Posted by Admin on January 24th, 2007 — Posted in Internet Marketing
by Jeremy Harrison
In order to get the results you want from email advertising, you need to have a list of people who have opted in to receive your promotions.
Here are five tips to quickly build a large email list, which will be the core of your email advertising efforts:
- DO… Tap into your existing customer base. This is the most important group for you to include. They already know about your company, and are likely to come back again if you give them a good reason. They are also likely to easily to give their email addresses as a loyal customer.
You can build this email list by collecting email addresses from your customers when they come and purchase your product or service. If they need a little encouragement, try a monthly drawing for a free gift if they drop their name and email addresses in a drawing. Or, simply tell them about the exclusive benefits of being on the email list, such as the monthly specials.
- DO… Use coupons and other irresistible offers on your website. When people arrive at your website, they shouldn’t want to leave without joining your email list. You can make this happen by offering coupons or other valuable incentive to people who visit your website. We can help build irresistible signup pages that will maximize the number of people who sign up for your email list.
- DO… Buy a mailing list and send a traditional postcard. There are list brokers out there who sell lists of prospects for you to do mailings. You should never buy a list of email addresses, because that is spamming, even if the list broker tells you otherwise. However, you CAN buy a mailing list and send a postcard or letter inviting them to visit your website. Then, by offering an incentive, you can get more people to signup for your email list.
- DO NOT… abuse your email list. The key to growing your list for email advertising is to keep your subscribers happy. Otherwise, you will lose subscribers as quickly as you gain them. You must clearly tell people what they’ll get with their subscription, and then keep your word. If you tell them you’ll send a weekly update with coupons, be sure you don’t send updates daily. The best bet is to write a privacy policy that tells your customer exactly how you will use and how you won’t use their information and email addresses, and then include that privacy policy wherever you invite people to sign up for your email list.
- DO NOT… buy or sell email lists. If you’re looking for a quick way to lose your credibility, start sending unsolicited e-mail. Even if a list broker has email lists for sale (as some do) never buy or rent them. There’s nothing wrong with buying a mailing list for postal mail. However, if you send unsolicited e-mail you will quickly get the reputation as a spammer. Do not sell your email list to others either.
This article contributed by Spire Advertising & Web Design–Leveraging powerful results for small business leaders.
About the AuthorJeremy Harrison is the founder of Spire Advertising & Web Design.
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Posted by Admin on December 28th, 2006 — Posted in Internet Marketing
By Paul Hooper – Kelly
There are only three ways you can attract traffic to your web site. All three have their merits, but one method stands head and shoulders above the rest. so are you using the right one?
The three ways to getting traffic to your web site are:
- Buy it.
- Steal it.
- Attract it.
There are no other ways of doing it, so let’s look at the pros and cons for each.
BUY IT. This generally means advertising with contextual advertising, such as Google AdWords, but can also be paid advertising on web sites and in ezines.
The advantages are:
- You can be up and running very quickly.
- With the right keywords, you can be sure your ad is in front of a targeted audience.
The disadvantages are:
- You pay for clicks, even if they never convert to sales.
- The expense can rapidly eat into your profits.
- Short lived effect, which requires constant replenishment of advertising budget to keep up the momentum.
- Considerable skill required to balance good keywords against cost, keep within your budget and make sure you convert enough customers to give a profit after advertising and other costs.
- Low conversion rates compared with other methods.
- You pay for clicks by people who might just be tire kickers — not targeted, qualified leads.
- You can be at the mercy of a “Google slap”, if they disapprove of your ad, keyword or landing page.
- No enhancement of your search engine rankings.
STEAL TRAFFIC. This generally means doing a joint venture with the owner of a subscriber list.
The Advantages are:
- Once it’s set up, you can get some great results very quickly, provided you have a JV partner with a good, relevant and responsive list.
- Provided you have chosen your JV partner carefully, their list should provide targeted, qualified names.
- The introductory nature of the marketing implies trust in you and your product, which makes the conversion rate higher than paid advertising.
- There is no up-front money risk, as you only pay for actual sales.
The disadvantages are:
- It can be very time consuming and disheatening to set up a deal, because the top people with the best lists are inundated with JV offers and likely won’t even reply. And the ones that do reply are likely to be those with poor quality or small lists.
- In order to interest the jv partner, you have to offer them at least 50% of your sale price.
- Short lived effect and then you have to start over and set up another deal with another partner.
- No enhancement of your search engine rankings.
ATTRACT TRAFFIC. This involves posting original articles, either written by you or your tame ghost writer, on various sites throughout the internet.
The Advantages are:
- The effects can be almost immediate.
- It can cost from zero (if you write it) to just a few dollars (if ghost written) for an article you can post on up to 100 web sites.
- It’s viral, because there are thousands of web sites and ezine publishers, hungry for content, who may pick up your article and post it on their site, giving you further free exposure and also their implied approval.
- Your article (and your resource box) act as a full page advertisements for you and your web site, yet are totally free.
- Long lasting effect, which can run for a year or more.
- Accumulative. Posting articles on a regular basis will have a snowball effect, constantly increasing traffic levels.
- As a published author, you will be perceived as an expert on the subject. This builds trust and trust pays off in increased response rates.
- Visitors arrive at your web site already knowing something about you and respond accordingly with the highest conversion ratios of all three methods. Some experts put this as high as 7-10 times better than paid advertising. In my own personal experience, it’s around 3.5 times better.
- With the increased emphasis now on web site content, more and more web sites are eager to post your articles.
- Each article can give you a valuable one way link from up to 100 sites where your articles are posted. This will greatly enhance your search engine rankings for no extra effort.
- Your name becomes your “brand”. And if you think that branding doesn’t matter, look at what branding has done for Donald Trump. Because the Trump brand is so famous, the name “Trump” linked to a real estate development will generate faster, higher value sales, even without Mr T’s direct involvement. He just gets a nice royalty for the use of his brand name and all for no extra effort!
The Disadvantage is:
- It takes some time, but not as long — or as frustrating — as tweaking your ads to get a lower bid price or tweaking your website to get a better search engine position.
If I had to distill the many advantages of article marketing into just three outstanding factors, I would say:
- The very low or zero cost.
- The massive response created, when the article is framed correctly.
- The highly responsive nature of the traffic, because people respond better when they know and trust the person they are dealing with and articles engender far more trust than paid advertising and even more trust than joint ventures.
Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise article marketing stands out as the clear winner and is the favored method used by some of the biggest names on the internet, including Yanik Silver, Jim Edwards, Steven Pierce, Kevin Bidwell, Michael Cheney and little old me! I’ve added my own tweaks to this tried and tested method, drawn from my forty year marketing career. You can find out more about this amazing method by grabbing the first few chapters of my new book, detailed below.
Copyright Paul Hooper-Kelly and www. InternetMarketingMagician.com
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