Running An Email Marketing Campaign
Posted on May 19, 2008
Filed Under Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
To be completely honest with each of you, I HATE email marketing! Unless, I build my OWN email marketing lists! Email marketing is the fastest way to throw your internet marketing dollars away unless you have personally built your list and have a relationship with your readers. In that case, it will be one of the fastest ways to increase your company revenues and keep revenues high over the coming years.
There are three focal points you need to be aware of when running an email marketing campaign. I will discuss each of them in greater detail below.
Build A Quality, Responsive List
First and foremost, if you want to have success with email marketing, you need to build your own list. I’m going to be blunt, purchasing or renting an email list is a waste of money and the email addresses will be crappy! If you own a website, you need to have a lead capture form on your site collecting first and last names and an email address.
To attract these individuals and make sure that they are quality, you need to offer them something of value. When talking to other internet marketers that I know, they try to offer some free PDF report, or something like that. I just offer a load of quality information for free. That usually seems to do the job, but whatever you choose, make sure that it is of value to the end user. If you offer good advice that is valuable, your list will not only be quality, but they will be responsive to your messages! These two factors make email marketing a powerful tool and money generating machine!
Email Your List With High Quality Information Often
This is huge and very straight forward! NO BODY LIKES A SPAMMER! Yes, you will be spamming them (technically), but it will be with information that is pertaining to a certain subject that they wish to learn about. Once they give you authorization to email them, they will only put up with your emails if they are filled with good content that helps them. If not, be prepared to be marked as spam and possibly be blacklisted!
Test, Test, Test Your Email Creative
This is huge as well and the key to a successful email campaign. First thing you should know about email marketing is, you need to send all emails as the HTML version. I send emails to my lists that are only text, but set them up as an HTML email. This allows for tracking the opening of each email and which links are clicked. These two things are important to know if you plan on testing your email creative.
In testing, have at least three to four options when testing. Test each version of the email creative for at least one week to your entire list. As you compare results, you can clearly see which versions are converting the best for you. Once you have the pegged, you can make the change and make big money!
If there is one thing that I can tell you about email marketing and hope you take from this post, it is, help others and be yourself while doing it. If you act like a human being, talk like a human being in your communications to your list, always provide meaningful content in your emails, and always sign each email with your name and contact info, the members of your list will feel like they have a real friend in you. They will trust you and usually pull the trigger whenever you pitch a product or offer at them.
It is a beautiful and rewarding method of internet marketing… if done correctly!
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Building A Business From Scratch
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 2 Comments
I thought today that I might talk about how I started Encore Solutions from just about nothing into a company that helps people market their services online. As we are approaching our one year anniversary as a company, I was thinking about everything that we have gone through to become a successful company. Last July, I was pretty depressed and hated my current job. I wanted more than anything to be my own boss and help other people build their online presence through internet marketing.
I phoned my younger brother one day and threw down a business plan over the phone. He had no experience with internet marketing, but wanted to be a part of something fun and new. It was exactly then that I realized that I was going to be a business owner. As I thought more about what I was going to be embarking on, I was quite scared. I had no idea how a little guy was going to come into the industry and make it. I also wondered how I was going to finance such an operation. At the time, I was doing internet marketing for a market research (paid survey) company here in Orem. I had been taking paid surveys on the internet for the last few years from three companies and making about $200 a month doing it. I decided that I was going to sign up for three more companies and take my earning from the six companies and roll it into our business.
When starting, I had about $600 from paid surveys that I had earned throughout June and July and we spent about $300 more that we put on a low interest rate credit card. This paid for us to register our company with the state of Utah ($52), open a savings and checking account at the local credit union ($25), buy a book of company checks ($20), purchase a year of web hosting for three websites from a company called Host Monster ($116), purchase a killer website template to build our company website ($50), purchase Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks to help build our websites ($300), purchase an Article Marketer account to help promote our business ($200), and a few other necessary expenses needed for us to go into business.
Two weeks later, we had landed our first client and business exploded from there. Today, we have helped many different types of companies develop their business on the internet. Internet marketing is a powerful tool that can lead to greater sales and increased revenues. To be successful at anything today, whether it is starting a business or marketing your business online, you need a plan, persistence, patience, and dedication. Without these, you are destined to fail and lose a lot of money.
It has been a fun trip over the last year, especially with the launch of Web Vizion. I hope that this post has helped you realize what potential you have to make good things happen. It doesn’t take a lot of money, just hard work!
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Building An Email Marketing List
Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
I was talking to an individual last night who has been trying to break into the internet marketing industry for the last few months. Discouraged, he talked about how hard it was for him to make money online. He has poured a lot of money and even more time into his venture than most normal people do and still has no results to show for his labors. He asked me how I make money doing what I do. It is simple, I have high quality email lists that I blast to on a regular basis.
Yes, my websites do quite well for me each day, but the real money in internet marketing is through capturing your visitors first and last name and their email address. Once you convince them that it is ok to give up this information, you have permission to email them as frequently as you would like. In doing so, you would ultimately send them offers that they can sign up for make you a commission each time it happens.
So the million dollar question remains, how do you build a quality email list. First, you have to have the proper software to populate a capture form on your website or blog. I use an email marketing software called Send Studio. Send Studio is a solid email marketing platform that can be used on as many websites as you would like. The reason I chose to go with Send Studio is because of the one time fee of $279. No monthly fees like other sites like AWeber or GetResponse. Each of these services cost around $20 a month, I think. They are great services, I just want to pay once and have a solid system.
Second, you have to get visitors to your site, or your capture form location. How do you do this? One, you can market your website online through various methods. You can do a ton of SEO to get your site ranked and get organic visitors. Or third, you can purchase or rent an email list to blast to yourself. Once you have access to a list of individuals who may or may not be interested in your list, you can blast them an email asking them to either visit your site, or opt into your list.
Third, you need to offer them something of value. If you don’t, good luck getting them to accept your offer to opt in. You can offer free advice about a particular subject related to your site. A PDF report about a particular subject to your site. Anything that might catch their interest and cause them to opt in will work.
Sweet, we have now established how to begin building your list. So, once you have people opting in, what do you do? You need to have a series of auto responders set up to go out to your list. These auto responders can not be sales pitch after sales pitch or you will lose the responsiveness of the email list that you have built. You need to genuinely want to show these people that you want to help them. Teach them all about the subject they want to learn. As you do, you can offer them products or services that will help them. These can be free or cost money. Offer them stuff that you, yourself have tried. This usually will get them to buy, if you have taken the time and put forth the effort to build a relationship with them. When they buy, you will receive an affiliate commission.
Over the coming months and years, you can continue to sell them over and over again providing you with a continual stream of income. Email marketing coupled with affiliate marketing is by far the most powerful form of internet marketing that there is. By leveraging its power, you too can become a master internet marketer and take your company or website to the next level.
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Is There A Future In SEO? My Answer Is Yes…
Posted on May 8, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment
Yesterday evening, I was reading a blog called ShoeMoney, some of you may have heard of it, some probably not. Apparently he did an interview about SEO and the future of the industry. In his interview he was quick to voice his opinion about SEO and how it has no future. I couldn’t disagree more! Anyone who thinks that SEO is slowly fading into the past is completely out of their mind and this is why…
Evolution of The Search Engines
Yes the search engines (especially Google) will change and evolve into something new on a continual basis. Google has changed so many things over the last few years that make it harder for black hat SEO techniques to be effective. It also put some limitation on real SEO’s and how they help their clients rank. Did we cry? Did we all throw up our hands in defeat? NO! We evolve with it and make it work again. No mater how much Google changes over the coming years, good SEO’s will adapt and continue to dominate the search engine rankings.
The Power of Link Building
Building links is always going to help a website rank. The voting system is here to stay regardless of what anybody says. It is truly the only fair way to asses how much authority a website has regarding a particular keyword(s). If you want to dominate the search engine rankings now and for years to come, you need to be building massive amounts of links to your site.
Meta Tags
Don’t see meta tags going anywhere anytime soon… These little babies are essential for telling Google exactly what your website is about. As soon as Google starts picking up links to your website, they will then go to your site and take a deeper look at things. It is then that they will asses exactly what you do and why you are there. They will categorize your site with a certain topic or keyword and you will start showing up in the search engines.
I could probably go on and on about my reasoning for this, but I’m too busy to do so. It is quite sad that one individual thinks that SEO is on its way out, because it’s just not happening. Best of luck to Mr. ShoeMoney in his endeavors.
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Internet Marketing Mix
Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click | 3 Comments
I am frequently asked why it is important to have a sound internet marketing mix. Well, because it’s important to diversify the traffic that is coming to your website. Don’t get me wrong, it is vital that you segment the market that you want to target, but you don’t want all of your traffic coming from just one source, hell, you don’t even want it coming from two or three sources. I learned in a Principles of Finance class about diversifying your portfolio to reduce the amount of risk you take when investing. It is the exact same with internet marketing and generating quality leads online. The more solid your marketing mix is, the better chance that you will get a higher quality traffic, with just a few losers here and there.
In order to diversify your internet marketing mix, you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture and what you want to accomplish. Some methods of internet marketing don’t work for certain businesses or industries. You need to pick the perfect blend to maximize your return on your investment. There are so many different forms of internet marketing that you can consider and choose from. Of course, there is the monster, Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN ads, affiliate marketing, co registration, pop ups and pop unders, email marketing, display advertising, and the list can go on and on.
Each of these methods of internet marketing has its advantages and disadvantages and that is why it is so important to have a balance among the methods. You may have an affiliate campaign that completely thrives and a co registration campaign that suffers. When you take how much you spent on each campaign and average it out among all conversions, your damage will be greatly reduced than if you just chose to do co registration and ended up getting hammered.
I can think of two really good examples that have happened to me over the last year. Just recently, a client of ours asked us to perform an email campaign for them. Being that we aren’t skilled in that area or have a list to blast to, we outsourced to a company called Prospects Influential. We were pressed for time and had to meet a deadline and took their offers and theirs only. In the end, we lost about $2,000 of our own money (since we did not charge the client) because we had one conversion off the entire campaign. If we would have allocated that $2,000 through a few different types of internet marketing, our losses would have been reduced greatly.
The second example is a positive one. We were doing some co registration for a client recently and placed their offer on ten different registration paths. Three of those paths suffered greatly with conversion under 2%. The rest of the paths converted at over 12% allowing the client to have a greater average conversion. Yeah it still sucked that they put money into three sites that didn’t convert, but the success with the other seven paths far outweighed the losses on the three.
I hope that you can clearly see how powerful a planned and executed internet marketing mix can be for your company. It is vital to your success if you want to make it big in your industry.
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