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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.

I highly recommend HostGator as your web hosting provider. I run servers in the same datacenter as theirs and know firsthand that the quality is as high as it gets.

Their shared hosting plans are perfect for your new site and start at $6.95/mo. I personally recommend their “Hatchling” or “Baby” plans. These are both large enough to host your site and offer all the features you’ll probably ever need.

HostGator offers 24/7/365 phone support, 99.9% uptime, and have a 30 day money back guarantee. Your site will be on a top of the line Dual Xeon server that provides INSTANT backups of your site. Their control panel is one of the best in the industry, and has over 39 scripts that can be installed with a click of the mouse.

HostGator offers free site transfers and is one of the main reasons why I recommend them. If you don’t want to lose your site stats then it is crucial to choose them. During site transfer they can transfer all stats, email addresses etc.

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

META tags, the hidden bit of code working behind the scenes of every HTML page.

There is a bit of confusion still lurking on the web whether META tags are usefull in SEO and are they required to rank well in the search engines. Well they are not mandatory but they are still used by some search engines so you shouldn’t exclude them altogether.

The basic info used in META tags are title, description and keywords. There are a lot of others but those first 3 are the most important. You should only use relevant information in your meta info. Don’t fill it up with every possible keyword otherwise known as keyword spamming, or stuffing. Keep your tags precise and this will increase your keyword density. As you notice the example below is focused on exactly what this page is about. Some search engines use the meta description as the text description used in their serps (search engine result pages) so it’s good to write a good description for each page.

Example META tags:

<HEAD>

<TITLE>nuvru – Meta Tags </TITLE>

<meta name=”description” content=”META Tag usage: are they still important?”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, meta tag, meta tag example, should I use meta tags”>

</HEAD>

META Tag Resources

• How to use META tags – Some info on how to use META tags.
• Free META tag generation tool – Auto generate META tags by filling in your info.
• META Data Profiles – META Data profiles from w3.org
• SEO Friendly Web Content – Article by Yahoo on SEO friendly content with a blurb about META tags.

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.

Link popularity is how popular your site is in terms of how many sites link back to yours.

Links to your site are important because they cast a vote that search engines tally to determine how important your site is. Links to your site are called many different things such as inbound links, incoming links, backlinks etc. They all mean the same thing and the more you have the better. Well that isn’t entirely true. The more quality links your site has the better. Quality links are ones that are relevant, oneway and from quality sites.

What determines a quality link?

Well I’m glad you asked. There are many factors that determine the quality of a link. These are

• Link relevancy – is the site related to yours
• Link density – is your link on a page with few links
• Link title – does the anchor text of the link describe your site
• One way – is the link reciprocated or not
• Age of linking site – older sites are sometimes seen as authorities
• IP or GEO location – links from sites that are on different IP’s or in different locations

How do you get quality links?

Getting quality sites to link to yours takes work. If you build a website that people find usefull it will be more likely linked to from webmasters running related sites. This means building up great content. If people enjoy your site they will link to it.

If you have a site that is new and doesn’t really have unique or special content then it is much harder to get people to link back, unless they are in the same boat. This is where exchanging links comes in. Two webmasters agree to link to each other in hopes of increasing their link popularity. Link exchanges are widely popular but search engines are catching on and penalizing webmasters that have intensive link exchange campaigns.

If you run a website for any considerable amount of time then you will most likely receive link exchange requests from other webmasters. You don’t have to accept any link exchange request that comes along. In the email there might be a link to the specified page your link will be on. Check the page out. Does it have tons of other unrelated links on it? Does the page have zero or low Pagerank? Stay away from exchanging links with webmasters who are blindly exchanging links with anyone. You might not be penalized by exchanging links with them but doing so will most likely not benefit your site at all. For quality control purposes do the link requesting yourself.

Give Away Content

One great way to get one way incoming links is to give away free content, scripts or templates. This is also a good way to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. Distributing free content does a few things. First it gets your name and url out there. If the quality of the content is good then other webmasters will be more inclined to use it. If you write articles, write scripts or build templates to give away make sure you include terms of usage. Make sure users have to keep your link in place so that you get a link back. It’s a fair request and webmasters are more then happy to link back especially if your site provides quality content and looks nice.

Text Link Advertising

Advertising on sites via text links is a popular way to get high quality one way links to your site. A few years ago you could buy up thousands of links very cheap and boost your site to the top of the search engines. Search engine have gotten smarter though with the popularity of this method. Now I would say buying a few links is acceptable but only if you buy only 1 link from a site at a time. It’s a great way for new sites to boost Pagerank and get indexed faster. Text links can be expensive and the price depends on a few factors such as Pagerank of the site, how much traffic the site gets and where the link is placed. Right now the going price for a link on a Pagerank 5 site is about $50 per month. Keep in mind that if you are looking to boost your sites Pagerank it might take up to 3+ months to see an increase. This is because Google only updates it’s info every few months and because there is no set schedule it is hard to determine how long your link needs to be up.

How to find your link popularity

There are a few ways to check how popular your site is in regards to backlinks, or the number of people linking to you.  Of course you can use the Google toolbar to simply see # of backlinks… but they will only show you a few of the possible backlinks you have.  I suggest using Yahoo to check your backlinks.  Simply go to Yahoo.com and type in:

link:http://yourwebsiteurl.com

You can also use Google’s webmaster tools to find how many links your site has, as well as see what subpages of your site have links pointing to them.  You might be surprised at what you find.

Keyword Density is the amount of a keyword appears throughout a single web page.

When creating content for search engine optimization it is good to keep keyword density in mind. Each page of your site should be focused on one subject which naturally your main keyword should be sprinkled throughout.

Don’t go overboard though and place repeating keywords in places they shouldn’t be. If you are creating usable content then you want your copy to be readable and enjoyable. If you stuff your pages with repetitive keywords you are bound to set off alarm bells with the search engines and annoy your visitors so stay away from this method.

So how do you know when your pages are dense enough? Well there isn’t any golden rule here. The best thing to do is stick to one topic per page and use the keyword more or less depending on the amount of words there are on the page. If you have a 500 word article on keyword density then you should use the that keyword in the title and heading of your page as well as 5 times through out the article. But again, if you are sacrificing readability for search engine optimization then don’t bother. Even if you do get traffic people won’t stick around long.

Here’s a free keyword density checker you can use.

HTML tags are many so we will cover the ones used for the purposes of SEO.

Formatting an HTML page for SEO is really pretty simple. The basic HTML tags to use are the h1, h2, h3, alt and strong tags. The h1, h2 and h3 tags are heading tags used for the heading of your page. See the big heading that says HTML Tags at the top of this page? That is the h1 tag in use and it is used for the main heading text of the page. It looks like this <h1>HTML Tags</h1>. It tells the search engines and users exactly the main topic of the page. The h2 and h3 tags can be used for sub headings which would follow lower in the page as seen below.

Proper use of h2 tags

So we started the page with a main heading using the h1 tag followed by a paragraph and then have a sub heading using the h2 tag. H2 tags appear a bit smaller then the h1 tag and so on. H tags go all the way up to h6 but I have never personally used anything beyond h3 and don’t know of anyone else using anything beyond that either. It’s good to keep your pages focused around one main topic and then breaking down the info into sub sections. And this is where you would use the h tags to properly define the hierarchy of sections.

Proper use of h3 tags

Using the h3 tag is not necessary but is used above as an example to show size decrease. Unless you have a lot of information on the page that is broken up into more then 2 sections you can get away with using just the h1 and h2 tags.

Using ALT tags

ALT tags describe images to search engines as well as people with disabilities that use screen readers to describe objects in a browser. If ALT tags are used on images users will know what they are about if they don’t load properly.

When images don’t load properly or are seen by search engines and use proper ALT tags this is what they see.

Describing images properly helps users and search engines get a better idea of what your page is about.

It is important to use ALT tags for your navigation graphics. If you use graphics as your main navigation then it is extremely important that you use ALT tags to describe the graphical link. This tells search engines where the link is pointed in turn describing the destination page.

Using the Strong tag

The bold tag used to be <br> but now it is <strong>. Bolding text gives readers a visual cue or visual emphasis when scanning text. It’s plays a role in readability of a web page and should be used diligently. Also, some search engines pay attention to this tag letting them know what words should stand out.

HTML Tag Resources

• HTML tag reference – w3.org’s HTML reference page.
• HTML tag examples – Examples of HTML code and tag usage
• Barebones Guide to HTML – Barebones guide to HTML