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Archive for the ‘Advertising and Marketing’ Category

With the economy so bad and the numbers of people unemployed or underemployed it seems everyone wants to know how to make money online marketing. There are thousands of websites and products out there that claim to know the answer and you can pry it loose from them if you allow them into your wallet.

The information you find online falls into a couple of categories:

1.) There is free internet marketing information and paid information.

2.) There is out of date make money online advice and current advice.

3.) There are honest products and strategies for online success and there are scams.

If you are willing to work hard enough and dig deep enough, you can possibly find out most of what you need for free. But that can take a long time and most people do not possess the skills to do all of that research.

For me, the key to make money online marketing is to find a successful online community that provides you with all of the training, tools and support that you need to get started and make your first money online.

The key is the complete package integration. Without spending a ton of money on one product, or bunches of money on little products and tools, you likely will flounder around feeling like you are missing the one key ingredient to online success.

That feeling makes you an easy mark for product vendors touting the next big thing in internet marketing. And while those products are not always scams, they almost always are not the magic bullet you are looking for.

So why do most people who try to make money online marketing fail?

I think the biggest reason people fail when they try internet marketing is that they are hoping it is an easy, get rich quick scheme where they can cash in on a never ending money stream with little to no work.

They are lazy.

When you tell them what they need to do, they find every reason in the world to not do it.

To succeed in this business you need to have a blueprint to follow, like that which is provided in any one of many great internet marketing communities that run on a paid membership basis.

Then you simply need to keep doing what you are told to do. Do it longer than the ones who fail and drop out, asking questions of the experts in your club who are usually more than willing to help, and checking off one task at a time.

Do you have what it takes to make money online marketing or will you just be a permanent information seeker?

I point you straight to the complete set of training, tools and support that will get you the online success you are looking for. Come over to http://Learn-To-Make-Money.com right now and get started.

A good and effective business blog marketing strategy involves more than creating a blog and hiring a blogger to maintain it. There is more to it than meets the eye. Similar to other traditional forms of marketing, with blog marketing you will need to promote the blog so your target audience will be reached and they will learn about the blog and your business as well. After all the goal of every business blog is put an online face or presence for the business either for the company in general or specifically for its products and services.

There are a few things every internet marketer should know when he is considering to enter into business blog marketing.

1. Patience is a virtue.
Just because you can quickly put up a blog it does not mean that it will equally be fast to garner a sizable audience. It is not true here that when you build it, people will just come to read it. Be patient because it does take time to spread the word about your blog.

2. Create valuable content.
What good is a blog if all that can be read on it are useless information? Create content that people will find very interesting that not only will they read it, but they will also tell their friends about it.

3. Post regularly.
Do not just post once a month, because you will surely lose your audience if you only put posts once in while. Posts regularly so people will find it a routine to visit your blog and expect something worthwhile to read there.

When someone uses the word ‘advertising’ immediately you think ‘expense’. Managed correctly, however, it doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are some strategies for small business owners looking for ways to advertise/market without going over-budget.

Likely the most important advertising tip for small businesses is: be “web-centric”!
This means that your website is the mainstay of your marketing plan, and the purpose of almost every other form of marketing is to drive people to your website. If you do an ad in the paper, the focus point is your web address; if you do a billboard or radio spot, the whole purpose is to get individuals to go to your website.

The reason this is the most cost effective strategy is because changing the content on your website is very fast and inexpensive, while changing printed materials is time consuming and costly. By making the purpose of all your other marketing and advertising simply just to get people to your website, those other printed materials never go obsolete, since your web address is yours as long as you want.

Make the focus of your website the extraction of contact information.
Many small businesses think that the point of their website is the get people to buy right now. Rather, the purpose of a website is to collect as many email addresses and phone numbers with permission, in order to follow-up on prospective sales. By collecting this contact information you have produced a potential client list that you can send production information to and not have to worry about whether or not they visit your site again.

How do you get people to offer you up their contact info? As contact information is valuable, offer something of value in exchange for their information. For instance, if you own a rental company, or a retail outlet, offer a coupon for 15% off their next store purchase. Do what it takes to get the contact info of your web visitors. Doing so greatly increases the likelihood that they will become customers some day.

Make certain to follow up with intension.
One area small businesses infamously fail in is the area of following up on potential customer leads/contacts. That is simply leaving money on the table- money that is rightfully yours! On top of that, seeing as your competitors are likely failing in the same area, being careful when dealing with follow-ups will place you ahead of your competition and attract clientele.

Create an immediate mailing that will be directed to visitors who fill out an online form with contact info. Develop a well-thought-out autoresponder series to keep in touch with them for several weeks or months, dependent on the nature of your business. If you are fortunate to have gotten their phone number, be sure to call with a special offer. The bottom line is to make them happy for giving you their contact info. If someone asks a question, especially online, make it a priority to get the answer to them as soon as possible. Again, your care of their concerns will set you apart from your rivals and gain you clients.

What is email marketing?

Basically, in plain English, email marketing is a targeted mass mailing done via email. The purpose of email marketing could be advertising in order to recruit new clients, introducing a new set of products or services to an existing client base, keeping your clients informed by means of a newsletter, etc. All of the before mentioned activities are very legitimate business efforts, as long as you respect some unwritten rules and as long as the list of emails you use is what is called ‘targeted’, in other words the names came from a database generated by your marketing division and represents your existing client base, a carefully selected list of potential prospects or a list of people who opted in to receive your messages.

If instead of the above you use a list that you bought (you know, “25 million guaranteed AOL email addresses for only 19.95 – plus shipping”), or are doing it without warning the people on your list, or using other shady methods, then you are considered a spammer and what you are sending is spam, bulk mail, unsolicited email, basically, the main enemy of all things virtue and life in general. Yes folks, it is that easy to be labeled as a spammer, and very hard to get out of it.
Once your message is considered unsolicited, you will immediately be put on zillions of black lists, side by side with those who promise inches and inches of extra extremities and hours and hours of ecstatic pleasures (for only 3 easy payments and some handling fees).

Sound pretty risky, so why bother?

Obviously, opt-in email advertising is far more cost effective than direct marketing via regular mail, door-to-door sales, or telemarketing. Paper, printing, envelopes, and postage can add up quickly. Door to door sales require paying out commissions. Telemarketing results in high long distance bills, often without great results, as people become more and more blood thirsty toward the people on the other end of the so called cold call.

So why not just use my personal email or my company’s mail server and some mailing software?

In the early days of email marketing. They would gather all their emails into some primitive version of a spreadsheet, fire up some mail merging program, hook it up to their corporate mail system and voila, thousands of emails were flying away.

Today, the scenario is certainly possible, but let me tell you in a simple set of scenarios what can happen:

One of the many not-for-profit groups that decided to police the internet will intercept that a large number of emails were generated and sent by a server near you (yep, they can do that). In order to protect the civilized world from those who spread spam, viruses and other vermin, they will put you on a list of threats to humanity. Those other nice corporate folks who were your indented recipients, have an IT department that gets constantly yelled at by angry users who get emails with naked people. Well – Mel, their IT guy decides to put up an anti-spam system that links to that not-for-profit’s database of known spammers (oh yeah, did I mention you are now a ‘known spammer’?) and block your emails. Your emails might actually be blocked so well that your company will have a real trouble communicating via email and your IT folks will all go nuts and/or get fired.

Basically, not so good. Other things that can happen are: you’ll have to build some opt-in / opt-out system, in some states there are laws that require that you make it very easy for your audience to unsubscribe, you’ll have a hard time formatting your emails in a decent, eye pleasing way, etc.

Lastly, the process of sending thousands of emails and managing lists, subscribing and unsubscribing people is tedious and just plain annoying. The only way to do it is with a maximum degree of automation, or, the better solution – to outsource to a company that does it professionally.

Folks, I am known for promoting the “do it in house” concept, and am not that big on outsourcing. But when it comes to mass mailing… I say stay away from it and let the professionals do what they do.

If you are worried about cost, know that the fee you pay for email marketing services, will still cost less than the continued overhead and expenses of the traditional options, not to mention the great possibilities of reaching a much larger audience, much faster (practically instantly).

What to look for in an email marketing company?

1. Automating Your Subscribe and Unsubscribe Requests

Many email marketing companies will provide you with exact HTML code you need to paste to your site to have a subscription form on your web site. The better services also provide a link at the bottom of each email that enables subscribers to update their information or unsubscribe from a list, automating everything for you.

2. Personalization of Emails

Another powerful feature of many email marketing services is the ability to use mail merge capabilities to personalize each email that you send. The better services allow to have custom fields, additional to the standard first name and last name.

3. Bounceback email handling

Bouncebacks are emails that are sent to email accounts that no longer exist or are full, blocked, etc. Essentially, you’ll get a response stating that your message did not make it. All email list management software programs are able to manage subscribe and unsubscribe requests and send out messages, however without integrated bounceback email handling all the non-deliverable emails will be sent back to you, a rather big nuisance if your list is large. Ideally, the email software you use will be able to manage your bouncebacks for you. Whenever a bounceback is received, the software makes a note of the address and if another bounceback is received the email address will be sent to a list of dead addresses.

This remove capability is extremely important since if you continuously send out emails with many bouncebacks you may be blacklisted as a spammer. This is something you really want to avoid at all cost.

4. HTML email

The ability to send out HTML emails has been around for quite some time. Most email marketing companies support the ability to send out messages that include graphics and formatted text. This is surely something you’ll want to look for.

However, not all of your users have the ability to view email messages in HTML format. This percentage is usually between 10-20%. Instead of seeing your aesthetically pleasing email they might see a string of meaningless code. Using most email list management programs, these 10-20% of users will open up emails from you and be very inclined to call you a spammer.

To avoid this, look for companies that use multi-part MIME to send out messages. When you send an HTML email in multi-part MIME, users who do not have the ability to view HTML messages will receive the email in the usual text format.