email marketing II

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Email Marketing For Your Business

By: Campbell Shaw

Email Marketing has become the easiest and one of the most effective ways to sell your products and services on the internet. Many people make Thousands and some even millions by using this means of advertising.

The first way of using Email Marketing is by using an Opt-in list. This is where you will pay a company to use their list. Hint before doing so make sure they are a reputable company. The cost will vary from company to company but is relatively cheap. The downside to this is that you are sending your email to a broad audience. Some companies will have a more defined audience for you to choose from. Again do some research.

The second is the cheapest and most effective way of Email Marketing is to build a list of your own. Have an email form on your website so people can join.

This can be done in many ways, here are a couple of ideas.

Start your own Newsletter informing customers and future customers about new products, sales or special promotions.

Have a Newsletter on helping others with building a successful business and tell them about the business tools that you use. These are only a couple of ideas. Get creative.

Having your own list means that the people on it are there for a reason. So your audience is very targeted.

Kill 2 birds with 1 stone....What??
You can purchase an Opt-in list and advertise your Newsletter. So you are advertising to a broad audience, but you will narrow them down to the ones that sign-up to your Newsletter.

To really take advantage of this powerful marketing resource, make sure that your emails are catchy and to the point. Otherwise all of your work will have gone to waste.

Also, Never use a persons email address for your Email Marketing if they haven`t Joined your list or given you permission to do so. Nobody likes to get Spammed and it will ruin your reputation and credibility.

Email Marketing is a very effective way to reach thousands, even millions of prospective customers. So get cracking and start building your own list.

All the best,

Campbell Shaw

Author Resource:->

Campbell Shaw Works At Home as a full-time internet marketer. Find Real Internet Businesses that are successful and have been tested and proven by the experts.

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email marketing

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Social Marketing vs Search Engine Marketing

By: Jess Baad

So you have a website but do you get enough traffic? The number of page views your website gets determines its success. What's a website worth anyway if only gets a few page views.

There are several ways of increasing the traffic to your website. We'll discuss only social marketing, which is getting popular, and search engine marketing.

Social Marketing

A lot of people are joining social communities and social bookmarkings these days. These sites allow you to interact with other people who are interested in different topics and many of them operates a blog.

Social Communities

These sites allow you to insert your profile for other members to see. Most of these sites allow you to insert your blog or website. You get traffic from these sites by participating in discussions and interacting with members. It's mostly about getting friendly and getting noticed.

If you get popular with these sites, you may get a lot of traffic and some search engine popularity through blogroll exchanges and link loves.

Social Bookmarking

These sites allow you to bookmark your favorite web pages, not just your own. However, bookmarking only your webpages can decrease your rank so you need to bookmark other web pages too.

You get traffic when others sees your bookmark and clicks on the link. Since your link are there, it may also gain some search engine popularity.

The Cons for Social Sites

Huge traffic comes if you actively participate in these sites. That would become too tedious in the long run. If your participation wanes, so is your traffic. One other thing, members of these sites also have a website to promote, so their interest to your website would not be so much.

Search Engine Marketing

Traffic which comes from search engines are people who are looking for information in the internet. When they find your site from the search results and click on the link, they are most probably interested on the subject. In all likelihood, they may be interested to what you are promoting.

To get your pages included in the search engine's results page, your pages need to be popular for them. Popularity means having many websites are linking to your site.

Several ways are available for you to get links. Submitting your site to link directories, buying links(not recommended), engaging in link exchanges with other websites etc.

Getting links from other sites is not enough, you need to get your links to sites which are related to your website. To the search engines, the link with a related subject must be important as it pertains to the content of the website.

The anchor text is also very important when other sites link to you. So when you are submitting to link directories or whatever, you need to place your keyword as the anchor text.

One very good way of acquiring links is to submit articles to article directories. You get to insert your website's url with an anchor text of your choice. Many webmasters search article directories to find content for their website so your article can be published to other websites together with your link.

Submit articles often and in no time, you'll get enough traffic from search engines. For sure traffic from search engines are people who are interested in what they are searching for which could be profitable for you.

What's Your Choice?

Whether you choose social marketing or search engine marketing, you have a chance of to increase your website traffic if you involve yourself diligently and put your heart to it.

Author Resource:-> The author has a hub page on how to increase website traffic.

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Starting a Business

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Starting a Business – What is a Business Plan?

By: William King

So you've decided to start your own business - congratulations! It's a huge leap from letting someone else take care of taxes, accounting, payroll, inventory, and/or a myriad of other activities necessary to run a business. However, running your own business has its advantages, too. You get to be your own boss, set your own hours and days to work, and are responsible for your own success. It can be a great way to free yourself from the tedium of 9-5 and work at doing what you love, but you have to begin by asking a few questions:

1. Are you doing what you love, or just doing something you’re good at? A desire to get away from the regular working world can be a good motivation to work for yourself, but you have to be excited to get up in the morning to do what it is you have chosen to do for a living.




2. What is it you are planning to do? What niche is it going to fill? Is there a need for what you can provide? Will the market bear another entry?




3. What technical skills or talents do you have? Just being able to do something may not be marketable enough to convince customers or financiers that you are a good financial investment.




4. Who are your competitors in your chosen profession and how are you going to do it better? Why should customers come to you? What do you have to offer that no one else does?

Once you are satisfied with the answers to these questions, it is time for the decision of what kind of business structure you will use. Will you be a sole proprietor, responsible for every facet and the penultimate authority as to how to run the business? Will you enter in with a partner, the better to share the cost and workload, but also the profits and the business decisions? Perhaps the decision will be made to incorporate, with its financial safeguards but more complex and costly structure? At this stage, legal advice is recommended, if only so that you fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of your chosen structuring plan. Many lawyers will provide a free or reduced-rate primary consultation, though often not more than an hour. When the structure is finalized, a name for the business should be decided upon, if not already having been done so in advance. It should be easy to remember, avoid initials and single letters (B & L & R, Inc. will be difficult to remember for customers) and try to say something about the business (Bob’s House of Hobbies is easier to remember and spell).

Next, a business plan is a vital step in laying out all these topics and proposals in a standardized format. A good business plan serves as a formal statement of the new company’s goals, financing, structure and legal considerations. It acts as a “resume” to prospective investors and is the primary documentation they will use to evaluate whether or not your business will be worth investing into. It also provides the proprietor(s) with a chance to see the workings of the new business in black and white. A basic business plan should at the least contain a balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flow, as well as a proposed financial budget for the first year, or as long a period as necessary if a year is impractical.

So with these quick tips, plan for success, and good luck in your chosen endeavor!

© 2006, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.

Author Resource:-> William King is the director of UK Wholesale Suppliers, Wholesale Suppliers , Dropshipping Directory and Pakistan Property Portal . He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

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Internet Marketing With Postcards

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Internet Marketing With Postcards

By: Joy Gendusa

On-Line Marketing Strategies

These days an internet marketing strategy plays a vital role in the overall marketing plan of any small business. Getting your website viewed is important for any size business - large or small.

Remember: You cannot put up a terrific web site on-line and hope that people will just arrive. You have to let your prospects know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, that your web site is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet Marketing Strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle. Unless you have something as needed and wanted as the original and authentic Fountain of Youth, your customers are not going to look for you; you have to look for them.

There is a lot of hullabaloo about promoting your web site. In fact, building traffic to your web site is the subject of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote your site, however, still assumes that your customers are surfers. Even though you may be an avid internet user, there is a large percentage of our population that are not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.

So, what do you do about this large percentage of the population who are not internet adept? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.

Off-Line Marketing Strategies

Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies are still alive. I recently read a statistic of the US Postal Service that stated that consumers spend an average of 25 minutes with Direct Mail and 30 minutes with catalogs. (There are more facts in the Mail Moment series of free white papers form the USPS.) Yes, they may go through their mail like Speed Racer and cull through the mail they want and the mail they don’t want at record velocity; but those that catch their eye and grab their attention, they actually read and spend time doing so.

You need to tap into that market and utilize that statistic. Become part of that pile of mail that your prospective consumer spends time reading. Direct Mail should be a pivotal point of your on-line marketing strategy. You need to ensure that you have a direct mail marketing campaign to drive traffic to your web site.

Other Marketing Avenues

Below is a small list of some of the ways to make your web site known (this list was taken directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken Evoy's brilliant book, Make Your Site Sell):

• TV, print and other advertising

• Stationary and business cards

• Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.

• Direct mail (prominently on every document)

• Telemarketing (make it part of the script)

• News releases to targeted media.

The main principle, to which you can add all your imagination, is:

AN INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY INCLUDES ANY AND ALL MEANS OF GETTING YOUR WEB SITE KNOWN AND VISITED BY TARGETED PROSPECTS.

Unless you have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere. Make it part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing activities should make it easy for your prospect to go straight to your site. One of the best ways to market your website off-line is direct mail postcards.

What is So Great About Postcards?

If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she is driving home, she probably will not look you up when she gets to the office the next day.

This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers are bulky, radio has to spell it out and with billboards most people are driving at the time. On the other hand, if your prospect is sitting at her computer and a postcard comes in the mail announcing your web site, she can just turn around and type in your URL and she's at your web site.

Now, if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes across an article about you in the magazine, it is not difficult for him to copy your URL into his browser and pay your site a visit. If they are not in the office, there will be a lag time in logging into your web site. Also a percentage of those journal readers may not write the web address down or even remember to check out your site.

I do not mean to say that those other avenues will not drive traffic to your site, but it will take numerous impressions and repetition to get them to remember your address.

On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received at the home or office where a computer is present, and if received somewhere else they are small enough to keep with you until you can get to a computer. This way, your prospective customer will be able to take the postcard right over to their desk top computer, type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!

I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion with direct mail, and specifically direct mail postcards. The most successful people on the internet market with Direct Mail to drive traffic to their site. The virtual world is just that – virtual. It really is not the real world so if you want your virtual business to be creditable in the real world, apply real world principles. Direct Mail Postcard Marketing will give you the credibility that you seek and will drive copious amounts of traffic to your web site. Ah, nirvana!

Author Resource:-> Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania (www.PostcardMania.com) in 1998, her only assets a computer and a phone. By 2005 the company did over $12 million in sales, employed over 100 people and made Inc. Magazine’s prestigious Inc 500 List as one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the nation. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy.

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Importance of Branding

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Importance of Branding: What's in a Name?

By: William King

Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company's brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's just "that girl in that picture." Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways" is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time someone asks about it. This makes the process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet. A customer looking up Bob's hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's House of Hobbies," and the customer can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.

Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and house wares.

Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains' technique of "grocery discount cards" or "loss leaders," meant to draw consumers into the store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers being less sensitive to price changes of their favorite brands (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors' incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as much money to gain a customer as it does to retain one. That's 5 times as much money as could have been spent on other things.

A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling--it is as important as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.

© 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.

Author Resource:-> William King is the director of UK Wholesale Suppliers, Wholesale Suppliers , Drop shipping Directory and Pakistan Property Portal . He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

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