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There are so many different internet-based marketing techniques available for a website business owner. All of them are useful and effective methods that can bring in the customers in varying degrees of success. Some of them may entail a lot of money while others are inexpensive.

But of all the available marketing methods that can be employed to promote your business, email marketing is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective yet cost-efficient methods.

Unlike click-based forms of internet marketing (where you rely on a prospective client to click on a link to read about your business), email marketing is far more profitable and effective in helping you achieve your marketing goals. For example, email marketing in the form of sending e-zines or newsletters to clients via e-mail not only helps you create a growing list of faithful readers you are also targeting your marketing efforts on a specific market or demographic that would be the most responsive to your products or services.

An email marketing effort is a very effective marketing strategy for a number of reasons. The regular emails that you send to your customer database helps you build a stronger relationship with both your existing clients as well as prospective new ones. Clients would feel that they are part of a club or a circle for being included in your mailing list.

The fact that people download their email daily works for you too. This is because they will always see your email marketing efforts on a daily basis if you do decide to make a daily email marketing strategy. The familiarity of it breeds between you and your clients can help ensure that you strengthen your bonds with them. This frequency is also a good way of building customer loyalty. Your constant email marketing efforts will help them feel like they are valuable to you. Choose your frequency of contact wisely though. You don’t want to bombard your subscribers. Email when you have something really good or usefull to say or offer. It’s good to let your subscribers or clients know before hand at what frequency you send out newsletters.

Email marketing, when done correctly, can also save you time and money. Emails are inexpensive and is the cheapest form of marketing medium for your marketing campaign. It also saves time because you can fire off an email to thousands of clients with just one click of the mouse.

One of the most important benefits of email marketing is that it is so easy for people to get into your customer database. People who are looking for information will sign on or subscribe as long as their need for information is satisfied. If your email marketing efforts are successfully addressing the needs of your demographic you can just sit back and watch your customer database grow in terms of people wanting to get into your mailing list. A significant percentage of that will surely try your business so it also translates to sales.

Email marketing efforts also help build your brand. You can implement strong email-based branding efforts and combine it with your regular email marketing mailers to make it more potent and meet various marketing and business goals more efficiently.

Other Articles on Email Marketing

• Start an email newsletter
• Build an Opt-in List
• Newsletter Formatting

Newsletters are a great way to communicate to your customers and bring them back to your site. Here are some quick tips to start a great newsletter program:

Newsletter Content. Your newsletter is a valuable marketing tool to spread the word about what’s happening with your site. If your Website is strictly retail, it’s appropriate to send a newsletter showcasing new designs or new products. However, if your Website is content driven, create a newsletter that’s relevant to your Website with updates, tips or anything that is newsworthy to your subscribers with a featured story or product.

Relevant and Interesting Subject Lines. Get your newsletter noticed in a crowded in-box with a relevant, interesting subject line. Do not mislead your subscribers with a subject line that is not relevant or completely off topic. This may get your subscribers to open your newsletter the first time, but can cause you to lose subscribers over time or cause them to immediately unsubscribe from receiving future newsletters.

Stay on a Schedule. Do your best to stay consistent with your newsletters. Whether you send it weekly, bi-monthly or monthly, your subscribers will know when to expect your next newsletter.

Don’t Over Email. If you are sending to the same list of subscribers, it’s best to send no more than once a week. If you do send weekly, make sure that your content is fresh and relevant so your subscribers do not become bored and unsubscribe.

From: Email Address. Make sure the “From: email address” is clear. Similar to the rule of subject lines, do not mislead your subscribers. Put your Company or Website on the “From: email address”. If your Website is a Blog or there is a company spokesperson, put their name.

The majority of newsletter subscribers opt to have their newsletter formatted in HTML so it’s good to send attractive emails filled with nice graphics and lots of pertinent info. Formatting newsletters in HTML doesn’t have to be a pain. If you are planning on offering a newsletter we recommend that you use a third party company to handle all of your email campaigns.

Aweber

Aweber Communications develops and manages online opt-in email newsletters, follow-up automation, and email deliverability services for small business customers around the world. You can access their website 24/7 to manage and send your newsletters to recipients who have specifically opted in on your website. Use can use their integrated Web Form Generator, with video tutorials, to create unblockable pop-ups or standard forms that are easily installed on your website without programming experience.

Configure unlimited follow up and newsletter messages with name personalization, click thru and open rate tracking, attachments, RSS, and split testing at no additional cost. Messages can include HTML using our 51+ pre-designed templates, or create your own with the integrated editor and images or plain text.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the leading provider of web-based email marketing software for small to mid-sized businesses and organizations. With their easy-to-use wizard, over 100 eye-catching email templates, list management features, email tracking and reporting, and high deliverability, Constant Contact makes it easy for you to communicate with your customers and visitors – and keep them coming back!

TemplateZone

TemplateZone offers professional email templates so you can easily choose from hundreds of html email templates to customize and send out directly from your computer.

Need help with business and sales letters?

WriteExpress offers a suite of sales and business letter templates you can easily use if you are at a loss for words when writing an email sales letter. They offer 3,001 award-winning business, sales and personal letters, hundreds of additional sales and fundraising letters, plus free bonuses.

Newsletter Formatting Resources

• Aweber – Control all of your newsletter campaigns with Aweber. Also receive free HTML newsletter templates. Best Value
• Constant Contact – Do it yourself email marketing – customizable templates – reporting

Positioning is about creating unique products or services that stand out from the crowd. To win a customers business is to position your product or service in a way that it grabs them and makes them want to buy, even if they know another business offers the same thing.

Be Unique!

Being unique takes some creativity. Some ways you can help your product stand out are:

Pricing:

This is usually the first thing people think of when they want to offer an advantage. You can use price to create a difference. For instance you could undercut your competitors and offer the cheapest product of its kind in the market. Alternately, you can create an upmarket product and sell at a premium price. Check out this article on Pricing your product for more info.

Quality:

Quality is another way to distinguish what you sell from all the rest. You can give your customers assurance that your product is the best by listing features, testimonials, product comparisons, celebrity endorsements, warranties, refund policies etc. If you claim a certain quality standard then be willing to back that up. Packaging is another way you can show that your product is top notch.

Service:

Service is not just for service providers, but for products as well. Do you offer customer service and support? Often you need to help the customer through the buying process. And what about after-sales support? Training? People want great service and when they find a company who has great service they are more willing to return and refer their friends.

Distribution:

How do customers obtain your product or service? Do you offer on-site service or instantly downloadable digital goods? Or do customers have to come to you? The easier your product is to distribute the more likely customers will be willing to buy. If you sell digital goods offer instant delivery via download to give your customers immediate satisfaction.

Packaging:

Packaging makes a strong statement. Appropriate design is the key issue here – it must deliver the message you intend. A cruise down a supermarket aisle will illustrate this. You can tell the biscuit section at a glance because there is consistency in how biscuits are packaged. A closer inspection, however, reveals a myriad of different colours and configurations. The trick is to be “the same but different!” You could try to pack your cookies in a coffee jar, but will that be too radical for the average biscuit-buyer to accept?

Likewise those offering their services must “package” themselves: this can come down to how your office is decorated, what uniforms your staff wear, even how your business stationery looks. All must reflect the unique image you are trying to portray.

Above all, make sure all the information you need to convey is contained in your packaging: ingredients, warnings, instructions, contact details, special promotions etc. etc. etc.

Identify your Strengths

Positioning is your competitive strategy. What’s the one thing you do best? What’s unique about your product or service? Identify your strongest strength and use it to position your product.

Ultimately, you want to use positioning to make sure it is your product or service – not your competitor’s – that springs to mind when a customer wants/needs something.

Being first in mind equals ownership. And market ownership allows you to be a big fish in a small pond. When you’re a big fish, you can always increase the size of the pond… or create even more ponds.

Market Research Resources

• About.com’s 4 part article on Market Research
• Dobney.com’s Basics of Market Research
• Pricing Your Product

One of the most important things to a businesses success is a successful marketing campaign. It is no different for online businesses. Online marketing is sometimes overlooked or not paid enough attention to. Below is some information we have put together to make sure you have a marketing plan in place to see to it that your business grows and prospers.

Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing.

Inbound marketing includes researching to find out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers (markets) might have which specific needs
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how your product might be designed to meet the need
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (”packaging”)
4. How much customers might be willing to pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who your competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product so that customers buy from your organization, rather than from your competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified – its personality – to be most identifiable (naming and branding)

Outbound marketing includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on your organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

Too often, people jump right to the outbound marketing. As a result, they often end up trying to push products onto people who really don’t want them. Effective inbound marketing research often results in much more effective outbound marketing and sales.

Gaining Traffic

Traffic is the most important thing for any website. It’s your visitors that generate revenue by clicking on your adsense ads, by following your affiliate links to make a purchase or purchasing products from your website. It is very important to build up traffic to your site if you want it to generate any amount of money.

There are a lot of services around that web that guarantee increased traffic. I however steer clear of any paid services that claim to generate traffic because with a little work you can generate unlimited amounts of traffic yourself for free. I’m talking about what is known as SEO (search engine optimization) or what I like to call website publicity. Generating free organic traffic to your site doesn’t cost money, it just takes time and effort.

I’m not going to go into lengthy details on SEO. I’m just going to give you quick tips on what you can do to start generating traffic to your site in your spare time. Of course the more effort you put into it the more traffic you can generate. Just remember more traffic equals more revenue. (more…)

Don’t have a list of signed up subscribers to your newsletter? Start building your list now!

Here’s how:

Add a “Newsletter Sign up Form” to your Website. This will allow visitors on your Website the option to receive communication from you. To get started, you can sign up for a service, enabling you to collect a database of subscribers. You can do this by signing up with an newsletter email service such as aweber which gives you the code to put on your site or creating a simple form yourself that sends you an email letting you know someone has signed up.

Co-market with a complementary site. Market your “brand” on a complementary Website and grow your subscriber list there. Cross promote to each other’s Website or create a co-registration.

Host a Contest or Referral Program. Attract preferred subscribers by providing an incentive for them to subscribe to your list. It can be as simple as a contest, or coupon offer for referring friends that would be interested in the newsletter. However, do beware of the “contest junkie” who may not be a qualified lead.

Make true, compelling offers. When promoting your newsletter, be upfront to your prospective subscribers on what they will get in return. Will your newsletter contain the latest designs and special offers available only to subscribers? Will it contain tips with the latest and greatest updates from your Website? The more compelling marketing incentives with your newsletter, the more your visitors will be genuinely interested in signing up.

A great way to get people to sign up for your newsletter is offering them something free.  The most popular and easiest things to offer as incentives are digital goods that are immediately downloadable.  Offer a free PDF report on the top 10 ways to do something your prospects might be interested in.  Offer a free MP3 of tips or of a teleseminar you did in your industry.  Whatever you offer has to be perceived as highly valuable though, so make it good.

When building your list of subscribers, think quality over quantity. The more qualified and targeted your list, the higher the likelihood of generating sales through it.

Affiliate marketing is of course marketing affiliate products and if you are new to it then there are some e-books and sites that can help you get started. Marketing is a science and to get the most out of your efforts it’s essential to learn how super affiliates achieve such great success.

Super Affiliate Handbook

This is the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earns $435,000+ per year online selling other people’s stuff. It has 236 information-packed pages of practical tips and real-life examples. A must read if you are getting started in Affiliate Marketing.

James Martell Affiliate Marketers Handbook

A proven industry expert with five years of experience publishing websites shares the tactics that have propelled much of his content to the top of the search engines in sixty different industries. This 341 page manual will guide you through the exact processes of publishing high-traffic websites and profiting with performance-based marketing links.

ABestWeb.com

Probably the largest affiliate marketer forum where you can go to find information on affiliate programs.

AssociatePrograms Forum

Another great forum for finding others involved with affiliate marketing. Check out the rest of the site as it has detailed information on affiliate marketing.

The Affiliate Classroom

The Affiliate Classroom specializes in training affiliates and online business entrepreneurs on how to launch and/or grow their business.

There are many ways to advertise your business online. PPC or Pay Per Click models are the quickest way to bring targeted traffic to your site. There are also methods such as banner advertising, ezine advertising and more.

PPC Advertising

Google Adwords

Googles Adwords program is the most popular PPC program out there. They have an extensive interface for managing your PPC campaigns and offer a suite of tools to help you. You can choose to display your ads amongst Google’s search results are on their network of publishers sites. You can also specify where you want your ads to appear geographically.

We Personally Recommend:

Signing up with Google’s Adwords program.

Test drive an ad for your site.

Start with a small amount of money.

Mark your results and try different methods.

Start small and aim high.

Yahoo Search Marketing

YAHOO! SPONSORED SEARCH DRIVES POWERFUL RESULTS

· Reach: With one advertising buy, you can reach over 80% of all Internet users because you can be listed on some of the best search engines and portals on the Web.
· Targeted Leads: Customers who click on your Sponsored Search listings are pre-qualified, motivated and looking for what you have to offer.
· Bottom Line Results: You control the cost of acquiring new customers, and you pay only for targeted leads. This translates into a high return on your advertising investment. Sign up with Sponsored Search now!

Miva

Miva formerly known as Espotting is a UK based pay per click search engine. Your top 5 listings appear on Yahoo! UK, Lycos and Hotbot UK and will reach 72% of the UK Internet population.

Mamma Media Solutions

Mamma is a PPC company offering PPC advertising.

Kanoodle

Kanoodle is a PPC advertising service and has partnerships with sites such as, NetZero, DogPile, CNET, Metacrawler and Turbofind.

AdBrite

AdBrite, “The Internet’s Ad Marketplace”, is an e-commerce site. Rather than selling books, CDs, or rare antiques, They sell ad space on thousands of websites. You can hand select which sites you want your ad on and be up and running in minutes.

SearchFeed

SearchFeed provides online advertisers access to a network of leading Web properties.

Banner Advertising

Traditional online marketing methods include banner advertising. This requires some research to find out what related sites offer it and figuring out if it is worthwhile. Banners have given way to text based advertising in recent years but it still highly used online.

Casalemedia

Casale Media provides advertisers with direct access to the highest quality media inventory on the web. They supplement their media offering with a comprehensive suite of technologies and services that deliver, track and optimize online advertising campaigns for maximum response.

Fastclick

Fastclick offers a reach of over 117 million unique users. Your display advertisements will be seen by over 70 percent of all Americans currently online. Fastclick has custom solutions for agencies and direct marketers of all sizes.

Ezine Advertising

Ezine advertising is basically advertising in newsletters distributed by site owners. This can be a very good way to get your name out there to people that are interested in your products. Newsletter or ezine subscribers have personally signed up and given permission to sites saying that they want to be contacted via email about news and other info. Finding a good ezine to advertise is may take some research but it might well be worth the effort. Test out your ezine ad on a single distribution and note the results. If it returned some positive results continue with it.

ezine Directory – Here you can find ezines who will publish your ezine ad.

Online Advertising Resources

Clickz – Online advertising solutions for marketers.