Email Advertising as Marketing Tool

 

Email Advertising as Marketing Tool

Direct promotion that are using email has boomed over recent years, but has brought with it mountains of spam. If you intend on using email as a method of advertising products and services, you have to be sure that you stand behind the products you're promoting and make yourself available to answer any questions that may be asked. If you hide from people, they will wonder what you are hiding.

An effective promotion technique that I have found is to combine email with the ad article strategy. This generally means creating an ezine or newsletter promotion that visitors can sign up for that goes directly to their email inboxes. You can occasionally put a summary of a product or service, however, you should include just enough information to stir the curiosity of your readers in an ezine. The summary then contains a link to the ad article on our site. The benefit of this is not only that you have a good opportunity to promote the product or service, but while visitors are on your site they may also look at other sections at the same time This way you as the advertiser benefits through having highly targeted potential clients visit their site.

Getting Started As an Affiliate Marketer

If you are a beginning Internet Marketer and you do not actually have any money to work with the best way to start marketing is by using the payperclick search engines. The truth is, when you are a marketer products are not the things that actually sell, it is the traffic that sells. However true this is you still want to promote the programs that meet certain criteria. If you are wondering what the criteria are they are listed below and are as follows:

1. Look for programs that offer to pay you over $10.00 per sale. If not that then at least search for programs that pay you $50.00 per month or more in residual income because just one customer can be worth $1,200.00 to you in 10 years.

2. Look for products to promote that don't have more than one or two external links to that connect to other programs. If you're going to pay good money to send people to a web site, you should at least make sure that you're sending them to a good money resource and not a resource that has with 50 holes in it.

3. Look for products that have limited ordering options because you don't want to send people to a site if you only get credit when they pay by credit card. The result will be that you will lose people because the site also accepts payment via PayPal and the average person doesn't know how to integrate PayPal with their current affiliate software or some other more complicated payment method like direct checking.

4. Try to find sales sites. You can check out associateprograms.com and find five programs that meet the criteria. It will take some digging, but they are there if you look for them. Let's say you're promoting sneakers, for example. What you are going to want to do now is find as many applicable keywords as you can that are directly relating to sneakers. You can find lists of keyword variations for any products or services by going to jimtools.com and clicking the 'keywords' button at the top.

How this works is that you can do keyword searches and find every variation of the word sneakers that you can think of. If you save all your keywords in a text file you can place bids at all the major payperclick search engines. Here is a list of some of them:

http://www.overture.com They are very critical and will bring you the most leads.

http://www.findwhat.com delivers pretty good traffic

http://www.bay9.com

http://www.ahha.com

http://www.kanoodle.com

http://www.sprinks.com

http://www.searchandconquer.com This one is Free

http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com

There is a trick to making huge profits with payperclick search engines and one of them is to bid on as many keywords as possible. How it works is that you bid on a 100 keywords and it is the exact same thing as getting 100 links back to your web site. When you are submitting your listings, you must always be sure to put the price there as well. The key factor here is that you want everyone who clicks through your site to be prepared to divvy up some cash.

If you don't do this, you'll loose a lot of money from the people who are always seeking freebies every single time. With this in mind, say you submitted 350 keywords that are relating to sneakers to each and every one of the search engines above. If all of them are totaled together they will give you a combined total of 150 clicks per day. This is assuming of course that only one out of every 300 people make their purchases because this is a particularly popular item.

If you sell one pair of sneakers and make $10.00 per sale that's one sale every two days. If your average bid is 10 cents per lead, it's costing you $3.00 in advertising costs just so that you can make $10.00. So each month you could average $800.00 from just this one product in net profit per month. That is pretty good, but if you are pushing 5 different products you will have $4000 in one month's profit.

The next thing that you have to do is try to find five products that are just like the first one. If a company/website doesn't have an affiliate program setup, try calling them and asking if you could strike a special deal with them. The best part of using this marketing technique is that after you set up one income stream using this method, and you've tested it and it's working, you can start on another one right away.

You can promote one or 100 companies if you want to it is really up to you. You can literally set your own desired income this way. Plus, by doing this, you get the chance to build long lasting working relationships with the owners of these programs most of the time. It is like out of nowhere, you suddenly have a network of people you're working with.

If you follow this article closely you'll be drawing more targeted traffic to programs that you promote than most of the high traffic sites that just have a simple link to the product in question. You can do all of this with little to no money at all in the beginning.

Once you start making enough money with the payperclick search engines, you can start investing some of your money in your own idea or business on the Internet that you want to start; which when you think about it just makes sense. You can simply take the easy way out and make more and more money promoting other people's programs. As Internet marketing gets more sophisticated in the next few years, there will be more and more companies that are offering solid moneymaking opportunities to experienced resellers, so it is best that you do your homework and learn this stuff while you can because eventually everyone will be trying to cash in on this then ancient method.

The Craft of Listing
Owning a list is the most profitable online marketing tool out there today. As an affiliate marketer, you are going to have to get used to listing. In fact, there's not a time when you can send out your mailing to the A+ Marketplace where you won't make $300.00. You can build your list with little to no effort to over 6,800 subscribers within five months and have over 35,000 subscribers by using some highly effective tactics. Let's take a look at some of those tactics now.

Popup Emails:

This method is 10x as easy to get once you visit the Opt In Lightning site or any other site that Opt In Lightning is installed on. When you do this, you'll notice that it captures the visitor's email address without the visitor having to fill out a form when they sign on for it. They just have to click ?OK.? Instead. This is commonly known as Auto Info Capture, and makes it 10x easier for people to subscribe to your mailing list. The basic principle here is that the easier you make it for people to subscribe the quicker your list grows.

When you use Optin Lightning programs, you can nab any email address from the visitor's client browser. The number of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses is that you can pick up is practically zero. The few Hotmail or Yahoo addresses you do capture are those that they configured in their browser, and will go right into their main inbox anyway instead of them having to retrieve them over the 'net. This is commonly referred to as your "Pull Ratio."

When you use a regular or "traditional" subscribe box, what you are doing is subject your list to what can be called pollution. What I mean by this is that, nothing is stopping people from populating your list with FFA confirmation email addresses, Auto Responders etc. If you ever decide to sell ads, your advertising clients are going to get very angry as your list grows because they will expect that their own ads that they paid good money for to pull more.

Using the old method over an extended period of time will eventually hurt your business. This is why Internet Marketing experts all agree that Ezines that get larger lose all or most of their pull. Now you know why. Someone using the traditional subscribe method can put all their friends etc. on your list, and force you to deal with spam complaints. This is called "List Bombing" and by using Popup Email Capture only, you will be able to avoid this completely.

If you can avoid these problems from the start, you'll slowly and steadily grow a solid clientele hungry for your products and services.

Personalizing email

You should always personalize each and every email that you send out because this gives people who are on the list a feeling that you're not just another newsletter editor, but their friend and that you truly care about their success. Doing this can increase your sales by at least 200%. You have to think like a marketer as well as a consumer. If you start to think like a salesman, you will loose customers. The competition here is fierce but if you work on it, you will succeed. You want to shoot for the feeling where you actually become one with your list. By personalizing your emails, I mean that you can write as if you were sending a note to your friend. That's when you know for a fact that you will have a following.

Send Emails on Friday
I always send my newsletter on Friday at noon because it reaches the East Coast at 3:00 p.m. This way your readers will have the entire weekend to read it, when they are relaxed and comfortable. During the week, your consumers have to work, deal with family and home matters etc. They simply do not have the time to really give your emails much thought. When you wait till the weekend to send the mails, you can take the weekend off and come back Monday to find a stack of orders just waiting for you.

Offer Incentives
Offering incentives like free bonuses just for subscribing with no obligation to remain a subscriber can really boost your orders. Doing this builds a level of trust with new people who don't know you. You see when you start by offering freebies, you will attract a whole new crowd of consumers.

Follow up your Emails
By using an AutoResponder you can deliver your follow-ups without effort. Each follow up should be a sales letter to a residual income product you're selling, an MLM program you're promoting or a product you're selling. There should not be any free content and these sales letters don't beat around the bush. I make thousands per month using email follow up alone. You can get an occasional flame and some unsubscribes, but this is exactly what you should want.

You want to be building up your client list and the follow-ups actually WEED OUT people who aren't ready to make some kind of monetary commitment which will make your job a great deal easier.

No free content
Do not offer any free content because this gives the reader nowhere to go. They either get involved with what you're doing or they get off the list. Besides when you are offering free content, all that you are really accomplishing is you owing more money and having less bandwidth to work with.

Don't accept any form of paid advertising
By accepting paid advertising, you only succeed in polluting your list and this takes attention away from whatever your newsletter's main theme is. You want to keep your readers informed of MLM and Residual Income Programs because this just another way of building and keeping their trust in you.

Don't put copyright on it
Some lists add copyright information and I really don't know why. It is best to simply forward this information to anyone that might be interested. It's a lot easier than using a script and it's been working for me. In any case, most people generally don't care anyway.

Purchase Subscribers
Every email address that you could possibly get is like potential gold to you so if you are going to purchase any email addresses from the many lists that are available for purchase, however, you have to be very specific in who you choose to buy from so watch out. You can purchase 1,000 subscribers for as little as $197.00 with some companies. It helps to be on the lookout.

Talk about yourself a bit
This may sound a bit strange, but people like to do business with people they know and trust. When you include SOME personal information about yourself, people will get to know you as a person. This helps break the ice and makes it a lot easier to do business with people. I don't know about you, but I always respond better to a business person that is willing to be a bit more friendly and personal with me.

Make Money with Pop-Under Ads
I told you that I would explain more about this later on, and here we are. While pop-under ads would appear not to pay as much as say emails do, they actually provide better dividends. Most Internet users have become quite accustomed to closing pop ups before they load. Because of this, you will not be able to make money on an ad that doesn't appear. Pop under ads load in the background, so you'll receive higher payouts with minimum interference while giving the advertiser a decent "show" here are a few reasons why this works.

1. Technology in advertising delivery: Some banner networks now have the delivery of pop under ads down to a "T". What they do is load quickly which allows your visitor is only shown a popunder ad once per visit and that is why some networks allow you to specify that the particular visitor only sees the popunders once every few days.

2. Read the fine print: Remember that you will probably not be paid for every pop up/pop under ad that is displayed so you have to read the fine print in the terms and conditions area that is always in the network you are applying to and you will find that no matter how many ads that are presented to a particular visitor in a single day, you will only be credited with one notice. A good Internet advertising agency will also target popunder ads to your audience and just like every other banner ad campaign you will also have to be allowed to choose which pop under advertising you wish to display

3. Putting pop under ads to use: Pop under code from the networks is easy to use than it ever was before. The code that is supplied by the agency is usually pasted between the tags in the HTML of the web pages where you want the ad to be triggered. Popunder ads can usually be run in tandem with a banner ad campaign, depending on the agency's own set of guidelines.

AGAIN, Be sure to review the "terms and conditions" of ad networks before you sign up.

The best link cloaking method
If you create a new web page that contains the following HTML code in it and save it this link cloaking method works. This example was provided by MerchantABC


Now, rather than using your personal link with your cookie ID as you can see below:

http://www.merchantabc.com/app/aftrack.php?afid=12345

you should have a link that looks like the example below:

http://www.yoursite.com/offer.htm (link to the page you created)

As soon as someone clicks on the new link, the page would automatically redirect to your affiliate URL. You just have to make sure that you set the link to your cloaked page in a new window so that you don't lose visitors from your site.

Unavoidable Search Engine Issues
The Robots line in the cloaking page is there specifically to prevent Search Engines such as Google from trying to index the page. Google hates meta refresh pages because it thinks that they are a spamming technique. It's safer for them to keep search engine robots out of the page, and since the page will have no content, there's no point in it being indexed anyway.

You must not be tempted to have search engines index the cloaking page in the hope that your affiliate URL page will be listed highly because the penalty that is imposed by some search engines if you are caught is not worth the risk. You could loose everything this way.

You can play it even safer by having all of these special pages in one directory and then introducing a robots exclusion statement for that directory in your robots.txt file. I would highly recommend that you begin by cloaking your affiliate links. You will definitely experienced higher conversions and therefore commission revenue when you begin implementing cloaking strategies. There's nothing unethical about it; and like many other site owners, you have to work hard on our site and have poured thousands of hours into it over the years there's nothing wrong with receiving a few bucks for this effort.

Getting Started-How to Find Good Affiliation Programs to Promote
When you are ready to get started with affiliate marketing it can seem overwhelming at first, but this should not be a problem now since I have given you the basics of what you need to know. It is often hard to know where to start and how to begin to market products online. With thousands of affiliate programs, different marketing strategies and countless people trying to pull you into their program how do you know where to start, or how you could go about it, you might wonder. Well, let me tell you.

With this getting started section, you can be up and running in as little as 6 months and seeing some results. Here is how you can get started in some quick and easy steps.

  

1 - Don't look for Get Rich Quick Method
If you have been alive for the last few decades, chances are you have come across the "get rich quick" schemes that are plastered everywhere. If you are going to succeed as an internet marketer you will want to get that thinking out of your head first.

Think about it; do you know anyone to ever make 10 grand in there first three months in a business, especially one that anyone can get started with for less than $50 bucks? Probably not, so do not think that this is how affiliation will work for you. Instead, you need to understand that anyone that makes serious money in this industry has been at it for a while, and they realize that they have to work for a business to make it work for them. By understanding that your going to have to learn the ropes so that you will not be setting yourself up for disappointment weeks later as your wondering why your not seeing any revenue. So let's get started!

Basic Skills you will need To Do Well Online

Ability to Create and Maintain Your Own Site(s)

Hosting Of Your Own Websites

Get Proficient with Email

Grasp Basic SEO Strategies & Online Marketing Ideas

At Least Basic HTML code understanding

Motivation and Patience
Chances are that if you are hoping to be a master affiliate, you already have these skills and you will have an easier time during your fist few months. If you don't, I would suggest that you do get these skills before you even try. You should begin by creating what is known in the industry as a "content site" this type of a site is also known as a hobby site. This practice project is meant to get you familiar with the process using the techniques in this manual.

How you do this is that you choose any topic that appeals to you, such as fishing, boating, hot rods etc. it can be anything you enjoy to do you can create a website about. This is meant to be your guinea site that you can learn on. During this time your goal with this site over the next three months is to find your target visitors and learn how to get their attention and keep it:

Increase you site traffic weekly
Create a Memorable Site that has no pop up, hard navigation, crazy flashing banners or anything related to making money.

Understand How People Use Search Engines & Learn Which Terms People Are Finding Your Site For and Increase Those Numbers by Monitoring them Regularly

If you follow those basic skills over the next several months you will learn the most important aspect of online marketing which will drive targeted traffic to ANY site you create. Most people get it wrong with online marketing because they think HUGE NUMBERS of visitors to there sites will generate income. That is just not true. I mean; have you ever searched Google for a particular topic and ended up on some unrelated site? If you did I bet you were off that site faster that you can count to three.

However, that is how many people try to drive traffic to there site and then hope those people will in some way do something, weather it is by subscribing to a newsletter or buy a product or service. Until these people learn that sear numbers do not equal dollars they will always be scratching there head.

The "trick" here is to drive as many "targeted" visitors to any site that you ever create. Weather your website is a hobby site about your favorite hobbies and music, or a commercial site that sells high end real estate, targeted visitors will be the visitors that will make you your money in the end, so these are naturally the visitors that you want coming to you.

Now that you understand about targeted visitors and just what type of visitor you want at your site you can spend your first several months of your "online affiliate marketing career" in designing a site that will have them coming back for more and telling their friends about you. It will be much easier to learn about keyword optimization while you are creating a site about outdoor fishing than creating a sales site about "selling Trim Spa" while prescription drugs are incredibly profitable you need to practice and perfect your craft before you jump into a highly competitive arena like prescription drugs, credit card or loans.

Things to Watch out For As Your Traffic & Site Grow

1. Site Traffic & Referral Logs

2. Visitor Feedback

The Importance of Traffic & Referral Logs
You will want to be able to monitor very closely any site that you ever build because you should be able to know how many visitors visit your site daily, where they came from, if they have ever visited before and most importantly what keywords they searched for when finding your site (this only works when they came from a search engine). All of this information has to be logged so that you can know who to approach when you are researching who your target audience is and what they want from you.

Getting Visitor Feedback
You have to keep track of what types of feedback are your visitors giving you, and whether or not people enjoy the site and the content. Do they find the navigation is tricky and hard to understand? Take this information and use it to your advantage. If you can offer a suggestion or rating section in your site that allows visitors to tell you directly what they like and what they don't like. This feedback is going to be invaluable to you when it is time for you to build your marketing website and track your feedback information for gaining partnerships with merchants in the future.

Your Money Making Commercial Site
Once you have spent some time working on your hobby site and you begin to feel that you have learned some of the skills that I talked about above you will be much more prepared to jump into the competitive affiliate marketing field.

Now you are ready to take the knowledge you have learned and apply it to a commercial site that requires you to sell some sort of product or service. Again the most important thing to consider is "how will you drive targeted visitors to your site.

You would be doing yourself a favor if you think before you choose your commercial site topic before you choose your next program to promote or site to create. Take a look at the supply and demand. Try to find a product or service online that has an existing consumer base and little or no competition.

The best thing that you can do to get started with choosing the right commercial products to endorse on your website.

You should study the various programs that look appealing to you and then make a list of your top 10 programs. From here you can take your list and run a handful of searches on Google to get an idea just how many other websites are catering to this program. Take a look at the Google results below which helps you get an idea of what you can expect to see when you type in keyword queries:

1. Searched the Google for fishing:

Results 1 - 10 of about 46,200,000

2. Searched the Google for Trim Spa:

Results 1 - 10 of about 16,800,000

3. Searched the Google for car parts:

Results 1 - 10 of about 8,850,000

4. Searched the Google for tank parts:

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,080,000

From the information that is gathered from the keyword query, you can get an idea of the amount of competition among those websites and pages that are selling any of those things mentioned above. Form this it should be easy to see that tractor parts has the least amount of competition and would be easier to get a higher ranking on the popular search engines simply because there are less sites than a Trim Spa or fishing site.

Now that I have pointed that out so subtly, it is also important that you try to understand just how large of a consumer base each industry actually has. I think everyone would agree that car parts outsell tank parts because more people own cars than tanks.

When it comes to your method of tracking the data, you can use a service called wordtracker which will do this automatically. I use wordtracker myself to find niche areas, it won best affiliate tool on abestweb.com in 2002. I use it because it is reliable and takes much of the leg work out for me.

You have to work for any results that you are expecting to get. Don't expect to be able to put four of five hours into a site and have that site generate thousands of dollars worth of commissions for you because that is just not realistic. Like anything worth while it does take work, If you know that going in and are prepared to put in the time that it takes to make a great site chances are much better that you will see hundreds to thousands of dollars worth in commissions monthly at your leisure.

If you make it this far you will be past the affiliate newbie stage and ready to take on the affiliation world. With the popularity of the market ever rising it can be at the stage of collecting so much money that you can live on this income alone. If you just follow your dreams and be willing to put in the effort to see them become a reality. When your ready to choose you second sales site stop by my top programs, you might find a winner that makes sense to you!