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A Lesson In Searching Advancements

By Jennifer Osborne in Marketing

When I was a kid, I was trained to do category type searches by the Dewey Decimal library system. Later, as I got older, the Yellow Pages reinforced this category type search. When I needed my Hair Cut I let my fingers do the walking and I looked up Beauty Salons. If I needed to drop a few pounds I looked up weight loss.

And I’m not the only one.

These category searches are so programmed into how we look for information, that they’ve become some of the most competitive keywords on the net: “travel”, “weight loss”, and of course, “sex”.
Why?

Our neural networks have been programmed to do Category type searches. But the average 16 to 24 yr old doesn’t know how to do category level searches. If a 21 yr old has a leaky sink, they’re going to search under “leaky sink” not “plumbers”.

Why don’t the Millennials use Category Search?

(The Millenials are the generation born from 1980 to 1995. They are currently our biggest demographic. With 79 million, they even outnumber the Baby Boomers)

1) The Millennials Brains do not have the same neural networks that ours do
That’s a fancy way of saying that they haven’t been trained to use category search. Young people no longer use the Dewey Decimal system and paper Yellow Pages. If they want to find something they go to a computer terminal and look up exactly what they’re looking for. And with a few refined searches, they usually find it.

The internet (which wasn’t in mass consumption when we were kids) allows Millenials to search in natural terms. There is no need for them to “re-train” their brains to think in terms of Category Search the way generations before have.

2) The Search Engines are smarter.
When I first started using the internet in 1991, it was really difficult to find anything. The search engines couldn’t handle more than a couple of keywords and the average searcher didn’t understand Boolean Search.

In fact, search engines are so smart now, they can compensate for the fact that I can’t spell. I can search for “boulian search” and get the “did you mean?” result:

Note to Google: the next evolution of search should include an opt-in to make search more FUN (you know, for the Millenials)

In fact, the latest advancement of search has Google recently putting stop words (I, and, in, the, etc) back into Search. Barry discusses it here with links to Bill and Dan.

3) The Millenials are a Demand Generation
They haven’t known Depressions, World Wars, Oil Crisis’s and rampant Inflation like our grandparents, parents, and us. They haven’t had to worry about goods being in short supply. It’s about them and their needs. I don’t need a beauty salon I just want my hair cut.

So what’s the implication of this?

Category type keyword phrases such as “weight loss” and “plumbers” is fine if your target market is 30+. But if you’re marketing to the 16 to 30 demographic then you had better have a very robust long tail strategy.

And if budget is a consideration (when isn’t’ it?) and you have to make spending decisions, you may even want to forgo those pricey category keywords in favour of the long tail.

As the Millenials start to dominate the economy, smart marketers will think about how to better market to this demographic. From a search perspective, this has a tremendous implication on Keyword Strategy and how we optimize sites. Optimizing for the long tail is now much, much, more important.

It’s not about targeting thousands of additional keywords by cranking out tons of low quality content. It’s about finding really good ways to talk about your product or service in natural language. This could be in the form of articles, blogs, or user generated content.

So Nike, Pepsi and Wii: when I search for “Dude, I’m Phat!”; “Crush my thirst” or “I’m bored”

I’m not finding you … and neither is your target market.

Author:  Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

Increase Sales On Websites Through Streaming Audio

By Heather Turnbow in Marketing

Radio is a good medium for product advertisements, as many studies have proven. People listen to the radio for entertainment, to their favorite artist’s latest music tracks or to the current popular radio shows. The broadcast is broken up into sections, and on these interval breaks, advertisements on products and services are played.

For many years, this has been the trend in advertising. But now that the radio medium is almost behind the audio-visual medium, the television, the Internet, and other marketing strategies have to be employed to continue the benefits of advertising through audio.

Then the benefits of using music on websites were discovered. Before, music on the Internet was just available in downloadable forms as mp3. Even through hosting downloadable music on their servers, companies were able to get much traffic on their sites. And everyone engaged in Internet marketing knows that website traffic plays a big role in boosting product and service sales.

However, there had been a problem with illegal music download in which artists, musicians and record companies have lost millions of revenues.

Then, came the popularity of Internet music streaming. Unlike the former, radio streaming does not allow download of the music files. Thus, the copyrights of the artists and record label owners are protected.

So, how can this be done? There are several ways to stream audio from your site. First, is to stream a radio program from your site or blog. You can find free affiliate programs that allow you to stream their radio content from your site.

What will this mean to you? This means that your site will have new audio content every time it is visited. What’s even great is that the content is being updated even without much effort from you.

In this case, what you needed to do is to signup with an Internet radio station and have the link embedded on your blog or website.

Another way is to stream mp3s. To do this, you just need to upload your mp3files on a server and add the files’ links to the page. When the link is clicked, the browser opens a media player window and plays a file. However, since the file is in mp3 format, it may also be downloaded. Downloading music files without the authorization of the copyright owner is illegal. Therefore, if you will be using this type of streaming, make sure that you have the appropriate permit to do so.

A third way to add audio to you blog or website is to stream music through organizing playlists. Playlists are m3u files, which if downloaded, will not play music if offline. Using this process, however, can be complex. Here is a short instruction on how to do it.

1. Save your mp3 or wma file on the server. You may skip this step if you know that the file exists on another server and know the link to that file. Make sure that the link has a .mp3 or .wma extension.
2. Open your text editor and type the path to the file. Include the http:// and the file extension. Repeat this step until you have included all the links to the files that you would like to be included in the playlist.
3. Save the playlist with a .m3u extension.
4. Upload the m3u file on the directory where the music files are hosted or to your server.
5. Open your html editor and embed the link to the m3u file. Through this, you can also set if you want to have the playlist to auto play if someone visits your site of if you want your visitor to control playing the music. You can also set the volume level.

After the code is embedded on the html file, and whenever your site is visited, the songs in the playlist will be buffered, streamed and played one after another. If your playlist has several songs, the user can skip forward or go back a song in the playlist using the media player controls.

Doing this setup works for many website owners. Through this you can customize the type of music being played on your site. You can even play recordings related to your product to boost product awareness.

It requires knowledge of html to be done. But if it will help to increase traffic to your site, why not request assistance from programmers. After all, having audio on a website is a proven way to increase sales.

Author:  To View More on Heather Turnbow’s Marketing Strategies, visit: http://MommyMakingCash.com and her radio program: http://blogtalkradio.com/HeatherTurnbow

Stumbleupon - for Market Research?

By Jennifer Osborne in Marketing

I’m a HUGE stumble fan. Both as a user and a marketer. As a user I get treated to new and interesting websites every day - that I would never have found without Stumbleupon. As a marketer, it never ceases to amaze me how much traffic Stumble can drive. Just when you think that a page has received all the stumble traffic it’s going to get…whoosh… another wave hits. Sometimes even a few weeks after the initial submit.

I recently found that in addition to being cool for the above reasons, Stumble has a fantastic third use… cheap fast Market Research. I know, if you have ever done market research before I’m sure you’re shocked that I just used cheap and fast in the same sentence.

I came upon this discovery by accident. A client had just launched a new website and they wanted us to drive traffic to it. SEO for the long term and PPC, Social Media, online PR, in the short term.

Keep in mind, this was (is) a really snazzy site. The client (who wishes to remain anonymous), invested a huge chunk of dough into the site and it looked WAY COOL. The whole team was REALLY excited to be a part of such a cool project.

We put a lot of time into planning for the site launch and did our usual stuff, reaching out to online influencers, setting up paid search campaigns, etc. Except our tactics (which are usually pretty successful) didn’t pan out this time. We drove a moderate amount of traffic to the site but it didn’t take off like other efforts had. This was a bit of a puzzle.

Stumble helped us to figure it out. We stumbled the site and got enough Stumbleupon traffic to make the problem abundantly evident. This really cool, hugely aesthetic site was getting a number of thumbs down!!!

Looking at the site analytics for the stumble traffic we saw that these visitors were spending a lot of time on the home page (an average of 2 min 23 seconds) and had a very low bounce rate - 26%. We couldn’t discount the experience of this traffic as being low quality, these visitors were clearly engaged and interested. So why weren’t they converting? (in this case a conversion was going to a specific page and filling out a brief form).

Based on the Stumbleupon metrics, we hypothesized that although the site looked really cool, it wasn’t very user friendly. Keep in mind that Stumbleupon traffic comes to the site not knowing beforehand, what it’s all about. They arrive at the site knowing that it is related to their selected interests, and that others found the site intriguing. Period. No other cues such as where they came from, text links, keywords searched, etc.

Clearly in this case, the stumble traffic was confused. There were too few cues on the homepage as to what the site was about. To make matters worse, there was no navigation on the homepage just an enter here button. The button was below the fold so most people didn’t see it. The homepage was really interactive so they had fun playing with it initially, but in the end they got frustrated and left.

Based on our Stumbleupon hypothesis, some pretty direct Stumbleupon comments, we recommended a number of changes designed to improve the usability of the site. Grudgingly(they were afraid it would take away from the cool factor), the client moved the Enter Here button, they added an informative title, and made it a lot easier to go in and look around.
Immediately after the changes were implemented the site metrics went up (considerably).

These were all learning’s that we could have achieved through a focus group even before the site was launched. But in reality, where budget is limited and the project is usually behind schedule, who has the time or the money to do so?

Stumbleupon provided the critical feedback that the client needed. We just had to listen.

Author:  Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

10 Essential Questions to Ask Your Target Market

By Donna Gunter in Marketing

“My target market is everybody.” Is this statement true for your business? If so, how is that working for you? My guess would be that it’s not working at all. I shudder when a client tells me that their target market is everyone. When you target everyone, it’s too hard to focus on anyone and you attract no one.

One of the most terrifying decisions an online business owner makes is the decision to refine and define their target market. Why? Generally because they’re scared of excluding people. However, the more focused you are in your marketing efforts and the better you understand and can define your target market, the easier your marketing becomes. Really! And, what’s even more astonishing is that you’ll soon begin to hear, “Well, I know you only work with and have seen how successful they have been in working with you, but I’m . Will you work with me, too, and help me succeed?”

What’s the easiest way to uncover the characteristics of your target market? Conduct informational interviews with those who belong to that target market. Despite the fact that most informational interviews are used by people seeking a job in a particular market, you can apply this concept to help you create a full description of your target market. If you have no idea who that might be, interview some of your favorite clients or friends/colleagues that you think would make an ideal client for you. Go through your contact database and find prospects who meet your description and request to talk to them about their challenges.

You can set up 30-minute interviews over coffee or over the phone with people who fit your ideal client profile and ask them a series of questions about things you want to know more about that will give you insight into their daily lives. Or, join in and participate in their online discussion lists, forums. or blogs and research the kinds of questions being posted. Find someone else who provides a different offering to the same target market and ask to send out a short survey to that person’s contacts and to find out more about them as a group.

Here are the questions you can ask in your informational interview or survey. Some of these questions may not apply to your target market, depending on whether you’re a business-to-business company or a business-to-consumer company:

1. Demographics.
Are they male or female? What age group? What socio-economic or ethnic group do they belong? What is their religious preference? What levels of education have they completed? What is their marital status? Do they have children?

2. Psychographics.
What are their lifestyle preferences? What kind of hobbies do they have? How do they spend their free time? Do they tend to be conservative or liberal in their lifestyle and political beliefs? Are they generally introverted or extroverted?

3. Financial.
How much do they make in a year? Can they easily afford your product or service? On what do they regularly spend money?

4. Industry.
What types of occupations do they hold? Are they part of a particular industry or profession? To what groups and associations (real and virtual, personal and professional) do they belong? Is there a list of them that might exist somewhere?

5. Values and Beliefs.
What are their beliefs? What values do they hold dear? What is important to them in their life and work?

6. Location.
Where do they hang out in real time — at church, the local coffee shop, the hardware store, civic groups or professional association meetings? What about online in discussion groups, blogs, forums, online networking sites? Do they attend conferences or trade shows regularly? Can you open the yellow pages of your phone book and find several listings that would encompass your target market?

7. Information Gathering.
What magazines, newspapers, email newsletters, blogs, and professional trade publications do they read? What television programs do they regularly watch? What kind of movies do they see? What kind of online videos do they view?

8. Connections.
With whom do they do business on a regular basis? Where do they network online and offline? Who are their “natural referral partners”, or other businesses who cater to the same target market but offer a different service? Whom do they trust and respect?

9. Communication.
How do they prefer to interact — in person, by email, by webconferencing? Are there buzzwords or industry-specific terms that they use frequently? What gets their attention?

10. Problems and Solutions.
What are the key issues/problems/concerns keeping them awake at night? Are they in enough pain that they’re willing to pay you to solve their problem? Where are they seeking assistance to help solve the problem? What kinds of products and services might they purchase to help solve this problem — books, magazines, coaching, consulting, etc.?

Once you’ve completed several interviews, then compile the information you have received and create a profile of your target market. Based on the info in this profile, then answer these three questions:

1. Are there enough of them to make them viable as a group?
2. Would I enjoy working with this target market?
3. Do you offer ready solutions that would help this target market solve their problems?

If the answers to those questions are all “yes”, have this profile available to you as you plan your marketing strategy, write your website copy, create information products, write articles, blog, or compose your email newsletter. When you fully understand your target market, you are able to streamline and focus your marketing, and you’ll wonder why you ever waited this long to define your target market!

Author:  Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com. Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com.

How to Make Money Flipping Squidoo Lenses

By Tyler Monesy in Marketing

Since you are reading this article, I know you are looking for a way to make money. I figure you would prefer something that doesn’t already have 8 billion people doing it and with a little effort, you have a realistic chance to make money. I am about to introduce you to what you are looking for plus it’s relatively new and it’s in high demand (aka a hungry market).

Before I get into the details here’s my prediction. 2008 will be the year flippers make a lot of money — it’s a hot and growing market with a ton a demand.

You might be wondering what is flipping and also what is Squidoo. If so, I will give you a brief overview of each.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a Web 2.0 social site that allows user to create their own content. This in itself is no big deal but the real attraction to Squidoo is both the user base is growing dramatically and Google loves Squidoo pages. I get front page Google results quite often with a good Squidoo lens. This all leads to explosive opportunity for high volume traffic. Of course, traffic or even the potential for traffic has tremendous value to buyers.

Flipping

Flipping a Squidoo lens is the same concept as flipping a house. You simply build a great lens and then sell it for profit. Like picking a good location is important to flipping a house, you need to pick the right niche, keywords and content to maximize your sales price with a lens.

So how do you do this flipping stuff?

First, you head on over to Squidoo and set-up a lens so it is optimized for sale. This includes picking a niche along with selecting the best keywords related to the niche. You want to select a topic where there is a hungry market. If you are not sure where to start for topics, you can head over to Amazon and look over the non-fiction best seller list to see if you can come up with ideas. There are many other ways to find niches but I will save that for another article.

Once you have your lens set-up, you are ready to add content and further tweak it. The content you add can make or break you — so it is important you add quality content. The nice thing about a lens is you do not need to add a lot of content. Usually one or two 300-500 word articles is sufficient. You will want to add affiliate links for products that target your niche. You can also use polls to generate affiliate revenue.

The last step is to carefully review your lens for perfection. Just like you would wash, vacuum and wax your car before selling it — do the same with your lens. Make sure it shines. Review it for typos, add images where appropriate and confirm the layout is good.

The next step is to promote your lens. The more you can promote it the more traffic you will get. Naturally, traffic will lead to affiliate sales. With both traffic and sales, you will have driven up the value of your lens. Keep in mind, you do not have to have traffic and sales to sell your lens but you will get a better price and more buyers if you do.

You can promote your lens in a lot of different ways. Add it to social bookmarking sites like Stumble and Digg. Write articles and submit it to directories like Ezinearticle.com, Goarticles.com and SearchWarp.com. You can visit relevant forums and be part of the community there. Add your lens in the signature of your forum posts. The more promotion the better.

Ok, so now you have both built and promoted your lens. Now you are ready to sell it. There are numerous sites for selling including eBay, Sitepoint, forums and many other locations.

This article is a starting point for flipping a lens. I hope you have found this interesting and useful. Now go flip!

Author:  The author Tyler Monesy is an expert in Internet Marketing. For the complete details on flipping a Squidoo Lens head on over to Flips That Lens and can grab his free cheat sheet for selling a lens here: FREE Lens Cheatsheet

Marketing through E-mail and Issues Surrounding it

By Anne Ahira in Marketing

Email marketing is one of the forms of direct marketing, which is done via Internet. Emails are sent to potential customers to boost the business, and gain the trust of the customer by disclosing relevant information and help them to make good shopping decisions. It also enhances the relationship with a current customer, by repeating business with them. In simple words the procedure of sending emails to customers is known as email marketing.

The major advantage of email marketing is that it doesn’t consume a lot of time, is minimal resource consuming and is also cost-efficient. Within a short period, a large audience can be targeted. Features such as Subscriptions, bounced messages, web bugs, and click through help enables businesses to track potential customers. Since the customers can be directly reached, feedbacks can be collected with ease. In terms of cost also it is not as expensive as newsletters. Reports have proven that this is the next best marketing technique after search marketing. It is effective in tracking the returns on investments.

Email marketing is a modernized version of mail marketing. The advantage over direct mail marketing is that it takes less time to reach a customer than mailing. Like people check their mailboxes daily, inbox is also checked by majority of the Internet users on a daily basis. Over the period of time, lots of helpful tools and web services have been developed. List host is web service that provides lots of options to the marketers like managing huge emails and email address database. If the budget is more, list managers can be hired who can be given charge of opt-in-email newsletters and managing databases. Software is also available in the market that does this job too.

When the customer fills the form for the first time, there are check boxes to be ticked which reflects their interests. Depending on these choices, an advertiser sends information to them, this is known as opt-in-email advertising, because the customer has opted to receive emails and marketing like this isn’t illegal. The content of the email can be elaborate, but it shouldn’t be too long as people are really busy for that. The call to action, also known as effective words, in the email should be chosen with care. It’s not necessary that the content should revolve around only one item; related product’s information can also be included. This is known as cross selling. By using email blasting or sending an email to multiple customers at a time can save a lots of time and will also increase the efficiency.

The dark side of email marketing is spamming or also known as bulking. Some companies collect email addresses of people illegally and send irrelevant mails to them, which can be very annoying. Some hackers design an email like an advertisement, but when clicked on downloads adware and viruses that can destroy a computer, which makes it even more dangerous. To make matters worse, the Direct Marketing Association of America has petitioned to make spamming legal. Some prohibitions are also placed on providers who help out business organizations to manage their email marketing by giving them already prepared email templates.

Most of the mailing websites have added the facility of separating spam from genuine email by creating separate folders for both and this is known as spam filtering. But in case of large number of spam mails, a useful mail can go into that folder and can go unnoticed and gets deleted with the rest of the spam mails. This kind of mail is known as false positives. But the chances of this happening are rare. There are many laws against spamming like United States’ Can-Spam act, Europe’s privacy and electronic communications regulations. According to these laws, the companies should get their return address authenticated, false physical addresses should not be included and a one click unsubscribe link should be place in the email. The lesser penalty involves companies sending spam to be blacklisted and on a larger scale, they can be heavily fined.

Author:  Anne Ahira Marketing Guru of My 1st Internet Guru. Anne offers a plethora of inside marketing information and step by step guides to make your online ventures more successful.

5 Sticky Online Marketing Tips To Keep ‘em On Your Website

By Dan Lok in Marketing

You’ve done everything right to grab targeted visitors to your website. Finally! You sit there basking in the glow of satisfaction when you check out your web logs. Your eyes roll to the back of your head… you’re not thinking lots of traffic. You’re thinking hordes of it with plastic in hand. And you can’t wait to check your orders and optins. Then?

Awful, gut-wrenching reality sinks in.

Nothing. No orders. No optins. You double check your traffic logs. And it looks a lot like your visitors cannot wait to get outta town! It’s like your site is coated with Teflon instead of super glue. Ever heard the saying… slicker ‘n a mouse’s lip?

But wait… don’t throw your self into the oncoming rush hour traffic. Here’s what you can do today to remove the slippery stuff and send the mouse packing.

Every visitor arrives at your website wondering just one thing: How will this place benefit ME! It’s me, me, me. “I hope this place has what I’m looking for.” So?

Tell them. Be upfront about it. This is no time to be shy… to be the staid marketer. Let them know the reason for your website’s existence. Maybe you’re thinking… ‘well, my domain has keywords in it. It’s at the top blazoned in size 26 cool-looking font. They can see all the product pics everywhere.’

Ok. So are you telling me you’re just like everyone else selling the same stuff you do? There’s nothing utterly unique about your business, your offer, your terms, your customer service, your customer retention or appreciation programs?

Nothing?

Better find something fast because if not, then you’re just like everyone else and so it really doesn’t matter if they do business with you.

Be very clear about what you’re selling. Try not to think about you or how cool your graphics and soft-focused pics are. That’s all nice. But you want the truth? They don’t really care half a wit about it. You’re right…

Appropriate amounts Do help create a professional image. But try to add a dose of moderation. Be tasteful about it. Not overwhelming.

If you have a serious business with serious content, then don’t hide behind the curtains. Peeking around to see who’s there.

Remember, among other things, you’re trying to build trust. And people will trust you a whole lot more if they know who the heck is running the place. “Who OWNS this place?” So let them see your lovely mug… your face. Make it easy to contact you. Give ‘em a number to call, an email or warm and friendly form to fill out… the best you can. How about letting them know where on the planet your business calls home? Stuff like that. It’ll go a long way to help build credibility and trust. If you’re not hiding, then people will naturally think you have nothing to hide. Makes sense to me. So they’ll start thinking maybe you can be trusted with their money or optin info.

I remember being at a software site. And I really, really wanted this software. And this is the absolute truth: I spent almost 10 minutes finding the order link. It was maddening! But I wanted that software so much I became obsessed with finding the order link.

It was on the second page in the middle of the page. I was floored. I actually wondered if it was some very unwise joke or the guy was just totally bereft of any marketing clue.

I bought the software. Great software. Dumbest site navigation I ever witnessed.

Moral of the story? Don’t be like that, please.

Related to that has to do with giving your eager buyers as many ways to part with their hard-earned cash as possible. Ordering options. You’ve used them before. Right? An 800 number, order form, credit cards, paypal, how about… snail mail.

Options are cool. Be cool and you’ll get more orders.

How about leveraging your customers? Have strategically placed comments from your legions of happy and satisfied buyers. Social pudding with heavy doses of proof in it! That’s a winning recipe, for sure.

There it is, pals. Those are but a smattering from my personal bag of tricks. But they’re really not tricks. Just what works.

Author:  A former college dropout, Dan “The Man” Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test- drive Dan’s Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to: http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html

11 Killer Auto Responder Marketing Techniques

By Dan Hatcher in Marketing

Stuck in an auto responder rut? Are you out of fresh ideas? Ever wonder where you can go next with your auto responders. Marketing through auto responder series is a popular strategy to increase repeat website visits and sales. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with only your initial set of e-mail touches going out regularly? Get out of the rut with some of these ideas for auto responder improvements. Here are 12 customer building strategies.

Top sales pros confirm that on average, it takes seven or more communications or sales messages before prospective customers make a purchase. They also confirm that it’s generally easier to sell to a referral, because someone they know gave positive testimonial about their products or services.

Do the Two-Step!

What would happen if you combined both of these powerful ideas? An electronic two-step so to speak. Try these two-step tips:

1. Collect leads with your auto responder. Ask for mailing addresses and telephone numbers, too, for additional ways to follow up with each person. When you download the e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses and other information from those who requested additional information from your auto responder, follow up multiple ways. Send postcards. Call. Mail sales letters and other promotional pieces.
2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer in an insert, direct marketing package and/or PDF to be made available via auto responder. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material. Then send to the people in #1 above, monthly updates, announcements of new sales and products/services, and a request for referrals.

Ezines Book

Instead of trying to publish a small daily or weekly eZines, try publishing one large monthly eZine (similar to a monthly magazine) as an e-book format delivered via auto responder, preferably an Adobe .pdf file. You could have it made up of a large number of articles per issue and insert regularly featured areas throughout like inspirational quotes, industry tips, favorite sites and advice from the pros. You could also insert full-color graphics, multimedia components like audio / video file links and ads. Then you can charge a monthly rate, with an annual discounted package purchase, and sell advertising spots to sprinkle in your auto responder announcements for each issue and with an informational series to announce your monthly eZine to new prospects.

Other Good Things You Can Do With An E-Zine

1. Provide back issues of your eZine archives via your auto responder instead of hosting all your archives online. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them and offers a chance to include graphics, audio and video and other components all rolled up in pdf files for quick, easy download.
2. Help with tech issues and publish your entire web site, save it in a pdf file, and load it into an auto responder. Sometimes visitors don’t have enough time read your entire site or they lose their Internet connection or time online. So this way, they could print it out and read it offline.
3. You could offer your eBook via an auto responder. Often your visitors won’t have to download it or have the software to read it right away, so this way they can take it “to go”.
4. For a handy and nice legal touch, you could include the terms and conditions to purchase transactions and load them into an auto responder that is triggered with each purchase. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.
5. Publish free reports to send via your auto responder. The reports should be related to your business or web site and contain info, ads and links to your sites. People love getting freebies.
6. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey. Send this to via auto responder to those who sign up on your site in exchange for a free eBook, software or trial period at your membership site. This type of information will help you understand their needs, wants, likes and dislikes better.
7. Instead of answering each customer question that is e-mailed to you, publish “Frequently Ask Questions” and make them available via auto responder to those who sign up. This also saves you time and reduces support headaches.
8. Instead of publishing all of your customer testimonials or endorsements on your website, publish only a few. And set up an auto responder form that invites visitors to receive a complete list. This way you can give them a power-packed list; it’s more effective to include all of them.

Mix and match. Change your auto responder strategy to change your auto responder results! So why not improve your closing ratio and reach out even farther at the same time? Do the two-step!

In summary, by using customized marketing techniques like an eZine eBook, tailored to fit your own products and services, you can reach out and increase your website traffic and sales opportunities. Internet marketing can provide more ways to grow your business than you can shake a mouse at!

Author:  Dan is a veteran internet marketer having spent the last 11 years making his living by driving prospects to his website.
If you’ve been looking for a way to earn your living on the internet, Dan and his team of internet marketers may be able to help. Go to Dan’s website and punch your Ticket To Wealth. http://thebigticket.info

Combining Email Marketing with Other Types of Marketing

By Anne Ahira in Marketing

Whether you choose to do your marketing online or offline, one thing does not change. This is the concept that no single marketing strategy will be as effective as a combination of two or more marketing strategies. This does not mean it is necessary for you to implement every known marketing strategy to promote your business but rather it implies that it is worthwhile to market from a few different perspectives to help you achieve your business related goals. This article will examine the importance of combining email marketing with other types of marketing to create a successful; multi tiered marketing strategy and will also offer some advice on managing more than one marketing strategy at once.

As the old saying goes, “Two heads are better than one,” and this is certainly true when it comes to marketing. You may enjoy a great deal of success with email marketing but this does not mean you should not try other types of online marketing such as website creation, participation in industry related message boards, placing banner ads, orchestrating an affiliate marketing campaign and generating inbound links to your website. While it is possible that not all of these strategies will be effective for your business, you are likely to find at least one other option which complements your email marketing and helps you to achieve your business related goals.

Alternately you may even wish to combine your email marketing campaign with more traditional marketing strategies such as radio ads, television ads and the print media. Just because these types of advertising do not take place online, does not mean they will not be able to help you generate more business. In fact advertising both online and offline can allow you to reach a larger target audience. This is because you will likely reach Internet users around the world but can also reach potential customers who do not utilize the Internet for purchasing or researching products or services similar to the ones you offer.

Popular marketing strategies to combine with email marketing include banner ads and message board participation. These are all online activities and each one individually is fairly simple. However, in combination these simple activities can create a powerful statement. You may send out emails offering useful information about your products or services, purchase banner ad space on websites which may be of interest to your potential customers and participate in industry related message boards where you can earn the respect and pique the interest of potential customers. Even if your potential customers are not currently in need of the products and services you offer, seeing your business name so often can have a branding effect. Branding is essentially a process in which consumers see a company name so often that they are more likely to select a product from this company when they are in need of an item the company offers.

If you are planning to combine multiple forms of advertising, you should be aware that this can make it difficult for you to evaluate the effectiveness of each marketing strategy. This is especially true of the marketing strategies are implemented concurrently. When you are only using one type of marketing strategy, you can generally attribute increases in sales or website traffic to changes in the marketing strategy. However, when more than one type of marketing strategy is in effect, determining which strategy is producing the desired effect can be quite difficult. This situation can be handled by not making changes to more than one marketing strategy at a time. This will help to pinpoint which changes produce an increase in sales or website traffic. It can also help you to determine when changes to your marketing strategy have a detrimental effect on your sales and website traffic. However, if you are having difficulty determining which marketing strategy is most effective you can consider asking customers to answer survey questions and provide information such as how they learned about the products or services your business offers.

Author:  Anne Ahira Marketing Guru of My 1st Internet Guru. Anne offers a plethora of inside marketing information and step by step guides to make your online ventures more successful.

Why People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

By Tod Dale in Marketing

Nowadays, almost everybody buys online - shopping for groceries, clothes, sports equipment, houses, solicitors - you can now get everything you need without leaving your desk.

Accordingly, the practice of Affiliate Marketing has mushroomed in popularity, and now represents a widespread means of earning a full-time income via the internet. Affiliate marketing partnerships have three beneficiaries - the customer who receives the goods for which he was searching; the trader who has sold it to him; and the webmaster who introduced them to each other.

The very popularity of affiliate marketing has, though, led to the demise of many marketers; only the best succeed. The weak fall to the wayside. That’s business.

So, let’s analyze why so many people who try to enter into affiliate marketing programs fail; which will help us avoid the pitfalls ourselves.

One of the main reasons affiliate marketing ventures fail is simply because of lack of preparation - by both the trader and the affiliate. A trader needs to carefully consider who to use as an affiliate, matching his needs closely with their own. Too many companies adopt the approach of simply going for numbers - signing up as many affiliates as they can with little regard for quality.

Similarly, as an affiliate, you need to match yourself with appropriate traders. Make certain that your interests and enthusiasms are captured in the trader’s products so that you can genuinely promote them. Do your research on the company, its products and history and don’t just jump in because they offer you 40% commission every time you make a sale.

You can receive a wealth of vital information from the many affiliate forums or articles on the web. You can try to identify those products that are most likely to have a ‘high conversion rate’ and consequently earn you more money.

Some websites, of failed affiliate marketers, were disaster zones - examples of ‘how not to produce your own web site’ abound! Don’t let that happen to you.

First of all, choose an effective domain name; one that is appropriate for your products and is sure to be identified by search engines. This might sound glaringly obvious but the choice of name is of paramount significance. It doesn’t matter how good your site is; if the customer doesn’t ever get to see it, it doesn’t matter.

Design your website with 100% professionalism. Your design, your layout, your ads, your content are all equally important and need to be geared towards holding the sustained interest of your reader. Don’t cram it so full of pretty graphics and images that the visitor gets quickly lost.

Those sites that thrive, tend to be content-rich, using key words and quality information to give customers the information they are looking for in an attractive, eye-catching way. Your website is the means by which you will make your money, so develop it appropriately.

Arguably, the most crucial aspect of the affiliate marketing program is advertising. You cannot hope to succeed in persuading visitors who are looking at your site to click onto that of your partner, unless you are creative and effective with your advertising techniques.

Creating potent ads is not easy, and will entail time and hard work. But put yourself in the position of a potential customer; you are far more likely to be attracted by a vibrant, original and thoughtful marketing strategy - so that’s what you must aim to provide.

Many affiliate marketers fail because, with their “get rich quick” attitude they lose sight of longer term goals. You must, to make a prolonged success of affiliate marketing, and to develop it as a career, make sure that you learn it from A to Z, from top to bottom.

Keep updating your knowledge base - be it in advertising, web page design or search engine optimization. Keep improving your knowledge about the demands of customers and vagaries of traders. You cannot stand still in marketing. If you stand still, others will overtake you. The only way to stay successful is to keep learning.

Finally, many would-be affiliate marketers fail simply because they give up too quickly. They are enticed by the thought of making their million and sign enthusiastically for their first program. When that doesn’t work they perhaps sign for another one and go through the same ‘Teach Yourself Affiliate Marketing’ cut and paste process again; with the same results.

Don’t expect to be the new Donald Trump next week. Work at developing your skills and applying good business sense and, who knows, you might be able to give him a run for his money one day!

Author:  Tod Dale is a top marketer who specializes in creating six figure incomes for home business entrepreneurs. To learn more about him, visit his website at
http://integritywealthsystem.com/