I’m about to do something really radical with the WSW Power Investor subscription service. I’m planning on closing the doors for new subscribers to it this Thursday – June 19th. I’ve told a few other people in the financial newsletter industry about my plan and they think it’s crazy, but my whole goal is to separate my website from the stock market newsletter business.

I don’t like the way my industry works. Maybe you don’t either? Maybe you are sick of people pushing stock picks on you that don’t go up and trying to constantly hype you up to pay for their services – services that are often run by people who don’t even own the stocks they talk about. So many people are right now telling everyone to buy into this market that is obviously in a bear market. They don’t care if the people lose their money, they just want them to pay for their products and they are willing to tell them anything to get them to buy. We both saw this happen in 2000 and I think we are seeing it all over again. I don’t want to be associated with this industry so I need to do things differently.

I got to explain to you my business so you can see where I am going. Twenty years ago my website would have been a financial newsletter that you get in the mail. Today financial print newsletters are on the Internet and most sites like mine use the marketing techniques that print financial newsletters used to use. I learned about these techniques several years ago and adopted them for a period of time. But I now see a way to provide you with something totally different than anyone else and ten times more valuable for my subscribers and potential customers like you.

I got into the financial writing arena back in 1999. Back then we were in a raging bull market. Every night I would look through the charts and identify about a dozen or so stocks that I thought would breakout the next day. I put them out on a free email list. That email list grew to about 12,000 people.

I ran it for a year and then decided to charge $50 a month for it. About 600 people signed up. I ran it this way for several years. We had a little chat room a lot of the people congregated in. But it was really geared to short-term trading. Overtime my trading style changed into more intermediate-term positions. Since then I moved away from short-term daytrading and the service has evolved as a result. At this time I knew nothing about marketing on the Internet or how to get new subscribers. I really did no marketing at all, but didn’t really care as I was doing good in the market.

As a result due to simple natural attrition every month a few people would unsubscribe. By 2003 or so I had about 300 people still subscribing. I realized I would need to market the site in order to keep it profitable.

I did a careful study of the top financial newsletter sites. I looked at people who had 50,000 subscribers or more. They were all using the same methods and almost all of them had a history before the Internet of being a print mail newsletter. I was able to get my hand on transcripts of industry speeches in which some of the people running these newsletters revealed their techniques.

I subscribed to their newsletters and had no respect for what they gave their customers. But they knew how to sell. One of them started out writing a newsletter selling information about buying vitamins and he is now on TV all of the time as a stock market expert. His newsletter is crap, but he’s got 40-60,000 subscribers. My thinking was that I could use their techniques to build my business and provide my customers with good information that they don’t.

In the mail order world they sent 10 page sales letters out to potential customers on mailing lists. About 1% would subscribe. It was a pure numbers game. They took that numbers game to the Internet. And there that meant building and email list and sending out sales messages in the emails, which consisted mainly of telling people that their stocks picks were going up and they had to subscribe right now or they would miss the boat.

I looked at their emails carefully. And for a six month period I applied their method. When I was doing this gold was in a huge bull rally and my subscribers and I were participating in it. We were buying gold stocks and making a killing. Every week I’d send out an email on the free list that you are getting now saying gold was going up and you had to get in so subscribe right now before it goes up more.

I got to about 1,500 more subscribers in a year doing this.

But I saw problems with this technique. For one thing you were in a sense churning the email list. People who didn’t sign up got sick of getting emails telling them to sign up while those who did often did it without much thought – they just did so emotionally due to the hype. As a result you didn’t start out with a solid relationship with them and a lot of these people weren’t savvy enough to take advantage of the service. I rather have a smaller number of subscribers who can use the information and make money then have many people who aren’t really suited for the stock market subscribe.

But this is how everyone does it on the Internet to get people to sign up to a service. No one really sees this as a problem. They just see a numbers game. You can get so many people to sign up to an email list and so many of those people will become paying subscribers. If people leave the numbers game will replace them. You’ll make money. Who cares. Some of them don’t seem to even care about the content they actually sell.

This is what I don’t like about the industry and I think it makes it sleazy. I think you are probably sick of this stuff too.

I didn’t like this type of hype. At some point I stopped sending out emails like this. I had a good income from the site built up. A good subscriber base, I was making money in the hedge fund I was co-managing, and my own investments – I didn’t need to grow like that. I felt there was a better way to do things, but didn’t know what it was so just thought one day I would figure that out. Once that gold run stopped my emails advertising stock picks ended too. I still have them, but don’t hammer people about them to get them to sign up. I rather send people good information, because that attracts customers who can take advantage of it and make money, because they can see the value in it.

When you get down to it everyone in this Internet financial newsletter business is simply taking the techniques of mail order marketing and using them on the Internet. And they are doing so with success. The numbers game works.

But the Internet is so much more powerful than that. You have podcasts, videos, and email. There are so many ways to communicate with people and that means that I can set things up where I can actually help you on an individual basis. It doesn’t have to be a one person message like it is if I send someone a book in the mail or a newsletter.

On the Internet people can see you too just like they see someone on TV. I can put up a video, podcast, email – whatever the medium – and you can respond directly to me and ask questions. Few people in this financial newsletter world do that! But I do that on a daily basis now with the WSW Power Investor premium service. I just don’t communicate that with potential customers like you.

A few months ago I put together a “Stock Market Mastery” course for the website. It currently consists of ten lessons and when people sign up they get sent to them. I put it together and thought when I put it up it would be a work in progress. There were parts of it that need to be strengthened. You know how it is anytime you put something together like that you think it can be better.

Well the feedback I got from it was better than I expected. People really like it. It has helped lots of people. And those that sign up to the website end up sending me dozens of questions about trading and investing.

It’s like they sign up and now they have someone that can really help them.

And that’s when it hit me. Instead of a numbers game where you blast out messages to as many people as you can with hype you can just focus on a few people and truly help them. Instead of trying to hype up thousands of people to sign up for stock picks like everyone else does, I can create customers for life by providing more value than anyone else.

That means more value in the free emails you get and more value in the pay service.

However to do this with the pay service I need to do two things – control the growth of the service so that a huge influx of new subscribers doesn’t harm the community(a big part of the pay site is the community blogs and forums the members and I use to communicate with each other) and set it up so that when someone does sign up they can get as close as possible to one on one help that I can provide as they go through the course.

The only way I see to accomplish this is by closing the site down to new members most of the year and just allowing people once or twice a year in small time windows to sign up as new subscribers. This way I can get a group of people to sign up all at once and in their first month or so of being members I can help you with the Stock Market Mastery course and how to use the concepts to make money if you sign up. I can’t just keep it open all year long, because I can’t answer the amount of questions new people ask nonstop when they begin. It works better if I have my time organized to go along with influxes of new members so I can give the attention to them they need.

I’m going to close access to the website in a week in order to create this. I plan on reopening it in the Fall. Probably in October or November.

Besides taking a vacation or two, between now and then I’m also going to revamp the stock market course and then create some sort of coaching program to go along with it. I’m not sure what it is going to be, but I’m going to come up with something that works.

Then when I reopen the site I’m only going to let a small number of people in at a time. Let them go through the course and then with a limited number of people I can do a coaching program with them as they go through the course.

They’ll then be well trained to use my market commentary , stock picks, and to be useful members of the community we have built on it. They’ll find more value in the service than anything else they can find on the Internet when it comes to the stock market.

Now there are market training and study courses you can buy now. Many of them will cost you over $1,000. People charge big bucks for seminars and that sort of thing. But for the people selling these things these are one shot deals. You buy the course and are gone.

Because I’m looking to build long-term subscribers by providing them with real value I don’t need to charge such high prices. I’ll probably raise the prices some, but nothing crazy when I open the site back up in the Fall. An additional $100 maybe or perhaps double the current price. But I’ll be looking to limit the number of people who sign up then too. I’m not sure to how many as I have to figure out how to put together a coaching program. But anyone who signs up now will be locked in at the current rates as long as they continue their subscription, so they won't be effected by any future price increases.

I also don’t want to charge so much that people who want to sign up just for my market commentary and stock picks won’t feel blocked out. All of that is still going to be the real core of the site. This is all just a plan for building more value and stronger relationships with customers when they join up – something I don’t think these big time financial marketers think about at all with their numbers games.

So this is my vision for the future. For the service itself it isn’t that big of a change. It just means that I’m going to edit the course I put up and create some sort of coaching program for new subscribers. But for the way you may sign up in the future it is going to be a radical departure. To get a coaching program to work I’m going to have to sign up groups of subscribers in limited time periods. I’ll have to close the site and reopen it at times for new subscribers . How many at a time I’m not sure right now, that is something I’ll have to discover.

This is a radical idea and is what one of the newsletter guys I was talking to said was crazy. But I think it’s going to work. I just think he didn’t grasp it. The power of the Internet is that it lets you build real relationships with people. And that’s how to build a customer for life beyond some guy getting a newsletter in the mail. I want to provide the most value to you in this free email and in the WSW Power Investor service and believe that this is the best way that I can do it.

The first step in this process though will be closing the door to new subscribers this Thursday – June the 19th. Once we eventually reopen the rates will be higher. So I am going to keep it open for a few more days to insure that anyone who wants to get in now before the prices go up can do so – and will be locked in at the current rates for the duration of their members. You can sign up now by clicking the link below:

Sign up for a 30-day risk-free trial to WSW Power Investor - Click here

If you have any questions or thoughts about this just let me know. Just go to the contact form right here.