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Archives for the ‘ Business Ideas ’ Category

This post is a follow on from the post I made a few days ago, click here to read it first

Get That Business Coming Your Way!

You like the idea of an online newsletter, and you are beginning to see how this will help you bring in more business to your website. But you do have a few concerns, which is perfectly natural. You need to know that everyone who starts something new, has their own concerns and fears.

Some of the most common question are…

  1. What if I don’t have anything interesting or relevant to write?
  2. Can I keep the quality up over a long period of time?
  3. How do I make links from my pictures to my website?

These are just a sample of the questions that are asked…but never fear! This is so much easier than it sounds.

The thing you need to be concerned about IS WHEN you are going to DO IT! Stop with the excuses, just begin and you will realize how simple it really is.

  1. You do need to remember that you must always offer something that is of interest or very useful to your reader.
  2. Keep your newsletter fairly short. So many these days have more than enough emails to read, and they don’t have time to read a long newsletter. They will like the fact that they can read it quickly and get something from it.
  3. You want the best format possible for your follow up emails, so put some thought into this process. You want a model that you can use week after week, which by the way makes your job easier.Below are a few ideas that you can use as your standard format, choose one or combine them, whatever fits your personality.

I. Tip of the Month

Here you will come up with some great tips that focus on your main products. Do a bit of brainstorming giving you two or three months of content. If you are focusing on an area that you are familiar with, it should be easy. Some of the topics can be offering and explaining the problem, then offer a tip that will solve the problem.

II. The Famous “Top Ten” list

This format is so popular because it works. If you are an expert in Doll Collecting, then write your article about “Top Ten Reasons to start Doll Collecting”. Keep your sentences short.

III. Three Different Ways to….

Sometimes it can be difficult to find ten ways to do something, but you can always find three ways to do it. This can be done alternately with your Top Ten newsletters.

IV. The “Before and After” approach

You can use this much like you would the “Tip of the Month” format. You will introduce a problem with the solution. This format works best when you can include case studies which is an excellent way if interacting with your customers on a direct level. You may even ask your customers for some examples of their ‘before and after’ and if they will give their permission to share it with your readers. If your format is in text only, you can include a link to show pictures on your website.

V. What about “Checklists”

If you want to share something new with your readers, a great way to do this is with checklists. Be sure to include all the steps, and these check lists will help save your readers a lot of time, which they will love. You will begin by writing a short paragraph which introduces your topic, include your list, the end it with some final tips. You can format your entire newsletter on the checklist formula, or present it randomly.

Now you can see that online newsletters aren’t as difficult as you first thought. Get your list and get started, no excuses.

Today I want to talk about online newsletters and how these can bring in even more business for you. This is a very cost-effective way to market and will not eat up all of your time.

Whether you are mailing your newsletters out through the post office, or sending them out via email, this is a great way to increase the recognition of your brand, bringing in repeat business and sharing your experience and story and success with your readers.

  1. You are going to first put your list together of your current customers along with any potential customers. Any names that you have collected from inquiries, direct mail response cards, etc…that you have from the beginning of your marketing endeavors, will be the start of your list. If you don’t have a list, and you have some money set aside, you can purchase a list, giving you names of the best potential customers.
  2. If you are doing an online newsletter, it is best to include a content manager system. This will make your editing much easier with a newsletter template, your graphics and giving it your own style. You will have a little bit to learn, but you will have a lot of fun doing it. If you need help through the process, call a college student, they will be a great resource. Another option would be to hire somebody at Guru.com at great cheap prices.
  3. Next you want to have a feature that allows you to track bounce back emails to help you manage. your list, deleting these names from your list. It is really important to keep your list up to date. Now, your goal is to increase sales, but you need to make this an easy process for your readers because they all have very busy schedules, so you need to show off your products in the very best manner. Below are some tips to help you do this and achieve greater financial success from your email marketing.
  • Include pictures all throughout
  • Show details in these pictures
  • The pictures need to be bright and cheery
  • Make the picture a link to the sales page or product information page.
  • Be sure to add a text link which is associated with your product picture which links to the online product page
  • Include the ability to order directly from your newsletter with purchase buttons
  • When you have a new product, make sure you have direct links in the website, making it easy for them to get there without any extra navigating.

If you still have concerns about your new online newsletter, …just know you can do it… I will go over tomorrow some of your biggest questions… such as “What do I say?”, or “How much time will this take?”, or “How do I set up the links?”. Well, we will answer these questions in our next blog post. Stay tuned…

Affiliate Programs and How They Can Boost Your Income

What Do You Know About Affiliate Marketing?

As you already know, Internet marketing uses the Internet to market products as well as their promotion. You can be using this method to promote your own products or the products of others.

This is where we get into the affiliate programs and how they can benefit you financially by earning commission on the quality products you are promoting for others.

There are several avenues of marketing that you can use such as your website and web pages, personal blogs and Email Opt-in lists. You are going to promote the product with a squeeze page or promotional letter, In your letter, you will include an affiliate link which will contain the affiliate identifier.

With your affiliate identifier link, your visitors will click on the link, be sent to the product sales page or website, and with their purchase, you will be given a percentage of the sales price. This is very similar to sales in brick and mortar stores, however with an affiliate program, your part is very simple and self running. All you need to do is do the initial set up and optimize the traffic.

You need to realize though that Not All Affiliate Programs are the same, so choose wisely.

What you need to know and look for in choosing the right affiliate program:

1) Training and Support

Affiliate programs will usually provide training and support, which is crucial for those just starting out on Internet Marketing. This is so important as it will be the only way for you to become effective as well as profitable. You need to look for affiliate which offers sufficient training and the know how in selling their product. There are however, Internet marketers who have experienced great success in affiliates without the training and support, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that training and support?

2) Look for High Commissions

You are going to put in the effort to bring in the traffic to the affiliate product with your sales pitch, then directing the customers to the affiliate sales page, and for your well earned efforts, you will receive a percentage of the sale in form of commissions. As you look at the different Affiliate programs to market, look at the amount of commission they offer, some are hardly worth your effort.

The most popular site to promote affiliate programs is Clickbank. You will soon see that Clickbank is the largest online marketplace on the Internet. Clickbank places hundreds of thousands of products which are sold on a daily basis. There are some that pay up to 75% of the purchase price.

3) Affiliate Referral Programs

There are a few programs that will offer you a chance to recommend their affiliate programs yourself. This sill ultimately award you with a greater percentage of all the sales generated for the program you recommend. This is where your viral marketing techniques will come in effect, the more you recommend, the more money you will make.

4) Triple Combination; Affiliate Training and Support, Referral Commission and Product Commission

You will be happy to know that there are some programs out there that offer the best of all three worlds of affiliate marketing. You can have all of these with training to help you in your marketing efforts. A wonderful example of this is the Internet Marketing Center’s Affiliate program. With this combination, you can reap huge commission benefits.

You can make some good money with Internet marketing bringing you closer and closer to your goal of financial freedom. But remember, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort.

Can I Use RSS FEEDS To Increase Traffic?

Traffic is something we all want when it comes to our websites and blogs. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one method that is rising to the top is through RSS FEEDS.

I recently wrote an article on “what is an RSS feed, and how to Set them up“. Here is the followup article to that. If you haven’t read the first one yet, click here to do so now.

What does RSS stand for? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Remote Site Syndication. They both mean the same thing, so it doesn’t really matter what you call it. No matter the name, it works as a great traffic generating tool. You could go to any popular news website and see the feed options. This is a great way to stay on top of the latest headlines and news all over the world.

How Do You Get RSS Feeds?

You subscribe by clicking on the RSS button, then you will automatically get the news into your reader, or a reminder on your homepage. This is a simple way to stay in touch with your favorite websites and blogs. Are there advantages to RSS over Email Marketing?

Yes, and the main advantage is there are never any spam complaints, you have a 100% deliverability without any of the problems. You can usually count on your message being delivered to the readers.

When you have set up your RSS feed, you should submit it to the RSS FEED directories. Your message will have greater exposure to readers. You can do this in a matter of minutes then gain all the benefits.

A great site to read up on this is rssfeedgenerate.com. Here you will find some great instructions on the “How To’s”.

Another recommendation is to check out Mashables RSS Toolbox.

Does RSS Help Search Engine Rankings?

RSS is a fantastic tool for increasing rankings on the search engines, that is if you have it on your website. You probably already know that search engines love the websites that are continually updating their content, and the RSS Feeds will help your website to accomplish this. You will therefore achieve higher rankings on the search engines as well as increasing your website traffic. This is a win-win situation!

The keys to making money on the Internet is to increase your traffic and build up a mailing list. You can do this by using RSS Feeds, if you don’t take advantage of this great tool, you will be missing out and tons of opportunities.

There are 5 Key Points in using RSS Feeds to help you monetize your website and bring in lots of traffic.

  1. Learn how to use RSS Feeds, If you aren’t sure how they work, educate yourself, start using this great tool and become familiar with it.

  2. Attach links from other blogs and websites which will increase your your own popularity and traffic to your links.

  3. Once you set up your RSS Feed, submit it to the RSS directories. This will increase your search engine ranking and increase the popularity of your link.

  4. Keep your RSS Feed up to date which will have your site indexed by the search engines frequently.

  5. Take advantage of the RSS Press Release. You will be able to use this instead of email marketing, helping you to spread your information and news to your readers the moment it comes in.

  6. This is great for real-time advertising. Let’s say for example that you have a client that wants a particular product that you currently out of. You can use RSS to notify him when it comes available. Your customer will be well served and this will increase their loyalty to you. You will be taking care of your clients which will bring more money to you.

  7. It is so important to create your own Brand! You are establishing your own credibility which is huge in this business. You will be putting your name out in front your readers just by using RSS Feeds. You will eventually become a trusted source of information.

You should now have a few ideas on how RSS Feeds can be used to generate traffic which is the key to your success.

Affiliate Programs and How They Can Boost Your Income

What Do You Know About Affiliate Marketing

As you already know, Internet marketing uses the Internet to market products as well as their promotion. You can be using this method to promote your own products or the products of others.

This is where we get into the affiliate programs and how they can benefit you financially by earning commission on the quality products you are promoting for others.

There are several avenues of marketing that you can use such as your website and web pages, personal blogs and Email Opt-in lists. You are going to promote the product with a squeeze page or promotional letter, In your letter, you will include an affiliate link which will contain the affiliate identifier.

With your affiliate identifier link, your visitors will click on the link, be sent to the product sales page or website, and with their purchase, you will be given a percentage of the sales price. This is very similar to sales in brick and mortar stores, however with an affiliate program, your part is very simple and self running. All you need to do is do the initial set up and optimize the traffic.

You need to realize though that Not All Affiliate Programs are the same, so choose wisely.

What you need to know and look for in choosing the right affiliate program:

1) Training and Support

Affiliate programs will usually provide training and support, which is crucial for those just starting out on Internet Marketing. This is so important as it will be the only way for you to become effective as well as profitable. You need to look for affiliate which offers sufficient training and the know how in selling their product. There are however, Internet marketers who have experienced great success in affiliates without the training and support, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that training and support?

2) Look for High Commissions

You are going to put in the effort to bring in the traffic to the affiliate product with your sales pitch, then directing the customers to the affiliate sales page, and for your well earned efforts, you will receive a percentage of the sale in form of commissions. As you look at the different Affiliate programs to market, look at the amount of commission they offer, some are hardly worth your effort.

clickbank

The most popular site to promote affiliate programs is Clickbank. You will soon see that Clickbank is the largest online marketplace on the Internet. Clickbank places hundreds of thousands of products which are sold on a daily basis. There are some that pay up to 75% of the purchase price.

3) Affiliate Referral Programs

There are a few programs that will offer you a chance to recommend their affiliate programs yourself. This sill ultimately award you with a greater percentage of all the sales generated for the program you recommend. This is where your viral marketing techniques will come in effect, the more you recommend, the more money you will make.

4) Triple Combination; Affiliate Training and Support, Referral Commission and Product Commission

You will be happy to know that there are some programs out there that offer the best of all three worlds of affiliate marketing. You can have all of these with training to help you in your marketing efforts. A wonderful example of this is the Internet Marketing Center’s Affiliate program. With this combination, you can reap huge commission benefits.

You can make some good money with Internet marketing bringing you closer and closer to your goal of financial freedom. But remember, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort.