5 Crucial Email Marketing Tips

Focus on One Message

If you’re sending non-newsletter email blasts, stick to one primary message for each email sent out. The more information you pack into an email, the higher the chance the recipient’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll reach for delete. Keep it to one focus point and put it right in the subject and first lines of the message to make it easier for those just skimming to absorb your message.


Email newsletters are expected to provide bits and pieces of several messages, so this tip doesn’t really apply to newsletters. But you should still keep your newsletter blurbs short and to the point, making the information easy to grasp.

Customize Your Message

Use the recipient’s name in your message whenever possible. Something as simple as customizing the email in this way can make the recipient more likely to read through and act on your message.
Include a Call to Action


Each email you send should spell out exactly what you want the recipient to do. Make links obvious and call attention to any special directions you are providing. And it’s okay to be repetitive when it comes to the call to action – include it toward the top of the message and mention it again at the end.
Use a Template

Instead of sending out a generic email, take time to customize your template to reflect the colors, fonts and other branding elements of your business. Using the same email template for your messages will help the recipient recognize your company and generate feelings of trust.

You’ll also want to provide a plain text version that contains the same message but is stripped of all special formatting for recipients using email clients that cannot view messages in HTML. And don’t forget to test out your final template in multiple email clients to make sure it looks how you want it to across the board.
Watch Your Stats

Most email marketing services provide campaign statistics so you can monitor the number of opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. As you get started with email marketing, try a few different formats and link placements and then compare the stats to gauge your success.

And don’t be so quick to unsubscribe bounced addresses. An email can bounce for any number of reasons, and it’s best to wait to see if the address bounces more than once before scrubbing it from your list.

Top 10 eMarketing Tips

Successful marketing on the Internet is not just about listing your website on Yahoo or sending out thousands of unsolicited emails. Without a quality product or service and a well developed website a top 10 listing in Google is pointless.

10. Develop a "Free" Service Offer

free information and tools on your site that can be used by your online visitors. It's one thing to say, "Come to our site and learn about our business." It's quite another to say, "Use the free kitchen remodelling calculator available exclusively on our site." Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling so the visitors you attract will be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities and links to cross over to the sales part of your site.


9. Start a Blog

A blog or weblog is simply a web page that scrolls chronologically like a journal and contains links to other websites of interest. Blogs, as creative online journals, have been used by technical specialists for a number of years, but business blogs, or b-blogs are just now making inroads into the mainstream.
As an alternative, low-cost (or even free) means of electronic communication, blogs can make up a significant part of your overall marketing strategy. Although b-blogs carry an inherent marketing focus not found in creative weblogs, their casual structure provides the opportunity to connect with readers on a more immediate and personal level than traditional websites and newsletters allow.



8. 3rd Party Publishing

A great method of marketing your business is by publishing editorials in third-party ezines, e-newsletters and on information-based websites. Just as editorials in offline media can help position you as an expert in your field and drive readers to your website, providing articles written (or ghost-written) by you to targeted online media can also drive traffic to your website, often with no out-of pocket expense. Just remember to include a short biography that outlines what you do and a link to your website at the bottom of each article you publish.



7. eMail Newsletter

Permission-based email marketing can be a low-cost and very effective component of
your web marketing strategy. It can help to build a relationship between your business and target market, and can drive traffic back to your website. Email marketing can consist of direct email blasts and sales letters, personalized auto-responders, and/or email newsletters.

6. Offline Marketing

Never underestimate the value of using low-cost, offline marketing techniques to
encourage people to visit your website.

5. Site Listed in DMOZ Directory

This is a huge boost as it is said that Google's directory comes straight from the DMOZ directory. The DMOZ is commonly known as the Open Directory Project
(http://dmoz.org/) and it has strict guidelines as to who is listed. Submission info can be found here: http://dmoz.org/add.html

4. Yahoo Directory Submit

Yahoo! Directory Submit is part of a suite of services Yahoo! created to serve the needs of businesses like yours. Yahoo! Directory Submit provides expedited review of web sites that are submited for possible inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory for US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. Furthermore, for each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/dirsb/dirsb_pr.php

3. Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index
and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google
Sitemaps you can automatically keep Google informed of all your web pages, and when
you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

2. Submit Your Site

You should submit your site to Google, Yahoo, and MSN at least once and no more than
once every 30 days. Although Google says that manually submitting your pages to their index is unnecessary however they have an interface for you to do so. MSN will seldom visit a website unless invited by submission. Yahoo frequents more than MSN but less than Google but will dramatically increase visits after submission
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
MSN: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

1. Content, Page Quantity and Frequency of Changes

The bottom line for getting good search engine results is to have lots of keyword rich content on lots of pages. Google likes big sites. The larger sites are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites. Content must be updated often; this is a Google patent and concerns the changes to page content over time. Google sees newer content as better content especially if the site ‘theme’ is news, retail or auction.

Ways to Make Money Online

If you're curious about how to make money online, you've come to the right place! Here at the Internet Marketing Center, we've been teaching people how to make money online for over a decade. Our students have built and grown profitable Internet business with little or no up-front investment and thousands of them now make money online with very little effort.

There are lots of ways to make money online -- here are some ideas to get you started.

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Affiliate products. As an affiliate, you sell someone else's product for a percentage of the sale, and they take care of the rest. It's a risk-free way to make money online, because all you have to do is sell the product -- you don't have to worry about stocking, shipping or anything else.
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Sell a service. The Internet is the ideal place to make money online by selling a service. Whether you deliver your service locally or via the Internet, you can easily make money online selling your service. Think of what you're good at, and then build a simple website to sell your service.
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Electronic products. If you are serious about making money online, consider selling a downloadable electronic product. The beauty of electronic products is once they're created, you can make money online selling them over and over, without any additional cost to you! Consider writing an eBook on a subject you have unique knowledge on (and EVERYONE has something they're good at!) and make money online marketing your eBook to a niche market.

What Else Can I Sell to Make Money Online?

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Paid subscriptions and memberships. If you've got your finger on the pulse of an industry that changes often, or access to exclusive information not available anywhere else, you can make money online selling a paid subscription to a newsletter. Or, if you have the ability to bring together people who have mutual interests, consider a membership site to make money online.
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Physical products. Selling a physical product online will cost you a bit more up-front, but if you want to make money online, you might want to try it. Make sure there is DEMAND for your product before you start sourcing it by doing keyword research. If the research tells you there's a market, go for it!

Email Marketing Tips, Tricks and Secrets

1.Address Recipients with Their Name in Email Campaigns
Make your newsletter recipients feel more like themselves, less like mere numbers by greeting them individually and personally.

2. Avoid $$$ Signs in Email Marketing Campaigns
Why "$$$" won't bring you $$$.

3. Avoid Email Marketing During the Holidays
Holidays are often holidays from email, too. That's why email marketing during the holidays is often not very effective.

4. Avoid Mistyped Addresses by Requiring Retyping
Avoiding having people enter @htomail.cmo and @yhoo.com in the signup form for your newsletter.

5. Create a Clear Call to Action in Email Marketing Campaigns
Make sure recipients of your email marketing message know what you expect them to do (and what they can expect in return).

6. Defining Opt-In Email Marketing
My newsletter is "opt-in", sure! What that means? Um... well. yes.

7. Don't "Fix" Mistyped Email Addresses
Never fiddle with your subscribers' email addresses, not even if they obviously can't type.

8. Don't Forget the Preview Pane in Your Campaign
Move the boring stuff down the page, and greet recipients with your best offer instead.

9. Email Marketing Needs to Reflect Your Corporate Design
If it's your email marketing, make people see instantly that it is your email marketing.

5 Tips for Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

It’s difficult to find much value in content with no strategy behind it. Without a content strategy plan, your intended audience is unlikely to find your copy, let alone read it.

During the MIMA Summit last week, the importance of a content marketing strategy was the topic of a session presented by Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish.

For this week’s 5 Tips post, I’ve translated some of Rachel’s valuable points into actionable steps for creating an effective content marketing strategy.

1. Discover
In a nutshell, do your homework:

* Research competitors’ content. Whether you’re launching a blog, website or email campaign, determine what information is already out there and how it’s presented. How can you distinguish yourself?
* Concept your voice based on audience and type of content. If you’re providing quick tips and human interest pieces for consumers, your content voice will likely be more conversational. Are you offering in-depth, research-driven articles for a B2B audience? Your voice should be reflect that.
* Define the clear goals and message of your content. By failing to do so, you’ll have a difficult time building a solid readership. You also risk confusing the readers you do attract.

2. Design
Step 2 is all about planning—making sure all the “i’s” have been dotted and the “t’s” have been crossed:

* Determine responsibilities. Before deploying a content marketing plan, ensure that you’ve outlined who will be the keeper of the content. If you aren’t able to hire a dedicated resource, it’s essential to appoint someone to incorporate content maintenance into his or her current responsibilities. Content maintenance could also entail tasking each employee to contribute one piece of content per month.
* Organize content. Is your content logically located on your site in a central place? Is it easy to search for a particular topic? If your readers have a difficult time navigating through your site to find useful content, they’re not likely to stick around for very long.

3. Build
With Steps 1 and 2 complete, you’re ready to start putting the wheels in motion:

* Plan a style guide. Include as much information as possible regarding everything from tone and voice to target word count. Provide best practices for optimizing content and writing checklists.
* Create a copy deck. A copy deck is essentially a roadmap for your content pages, including text, graphics, advertising and links. It can be developed in stages, starting with writing a few paragraphs to describe the content.

4. Deploy
With the first 3 steps in place, a content marketing strategy is finally ready for deployment:

* Maintain. It’s crucial to have a plan in place to continuously update content. Outdated content will quickly turn readers away. Plus, a stagnant site won’t do you any favors when it comes to search engines.
* Monitor. Leverage analytics tools to gauge what worked best and what failed. Look for patterns in the most popular types of content—i.e., checklists, charts, case studies. You can analyze virtually any variable, from optimal article length to most popular type of headline

5. Adjust
The final step to creating an effective content marketing strategy is ongoing:

* Respond. No content marketing strategy is perfect. Based on analytics reports, continuously tweak your content efforts to maximize results.

Adopted from http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/content-strategy/

Success is Sweet

Internet marketers already know these strategies by heart. But there may be some who just entered the online business and marketing community who may not have tried some of the simple ways of marketing in the internet. The main point of internet marketing is to generate traffic and lead visitors and customers to your site. Your site's visibility will be the key factor for you to attract customers and make sales. Online marketing strategies have this purpose in mind.

Let us count the simple ways of marketing online:

Link Building: To achieve greater visibility in the Web, you have to have a high ranking in the search engines. To have a high ranking among the search engines, building links is vital. Search engine spiders crawl across the Web to look for the number of links you have and use it as one of the important bases on ranking your website. Build links all over the Web by reciprocal linking, creating quality content, and submitting your site to the site directories!

Keyword Search: Search for your main keyword and other terms that are related to your site. When making links, you can use your keyword and terms as an anchor text for more visibility to your site. Make use of keyword tools available online to search for the most searched for word that you can use as your keyword.

Site Directories: By submitting your site to site directories, you are also placing another link for the search engines to crawl. This adds to your number of links and can increase your rank among the search engines.

Article Submissions: One technique in leading visitors and generating traffic to your site is by submitting relevant and interesting article to article directories. Submitting articles to the directories can also help you build more links to your site, thus gaining you more links and increasing your rankings. Don't forget to make the article creative and relevant, of course. Readers won't be curious to see your website if your article doesn't get their attention.

Affiliate Marketing: The downside of this strategy is that you'll have to spend for the commissions of affiliate sales. Nevertheless, this strategy is used by many internet marketers. Affiliate marketing usually works by networking with other websites that are in the same niche as you. Now since you are both in the same niche, most usually the traffic that you can generate through affiliate marketing is targeted. This is about the best thing abut affiliate marketing (aside from generating sales). You are also building links through the links (in the ads) on the website that you are affiliated with.

Newsletters and Subscriptions: Sending newsletters to the customers and clients will not only help in building professional and friendly relationships with them, but also brings in targeted traffic to your web site. Whenever you have something new to talk about and events to promote, newsletters can be a great way to let the clients and customers in on the news.

Email Marketing: This is another popular way to generate traffic and occasionally make repeat sales. This is kind of like sending newsletters, only your are more or less not sending news but rather promoting your latest products and services. Remember that when making your emails, you should avoid making it spammy and annoying. Make your email content original, creative and interesting.

Forums: You can see the most eager visitors of the online community in forums. Participating and giving great content in the replies will help in establishing you as an expert in your niche. This will give you a boost in the eyes of the online community. You'll be able to form relationships among the community and get them to be interested in your site and business. Plus, you can place links to your website on your signature every time you make a post! This can increase your rankings and visibility in the search engines.

There really is nothing to marketing online... now all you need is just a lot of time and effort to make your website known across the internet.

Adopted : http://www.selfseo.com/story-19652.php

Why run away?

Internet Marketing - Is it for me?

Why run away when the opportunity knocks at your door. Make sure that you always accept when opportunity provides you with a proven path of success. Don't ignore it just because you have no experience in it.

Never think that "I have nothing in it, I cannot succeed".

The ground is clear. All players are level. You don't have any competition. You don't have to compete with anyone. Just play with your will.

You will succeed!!!