SiteProNews

Everybody knows they should be building a list of targeted, responsive subscribers, right? Well, if you didn’t, now you do.

But the fact is, building a list is harder than it used to be. Competition is high, and it seems like everyone is fighting for your subscriber’s attention. What this means is less people will join your list, less people will open your emails, less people will read your email and less people will ACT on your offers. All told, this means less money in your pocket from your email marketing efforts!

This problem hasn’t gone unnoticed. Over the years smart marketers have been offering free reports, free ebooks, videos or other ethical “bribes”. But in my opinion, there is no better method for building a targeted, responsive list than eCourses.

An eCourse is simply a series of emails sent to the subscriber with the goal of teaching them something of value. It is the REASON why a visitor to your site gives you their name and email address. They sign up because they want to learn something you are teaching.

Here are the 4 reasons I believe eCourses are best:

Ecourses Build A Highly Targeted List. This is not, “Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you a bunch of emails about anything under the sun”. There is a very specific reason for the eCourse. It is going to teach something about ONE topic. So, when someone subscribes for your eCourse, it is because they are interested in this topic and want to learn more from you.

This targeted list is a huge asset to your online business. You know EXACTLY what the subscriber is interested in. Therefore, you can design your lessons (and offers) to fulfill exactly what they want.

Ecourses Have A Higher Open Rate. Remember, there are other people competing for the attention of your subscriber. After getting people to sign up for your ecourse, getting them to open your email is the second big obstacle you must face. But, since they signed up for your eCourse, they WANT the information you are providing. Therefore, they are waiting for your email lessons. When they receive one, they are much more likely to open it!

More People Will Read Your Ecourse Lessons. Again, your subscribers asked for this information. They want to learn from you. They changed from someone looking for information to someone asking YOU for information. You bet they are going to read your lessons! While other emails go unopened and unread, yours is anxiously awaited and read.

Ecourse Convert Better, Making You More Money. Let’s not fool ourselves, you want to help people, but you also want to make money at the same time. This is why ecourses are perfect. Since your lessons are getting opened and getting read… you get a much higher percentage of people who ACT in response to your lessons. And when they ACT, either by buying your product or buying an affiliate product, you make money. A higher conversion rate means more profits for you!

So, if you want to build a targeted list people who are anxiously awaiting your emails, open them when they arrive, read them from top to bottom and ACT on your offer… eCourses are the way to go. And the great thing is, once you have one of these list building, profit generating courses in place, it runs on autopilot. So, you have plenty of time to create another profitable eCourse!

What’s your first ecourse going to be about?

Edward Lomax is the author of Autopilot Ecourse Cash which teaches you how to create remote control profit streams that work to make you money around the clock. To take one of his free ecourses, visit Big Wealth University.

Tags: Advertising, ecourse, targeted lists

Before discussing the use of social bookmarking as a business tool, we should first have a quick look at the phenomenon and discuss why it has become so popular. By understanding that, then it will become easier to understand potential business uses. The uses outlined here are just that: outlines, since the particular applications to which these sites can be put will be specific to your type of online business.

The original intention of social bookmarking is to enable you to store websites and pages that you have found and want to refer to later, and also to refer them to others that you think might benefit from them or just enjoy visiting them. You can bookmark any type of web content from articles to blogs to videos, and to start doing so you have first to register with one or more social bookmarking sites.

Among the more popular of such services are Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Blink, Furl and StumbleUpon. They are easy to join, and having done so all you have to do to make a bookmark is simply to add a button or chicklet linking to the specific social bookmarking site, and click on it. The URL of the page you are viewing will be added to your bookmarks and you can categorize it by means of tags. Tags are no more than the keywords that you feel best describe the page you are viewing. You can use just the one tag or a number of them.

All of your bookmarks within each site are accessible by clicking on one of the tags in your “tag cloud”, which is basically a list of tags, although it is possible to categorize them in order to make it easier to find bookmarks on specific topics.

So how can you use social bookmarking as a business tool? For a start it is a way to increase the visibility of your blogs, websites and even your affiliate programs, and increased visibility leads to more visitors. Social bookmarking sites can provide you with back-links that will improve your Google PageRank: this in turn can improve your search engine results position. Because they are free you have nothing to lose by using these sites in this way, unless you overdo it and are regarded as a spammer.

Here are the steps needed to use bookmarking sites effectively for your business while avoiding the spamming trap.

Let’s assume that you have registered with a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, and are ready to go. The same steps here will apply to the others, and like most other aspects of an online business, best results will be obtained by using as many social bookmarking sites as you can find. Repetition brings best results.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: social bookmarking, Web 2.0

This article is about a client — Fiona Raven. When we started about working on her site about three and a half years ago, we got her to #1 in Google out of about 9 million — for the search ‘book designer’. Since then, we have all gone through several Google updates. Page returns have gone well above 100,000,000 and dropped again; currently they are at 65 million. And through it all, she has sat at #1 with the occasional drop to 2 or 3.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been asked how this works. The essential answer is: do the basics and do them REALLY well.
FIRST, THE INITIAL SITUATION
Usually for a website, one would want to optimize around keyphrases that:
- Have as many searches happening as possible

- With as little competition is possible

- Are as closely focussed on what the company offers as possible.

- Are as close to a possible buying decision as we can get (e. g. black video iPod rather than iPod).
We research all this and try to balance the four factors to go for the best phrases possible. But for Fiona Raven, nothing else really mattered except book designer. So that’s what we focussed on.
You can bet that many (possibly hundreds of thousands, if not millions) of Fiona’s competitors are also optimized (to a greater or lesser extent). And probably a large number of them have much larger budgets than Fiona. So we circle back to the critical question — what is the difference that gives HER the number 1, and has given her #1, 2 or 3 continually for over three and a half years now?
HOW WE GOT THE HIGH RANK
There are no “insider secrets” or “sneaky tricks”. Sneaky tricks, of course, exist, but we don’t use them. They don’t work for long-term success. You’ll know many of these ideas. But have you implemented them yet, and are you implementing them EVERY WEEK?
For high search engine rank AND a powerful, effective website do the following.
1. ADD LOTS of relevant, thematically related content. All else being equal, a 100-page site will greatly outrank a 5-page site. One easy way to do this is to have a library of articles.
2. Don’t just present a bunch of information, craft it as an effective sales process. ARRANGE and EDIT that content to educate, inspire and ethically persuade your readers to do what you want - phone you, sign up for a workshop, whatever that is. To maximize effectiveness, divide the content into CORE and COMPLEMENTARY. For example, on our own site the Core content is just seven pages. This covers the most critical information about what we do and is the primary sales process. Then there are about 150 more pages of Complementary content.
3. Next, HIRE a specialist to optimize your site. This is important. With this Web phenomenon, there’s a prevalent myth of ease — that because the information is accessible means the work is easy. But let’s compare this to some other areas of human endeavor. On the Web, you can easily access all the tax regulations, or every yoga asana, or every mountain-climbing technique. You can have a piano and all the scores of the great composers. But you know that just having any of that information doesn’t mean you can use it at an expert level. It’s actually the same on the Web — please don’t give into that dangerous misconception that knowing a couple of small points about meta-tags will take you to the top of 100,000,000 page returns.
4. KEEP ADDING more content on a regular basis - at least each week. (Most site owners fall down badly on this.)
5. SOLICIT inbound links from thematically related sites - the bigger and more important, the better.
6. KEEP ADDING more links regularly, even if it’s just a few each month.
Fiona Raven did an excellent job of her side of the partnership. She was exceptional in that regard. I provided guidance for what she needed to do, but she did her work - sincerely and thoroughly. Her thorough application to the required work is what did the extra that pushed “very good” into “ridiculously, outrageously good”.
The combination of high ranking plus improved sales effect of the site brought her from having had no contracts for four months to a level of business success where she says, “If he can do for you half of what he did for me, you won’t be able to handle the sales”.
In summary
The “Big Three” factors in gaining search engine ranking are ongoing content addition, ongoing link addition and optimization.
Then edit your site to maximize its effectiveness to educate, inspire and ethically persuade your readers to make that phone call to you or click that “Buy” button.

Author: Michael Linehan has been using the Web since the month it became commercially available, starting with Mosaic 1.0. He combines a love of this technology with an extensive background in marketing and strategic planning to help you focus what you are doing and why, make your site an effective marketing tool and promote it to bring you prospective clients. Michael is the owner of Marketing Alchemy and is based in Victoria, BC, Canada.