Are the Newsletters You’re Subscribed to Bringing You Down?

Most of us working at home end up subscribed to a lot of newsletters. It’s a result of wanting and needing a lot of information, and hoping to get it from one source or another. Many times, we subscribe to a list to get a free download that sounds like the information will be useful, but it never actually gets used. Then we’re on a newsletter list and receiving email after email offering products promising success.

Reading about all these supposed methods to bring success can be a problem. It’s not just that too many people spend money on product after product, hoping that one will bring success. It’s that all these sales pitches sound like everyone is succeeding while we’re still struggling. It gets frustrating.

The Simple Solution

My simple solution is to avoid reading about all these products and the people claiming grand success. Unsubscribe from any newsletter that isn’t giving you information that is helping you to build your online business.

Many newsletters are little more than regular sales pitches for one product after another. They’re about making money for the list owner, not so much about helping you build your business. If the products they offer are good quality and relevant to your needs, great, stick with it, but if it’s promotion, promotion, promotion with little relevance to you and little free information, why are you staying on that list?

It takes just a little time to unsubscribe from each list, but if you’ve subscribed to more than you can manage to read, that little bit can add up fast. It’s worth the time. Your inbox will fill much more slowly, and you’ll better be able to find the emails you actually want to read.

You may feel that they aren’t doing any harm by filling your inbox, but they’re a distraction. At the very least, you’re having to skim the titles and/or senders to figure out if there’s anything you need to open each day. At the worst, you’re opening every one and being distracted by the offers, and tempted away from whatever you’re working on now.

You don’t need to be in on every new product launch. Sure, you’ll miss some business building and marketing ideas, but there’s only so much information you can use at one time. If you need more information, look for it when you need it. Pay for information too long before you will use it, and some of the details are likely to change, and the information will be out of date at least in part. That’s how online business goes.

Just think. Fewer shiny new ideas to pull you away from something you’re trying to make work. It’s not a bad thought at all.

If you just can’t stand to unsubscribe to a newsletter because you think you’ll want to be on the list later, you have a couple of options. The first is to make a filter that will remove the emails from your main inbox and set them aside. You can read them at your leisure when you need the information, or do a mass delete more easily.

The other is to bookmark the subscription page and then unsubscribe. You can add yourself to the list when you’re more interested in what the newsletter has to offer.

I gave my inbox a major cleaning about two months ago, and I’ve been loving it. The inbox gets very little now. Most emails are sorted into folders for a quick scan as appropriate for the topic. Just a few go straight into the inbox, and they’re more relevant. It’s so much easier to find the emails I’m after with all the clutter removed.