own, I wanted to come up with a better way of doing it. I definitely didn’t want to piss people off with my emails. (Though I did break one of my own rules with the subject of this post!)

Everyone says that all internet marketers need to have a newsletter. But I kept putting it off, because I hadn’t really seen a good role model among the lists I was on. The emails were just one sales pitch after another, or there were way too many emails, or they just weren’t interesting.

But I recently got some inspiration from a couple of good email lists.

Naomi Dunford and her discounts

When Naomi at IttyBiz released SEO School, she wrote a post about it that included a discount code meant for her regular readers. Later, when she released it to the general public, a bunch of people who don’t even read her blog just did a Google search for “SEO School discount code.” People who didn’t know who she was got the discount that was only meant for her fans!

To fix this the next time around, she started an email list. The idea was that whenever she came out with a new product, she’d tell her fans about it first, and let them buy it at a discount. That’s it. No regular emails, just discounts.

I thought this was a good idea because it gave a clear incentive to subscribe, and no one could honestly think they were being spammed (free money, duh). But I wasn’t sure that just doing discount emails would work for me.

If someone joined my list, and then I didn’t email them for a long time, they might wonder “Where the heck are my emails?” And then when I finally came out with a product six months down the road and sent an email, people might have forgotten about me by then. And then they’d wonder, “Who are you, and how did you get my email address? I don’t remember signing up for anything!” Still, this idea had potential for me.

Michael Martine keeping it short and sweet

My other inspiration came from Michael Martine at Remarkablogger. First he had Remarkablogger the blog, then he came out with his Remarkanotes newsletter. (Next he’ll probably come out with his Remarkaclothing line, or the Remarkafragrance for men.)

Michael sends out emails about once a week, so his subscribers don’t forget about him. But his emails are really short and interesting, so it’s more like getting emails from a friend than reading big long dissertations. His list is great for people who want a little something extra, but are short on time.

My newsletter for super cool people

I decided to combine these concepts in my own newsletter.

If you want to be in my inner circle, just sign up below. When I release a new product, you’ll be told ahead of time, and you’ll get a chance to buy it at a discount. (This also helps if you want to be an affiliate, so you can have a head start on writing a review.) I have a new ebook that will be announced to my newsletter subscribers soon, hopefully within a week, so this would be a good time to join my newsletter.

Aside from the discounts, you also get an email whenever I come across something motivational, interesting, helpful, etc. For example, the videos about Nick Vujicic and The Tea-Loving Caterpillars.

I sometimes write long blog posts, but my newsletter emails will be short. And they’ll be infrequent too, probably somewhere between once a month and once a week. Many of us who spend a few hours a day reading blogs sometimes forget that some people don’t want to spend much time on the internet.

And of course, your email won’t be used for any other purpose, you can unsubscribe at any time, and all that good stuff. So, if you want discounts and cool stuff, sign up for my newsletter!

(The form below might not work from your email or RSS reader, so you’ll have to sign up directly on the page. And you can always sign up on my contact page.)

Yaro Starak has just released a new video about a concept he calls Conversion Blogging. It’s basically what you get when you start by building a good blog, and then add an email list.

It’s no secret that most bloggers have a very hard time making money from their blogs, even if they can get decent traffic to them. Conversion blogging is Yaro’s idea of how to make a full time income without working yourself to death trying to generate page views. This concept has worked very well for himself and many of his students. And while I don’t have an email list of my own, I’m starting to warm up to the idea because of Yaro.

About a fourth of my subscribers are subscribed to my blog via email. This means that every time I publish a new post, they receive an email containing the content of the post. This is a lot more efficient than having to come to my blog every day to check if I’ve posted something new.

But the problem is that it becomes overwhelming when you start subscribing to more and more blogs. Email is a somewhat intrusive medium. It’s easier to ignore than a phone call, but it’s still kind of “in your face.” People are obsessed with checking their email many times a day, and they stress over keeping their inboxes clean.

So at some point, many blog readers will stop subscribing to blogs via email, and will start subscribing via RSS instead. This is a big step up from email subscriptions, because it keeps all your blogs in one place, and you only have to check your blog feeds when you want to read them (no cluttered inbox).

But from the point of view of the blogger, what’s the downside of having people subscribe via RSS? Your posts no longer stand out. They’re lost in a sea of posts from other blogs. When people get around to reading their blogs, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to read every single post. It’s bad enough that they might not see the posts you’ve worked so hard on, but also, they might not see the product launches and affiliate promotions that you depend on for your blogging income.

But consider this. Let’s say you have a blog that gets traffic through commenting on other blogs, StumbleUpon, and so forth. And you create engaging and entertaining content for your readers, so they keep coming back for more. And then in addition to your blog, you also have an email list where people can sign up for more specialized information on a particular subtopic, and they can get a free report or video for signing up.

Not all, but some of your blog readers will sign up for your email list. They’ll receive emails that are not just repeats of the blog posts, but original valuable content. They’re more likely to read an email than a blog post, and they pay more attention (after all, the emails are addressed to them by name). They look forward to the emails even more than the blog posts. And so, when some of these emails are promoting a product, they’re much more likely to buy it. That’s what conversion blogging is all about.

I don’t have an email list and I don’t think I’m close to creating one. I don’t even have any idea what the topic would be. But it’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while, and if I continue to learn about conversion blogging, I’ll have the knowledge ready if and when I get an idea for an email list.

You can watch the Conversion Blogging video for free, and you don’t even have to opt in to anything. It’s 33 minutes and I really like the presentation. You see Yaro talking up in one corner while the rest of the video is showing his computer screen.

After you watch that video, you’re invited to watch a brand new video version of Yaro’s hugely popular Blog Profits Blueprint, which has now been downloaded over 40,000 times. It’s 55 minutes and free, but you have to opt in to his mailing list to see the video. But because it’s done with AWeber, you know you can always unsubscribe with no problems.

How many of you have mailing lists, and what has your experience been?