Email marketing has become the preferred method…

Direct email marketing is one of the most powerful communication tools available today. It is easy, affordable, measurable, and highly effective. In fact, email marketing is to ecommerce as tires are to cars. You could drive a car without tires -- but it wouldn’t be pretty. Email marketing is the most important part of online marketing. Yet, I find that it is the least understood, and the least time is spent on it. Based on research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing returned approximately $48 for every dollar spent in 2007. To put this in perspective, that's more than double the average return on investment in comparison to other forms of online marketing.

Bulk email marketing is the management of mailing lists that let you separate your email recipients according to their interests and needs, which you can then target through relevant, personalized content. That is why some people say that being successful online is all about the list. Collecting email addresses with people’s permission, i.e. they opt-in to receive your email messages because they are of interest to them is described as "opt-in email marketing" or "permission email marketing" and should not be confused with Spam (junk mail). Ethical email marketing works because every recipient has given you permission to send them this information which is of value to them. Visitors become customers when you give them the content they’re searching for. SPAMING people on the other hand will damage your credibility and negatively affect your customer loyalty which you have worked so hard to build. Smart marketers recognize people's aversion to spam and are addressing the problem with best practices that focus on permission.

Once you capture your subscribers’ emails, the key to a winning and cheap email marketing campaign is to use software or an online business or email marketing service with an autoresponder. Email marketing automation software helps marketers stop emailing their prospects and start marketing to them - in a way that is personalized, and powerful.
They allow your business or organization to send to your recipients, targeted and timely information on demand. They help you plan, build and design your email campaigns while ensuring it achieves top delivery rates so you can stay in contact and build your business and brand awareness. They not only distribute it, but can collect and analyze the data to help you increase your effectiveness.

I personally have found Veretekk to be the best at helping me both build my opt-in email list through free FFA’s or Leadsomatic and being able to stay in touch with my customers and prospective customers. They have the highest quality autoresponder and ensure that your emails don’t spam and get through with Veremail . They also have great training for all of their tools.

Email marketing is a very popular tool these days but often not utilized correctly to reach out to prospective customers. It is not the same as sending a quick email to a buddy. It takes a good amount of planning, testing, and measuring. It requires a lot of technique, and as with all marketing, the more professional it is, the better the results you will get.

Email marketing is the way to reach your target market in the most professional, efficient and successful way. It is one of the most successful, effective and inexpensive tools in attracting prospective customers, and growing relationships with current customers, affiliate partners and resellers and also increasing brand awareness. The goal is to present your email campaigns in such a way as to separate you from the rest of the crowd. If you're not reaching existing and potential customers or members with your email marketing message, you can be assured that your competition will be.

Bulk email marketing has become the preferred method of communication in today's competitive online marketplace for one reason: bulk email marketing works!

“Build your business with emails”

How do you advertise? or is that Market your business?

So what is advertising and what is marketing? In Wikipedia we discover:
“Advertising is a form of communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and use them. Many advertisements are also designed to generate increased consumption of those products and services through the creation and reinforcement of brand image and brand loyalty. For these purposes advertisements often contain both factual information and persuasive messages.”
“Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing of the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) of products, services or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations. Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research.”
They sound a lot alike and when people use them concerning trying to promote their product or web page they often seem to use them interchangeably. They are not. Advertising is an aspect of marketing but it is only a part of what marketing is all about but you can’t market a product without advertising it in some way. Advertising says “buy” and “buy now and here is the reason why” where marketing starts off by saying I am here and I have a product I think you might be interested in but I want you to trust me and I will do whatever I need to do to try and prove that to you. This trust factor is very important when working on the internet as there is no face for people to see, no voice to hear, no body language to pick up on and therefore people find it hard to know who to trust or believe. Added to that is the fact that most of us have been burned by someone making big promises and not delivering.

This is even more of an issue today with identity theft increasing and the average person more concerned about privacy issues. Organizations that consistently take the high road on privacy, spam, and other like issues will endear themselves to customers and build trust.

As a result people (marketers) try using a picture of themselves or a voice recording, but even more popular today is video. Through video people can see the face and hear the voice which gives people an opportunity to get a “trust read” which is one of the reasons video is so effective in any marketing strategy today. It doesn’t change the fact though that there are people out there (and not just a few) who seem believable who are ready and willing to steal from us.

For those of us who are honestly trying to do business on the internet (and fortunately I believe we are the majority) it is all the more important to take the high road in marketing.

Next time we will start talking about some marketing methods in more detail, but I thought I needed to lay some ground work for that discussion.

“building trust will build your business”

Search Engine Optimization is Not the complete Answer

I know I have talked about this before but I feel it is worth a re-look.
Having your website optimized lets search engines link people to your website when they are searching for something using your keywords. The search engines can’t do this well or to your satisfaction without your site optimized properly but there is more to it than that.
Why when a person uses Google to search for a particular thing to buy will Ebay be listed usually at or near the top? Others have spent a great deal of time and money targeting keywords related to their site so what makes the difference? Can your website compete? The answer to why Ebay is usually listed at the top is, it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. Search engines pay more attention to sites that are more popular so how do I get my site to become more popular? By having popular sites associate with yours, assuming that your site has good design and well written content (which is the only way you will get popular site to associate with yours).
This whole area is called link marketing and webmasters all over the world realize and understand the power that is in it and are using it to their advantage. Link marketing requires your time and effort to really make it happen. So how do we get started?
Here are some ways to get link popularity for those of us that don’t have a lot of money to spend and most of us don’t. All of them require some work on your part to find those web sites and places that relate to your site that will link to your site.
-Exchanging Links with other web sites, but they need to have a page rank that is as good as or better than yours.
-Writing articles for Ezines or online magazines where you can include a link to your site.
-Posting comments on Forums that cater to questions about your field and where you can drop a link to your site, can be effective.
-Social networking sites like youtube, “Apsense” and “zion5” where you can have links and network with others about your field are all very important to start building your link popularity.
What’s very important is to start building your link popularity right from the point you launch your website in order to be successful in attaining your search engine marketing goals and objectives, but if you didn’t start then, well there is no better time then now to start.
Over the next while we will be looking at some of these methods in a little more detail and also looking at the different types of marketing that will help you get found not only by the search engines but by those you really want to find you, your potential customers.
“marketing generates customers”

Choosing the Best Keywords isn’t easy!

We have talked about content and links as being very important and this time we are going to talk about the third leg of the stool, key words. If you really want to get free search engine traffic to your web site (and who doesn’t) then key words are the third key. This is because pages that rank higher on the Search Engine result pages for specific keywords or phrases get more search engine traffic compared to lower ranked pages for the same keyword. The majority of web users when searching for information on the web use a search engine like Google. When they do a search, most click on one of the top 5 results on the first page. As a result, the ultimate goal of any web page owner when doing Search Engine Optimization is to gain one of those coveted top spots, with the number one ranking being the primary objective in order to get more traffic.
The first thing you need to do is Keyword research in order to find out what exactly it is that people are searching for in the area that you are interested in. Then you need to pick the key words that relate the topic on your web site, and that people are really searching for. Try using keyword research services to help you investigate word and phrase variations. Services like Wordtracker, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool or software like Keyword Elite which will generate 1000s Of Keywords In Seconds, are good starting points. There is simply no substitute for doing your keyword research.
What you are looking for in your research is:
*Single word keywords are very difficult to get high rankings for, so I use three and four word phrases most of the time.
*Obviously keywords that are the most appropriate keywords for your pages, and for your business.
*Words that are highly targeted are easier to get good ranking for as they are not so competitive that you will never be able to beat the big boys whose pages are well optimized with good content and a lot of links. Targeted keywords on the other hand generate targeted visitors, that are more likely to be active while on the pages of your website.
*Stay away from generic or very general keywords even though they may have the highest number of searches they are very competitive. They are tougher to rank for and a great portion of the traffic from these words will be irrelevant and typically the least productive.
This Keyword research helps you to identify keywords that are relevant, targeted, and less competitive. After finding out what people are looking for, and what keywords they are using to find that information, you can optimize your pages with these keywords that you have discovered are best for your site and will bring significant traffic to it.
Now that we have our keyword list and we are ready to optimize our pages where do we put those keywords? That is the topic for next time.

“Targeted keywords generate traffic”