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The first point you must remember is that email marketing is just a tool – not a new concept of doing business like Web 2.0 but a time-tested, hardened method for generating profits. In other words, email marketing is just like any other online business tool – affiliate programs, pay-per-click advertising, sales letters, minisites – one of many assets at your disposal. What makes email marketing so interesting (and important) is its focus on building a positive relationship with your customers. From a marketing perspective, email marketing is simply an online extension of the traditional marketing principle of acquiring “prospects” by taking their contact information and then sending them promotional information via email.

Think product catalogs, magazine subscriptions (advertising within a magazine is the “promotional material”) and newspapers (classifieds) – all of these involve the same two steps:
* Acquiring the prospect’s contact information (either by offering a freebie or a discount, or just by asking).
* Send regular promotional offers to the “list” – a collection of prospects whose contact information you have.

This is ridiculously simple. There are many more levels and much more depth to the subject (and we will be covering all of it today and in the next two lessons), but this is the essence of it. The issue that immediately comes out of this is: What motivation does the prospect have, first for providing their contact details, and second, for buying any products that are pitched to her? None at all.

Consider a social parallel – if you go up to a complete stranger and ask them to give you their name and email address (or worse, their home address as well) so that you can send them emails about what to buy, your chances of success are going to be very, very slim. Instead, you have to give the prospect a reason to hand over her email address. More so to tell you her name. And an even better reason for the permission to send her any sort of product or service promotions. In other words, you have to use the principles of “Permission Marketing” (a term popularized by Seth Godin) – provide the prospect with a valuable enough proposition for her to consider giving you the permission to “market” to her i.e. sell to her. All of this leads to the first principle of email marketing: Before anything else, give the subscriber something that she respects and values.

Creating Value.
Everyone has problems. Everyone is looking for answers to these problems. Marketing – effective marketing – is positioning your product as THE solution to a particular problem. Combine this with the first principle of email marketing, and you have situation where your first task is to create value for the prospect. In some cases, the “promise” and “proof” of a solution can be enough (like a sales letter). In other cases, you might want to try providing a rudimentary solution in the form of providing some information, and build that value over time by continuously giving more and more to your prospects (like an email newsletter).

Email marketing is all about providing useful information to your subscribers. First, you encourage them to give you their email addresses by promising a solution to their problems (for example, a short report on the real estate market if you are targeting investors). In turn, this translates into permission given by the subscriber to allow you to send them further information via email. The central core of this whole process is valuable, relevant information. Information that the subscriber is interested in. Information that the subscriber needs. Now many marketers make a hash out of providing valuable information and instead concentrate on “selling” to the list. Do NOT make that mistake. You first priority is to develop a bond of trust with your subscribers – this will only happen if you learn to give first and foremost.

Building Trust.
Once you’ve learned how to give, you’re ready to build your “list” by using any one or more of a number of lead generation techniques, all of which involve driving traffic to a special “landing page” where you make your “information pitch” (as opposed to a sales pitch) and request the prospect’s name and email address. But building your list isn’t the only thing you must do. Almost simultaneously, from the moment you have convinced someone to hand over their email address, you are on the road of building a positive relationship with your list. A relationship that is based on trust, where trust can include the following:
* Your subscribers consider you an expert in your field (and therefore someone they are inclined to believe and listen to).
* Your subscribers implicitly trust you to treat them fairly – this results from a commitment to give first, and sell later. In other words, invest time and effort in your list, and make it show.
* Your subscribers expect quality from you, and by extension, they consider any products or services you promote as valuable.

This trust is paramount in email marketing. If you can gain the trust of your subscribers, they will respond to your product offers (provided that you are selling something valuable and not just trash) and, eventually, make you rich. The money really is in the list. In the third lesson of this series where I discuss advanced email marketing strategies, I’ll cover in detail how you can follow simple steps to ensure that your subscribers trust you, and also a checklist of things that can break that trust (i.e. a NOT to do checklist).

Repeat Customers.
The greatest value in email marketing is that of repeat customers. In other words, through email marketing you can basically send product promotions to your list regularly and continue making money out of the same core list of subscribers. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated in that, but this principle of acquiring repeat customers is enlightening because it showcases an important fact about business: You can market different products to the same group of people. If you position it right over a period of time, you will have a situation where a certain group of people are buying new products from you every few months. Now this works, but only if you are able to identify your “target market” and are creating products and services that are the answers to the types of problems your subscribers need solutions to. Failing to do that will result in unhappy subscribers and a cold list – a list full of subscribers that are not interested in your emails, don’t want to buy what you are selling and are generally ignoring your emails.

Building a list you can contact again and again for continuing profits needs a lot of effort to build and maintain. A large part of creating repeat customers in email marketing is to maintain a long-term relationship with your list – this involves regularly providing information that is useful to your subscribers. When following email marketing, do not forget that other rules of marketing still apply – if you don’t give your customer what they want, they won’t hang around your website (or in this case, on your list) anymore.

Unless your small business is situated under a rock, you’ve probably heard something about email marketing by now, and you may have even wondered if it’s time for your small business to get into it.

In its simplest terms, email marketing means communicating with consumers through email. But there’s a big difference between trying to talk to consumers who never asked to be talked to in the first place, and talking to your own customers, who at some point have said, “Yes, I’d love to hear from you.”

That’s where permission email marketing comes in. Permission email marketing means giving valuable information to consumers who have requested to receive it. It is the ONLY legitimate way to send an email marketing campaign, and it is the only way your small business can benefit from email marketing.

But how do you get your customers to say “I do”?

If you have an online business, or if your offline business has a website that receives many visitors, compiling subscribers can be as easy as adding a subscription box to your website. You would offer users something valuable, like a periodical newsletter or emails with discount coupons and, in return, your users would subscribe to your mailing list.

Sounds great. But what if your business is primarily offline, and what if you don’t even have a website?

Many businesses think that’s reason enough to step out of email marketing altogether. But what they’re missing here is that compiling a permission email marketing list offline can be as easy, if not easier in some instances, as building a list online.

We have advised many clients on tips to collect email addresses at the point of purchase. Here are some of our favorite tactics:

- Collect business cards, Offer a prize.

This is one of the oldest, most proven methods of collecting customer information in-store. Your prize doesn’t even have to be huge. If you own a restaurant, it can be as simple as a free dinner for two. If you own a hair dresser, it can be as easy a 50% off coupon towards their next cut. The beauty here is that customers who submit their business cards have expressed genuine interest in your products or services. So when you contact them by email with further offers, you know you’re talking to people who want to buy what you’re selling.

The one thing to keep in mind here is that you MUST inform users that by submitting their business cards, they are agreeing to receive email communication from you. This can be as simple as adding a sign to the business card drop-off box saying: “We will send you an email to notify you if you have won. We may also send you periodical emails with special offers and announcements. If you do not wish to receive emails from us, please write ‘No Email’ on your business card.”

- Start a V.I.P. Club

Many consumers like the idea of belonging to something exclusive, and receiving offers that are extended only to a select group of people. The labor on your part is minimal. It’s as easy as keeping a notebook by the cashier. As a customer comes up to complete a purchase, casually tell them about your businesses’ V.I.P. Club and ask them if they would like to join. Customers will appreciate this if you position it as a rewards club, or a way to say “Thank you, we love to have you around” to your most loyal customers. Of course, you should offer V.I.P. Club membership to any of your consumers, as you may find, once you start emailing them offers, that’s a great way to build your most loyal customers. Make sure the offers you send them are, in fact, exclusive, and that you email V.I.P. Club members often enough, but not too often to become annoying (once or twice a month is usually a good interval).

Again, when you’re collecting customer emails for the V.I.P. Club, make sure your customers know they’re signing up to receive email offers from you.

***

These are just some ideas to get your permission email marketing subscriber list started. The best news here is that compiling a list is actually the toughest part of managing an email marketing campaign. As long as you’re using an email marketing manager program that’s specifically designed for small businesses like yours, the rest of the process is a breeze.

Creating a campaign involves little more than selecting a professionally-designed template, typing text and choosing a few good images. Your campaigns will be scheduled and sent automatically, so you’ll never have to worry about being involved in that part.

What you will get to do (and this is probably the most exciting and most rewarding part of email marketing), is analyze your campaign after it’s been sent. You’ll be able to see how many people opened your email message, how many people clicked on each link within the message and, best of all, exactly who did what. Now that’s what we call accurate, detailed, and immediate consumer research (you actually get to track your consumers’ actions from the exact moment they happen). And while you would previously pay a fortune just to get this research data, today your small business can send professional email marketing campaigns and track detailed consumer behavior for less than it would cost you to print store flyers.

It’s the new age of marketing, and there’s never been a better time for your offline small business to get into the game.

The internet is very dynamic, and in order to succeed, you need to be well informed and up to date with the various techniques of marketing on the internet.

Indeed, marketing on the internet has changed considerably over the past few years. Nowadays, methods for promoting products or services on the internet require an increasing selection of multimedia features and capabilities, much different and advanced from days past. For details visit to: www.outsource-beginners.com .So what are the techniques and you must consider incorporating into your internet marketing efforts in order to increase traffic to your website and boost your sales.

• Provide & share expert tips and ideas. Successful internet marketers share various tips and secrets their email lists, or online customers on a regular basis. Some internet marketers offer daily “tips’ send through an auto responder. These days, having a trusting and confident relationship with your clients and potential customers is very essential. This boosts your sales and increases your internet marketing business profits.

• Publishing e-Books, A very popular approach for generating profits and revenue to publish and promote e-book on the topic related to your business. You can give these out for free with links to your website. On the other hand, the internet is now the major source of information. So you can write and publish e-books on any topic. You can sell these online and earn a lot of money.

• Educational activities , One of the single most important ways to increase your personal knowledge and expertise with any given topic is to get involved somehow with teaching this topic to others. Once developed, separate the materials into small sections for delivery and distribution. There are a number of ways to distribute the materials out to your potential clients. Direct mailings over a period of time, or many successful marketers set the individual segments up into an email marketing auto responder program that sends the messages out to a predetermined list of clients and customers over a prearranged rate. For more information visit to: www.tube-pros-espects.com .Distributing this information gives you the perfect opportunity to include small “snippets” of promotion for yourself or various products or services which you sale or promote. You will be amazed at how effective this particular technique is.

• Link Exchange Directories, although not everyone thinks of it, you must sponsor a directory website with open invitations for others to include links, banners and promotional advertisements back to their sites. Beyond including your banners, links, and advertisements sprinkled throughout the page; you gain the added benefit of having reciprocal links exchanged with others in the process. Developing, marketing, and selling of materials utilizing internet marketing ideas and techniques can be fun and profitable. Finding new, creative, and innovative methods for growing your internet marketing business requires some effort. Because the internet is very dynamic, you must always be well informed about the tools for promoting your internet marketing business.

You must be flexible and keen to explore possibilities and new techniques for your internet marketing business. Have fun trying different promotional strategies for your internet marketing business to see what works best for you and your products.

To build and run the success profitable blogs for earning extra money on the internet, you must know how to do it properly. You will discover basic great tips to build your own blogs, get your blogs seen on the internet and become an outstanding among competitors on the internet. You will learn how to build, run and grow your blogs, as your marketing channel, in this article.

Generally, blogs are also known as web logs. Those blogs are the fastest growing technology on the internet. With there being so many blogs on the internet right now, how do you make your blogs known and get people to read it. How do you have the most often read blog on the niche market that you are promoting? My experiences show that there are many people who are trying to all accomplish the same thing. The big issue is how you can become an outstanding among those people.

There are several things that you can do to make your blog online marketing a success, and I am going to cover some of them in this article. I am going to share you 8 basic great tips to build your own successful blogs.

1. The first thing that you should know is that you should have your blog URL pointing to your niche market. For example, if you are trying to promote and sell sunglasses from your blog, you want your URL to say www.sunglasses.blogurl.com. Doing so will give you an extra advantage.

The free blog platform is rarely in my home based internet marketing business. Personally, I believe that the reliability will realize on your blog platform as well. Many people use the free blog platforms for their home based internet marketing business, which I don’t recommend you to use them.

2. The next step you should do in your blog online marketing is to customize your own blog. Rather than having the same old blog interface like everyone else has, make your unique and interesting to look at. There are so many types of blog software on the market that having your own look should not be that difficult to accomplish.

3. Obviously it appears that the keyword research is another very important element of your blog online marketing. If you are not using the keywords on which people search, then no one is going to find your blogs. I recommend you to have variety of niche keywords in your blog. It should not just the same one over and over. Not everyone just uses the term ‘sunglasses’ when they are searching for shades to keep the sun out of their eyes. Remember, the effective keyword research is an important factor to drive more traffic to your blogs.

4. In general, using SEO on your blog, which stands for search engine optimization, is a great idea as well. SEO will help get your blog out there and read, and will also help you get a better ranking with Google. Being as high as you can be in the Google search engine results is something that you want.

5. Exchanging the link among other blogs is a great approach to grow your blog’s popularity. Find other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. This will help you out a lot as well, especially if you can get some good exchanges with high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your link exchange, the better for your blog.

6. Many internet entrepreneurs do not realize this, but having a different title tag in the HTML code on each page makes a big difference. If you have given the first page on your blog the title of ‘sunglasses’, you need to be sure that none of your other pages are named this. Doing so will make Google think that you are spamming that keyword, and that will result in them punishing your blog URL.

7. When you have done your own keyword research, you will want to write content based on the research you have done. Using one or two keywords, make entries into your blog using the keywords will make it easy for your blog to be indexed under those terms. That will also result in people searching on those particular terms able to find your blog.

8. At last, pinging your blog frequently is another great way to have your blog seen. Every time that you update it, use the ping tools to ping it. This will let all of the blog directories know that you have added something new to your blog. This also brings you in some more traffic.

Final thoughts, I strongly believe that blog online marketing is pretty much the same as website marketing. However, if you have never had a website and are not familiar with marketing, the above great tips will help you get started. Be sure that you put new entries into your blog on a regular basis as well. This will help keep you up to date and current and also will keep your readers coming back for more.

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