LIST BUILDING - E MAIL SIGNATURES

A hugely under-estimated but free and powerful technique for promoting your business or website and building your passive income, an e-mail signature is simply a message of some kind which is automatically inserted below your normal sign-off at the end of every email you send.

Consider how many emails you send every day. In all probability you under-estimate the number. In this day and age of electronic communication the ability to communicate by e-mail has become so common, so automatic that we hardly think about it any more but every single one we send is an opportunity to market our business.

This is one of the simplest means available to every single one of us. I will give the example of the ever popular Outlook mail client system in which you simply click on ‘Tools’ then ‘Options’, ‘Mail Format’ and finally ‘Signatures’. This opens up effectively a simple word editor into which you can insert a hyper-link to your site and, if you wish, an image or logo as well.

So many people will see your signature and inevitably some will click on it, even if only from curiosity and the signature will have done its job. Over time this simple method can generate many leads and is therefore a method of marketing which it would be wasteful to ignore. It is the epitome of a passive income generator.

LIST BUILDING - Article Directories

As explained in “The Exciting Business of Building a List”, the most deservedly popular method of marketing online has at its heart, the accumulation of a list or lists of the names and email addresses of contacts. These are people who have previously expressed an interest in a product of yours and who have also, usually confirmed that they are happy to receive future mailings from you. Such mailings can be the basis for your truly passive source of income.

How to go about building your list or lists (Separate lists for different areas of interest or ‘Niches’) is the subject of numerous articles, blogs, books and other writings which proliferate on the internet. I make no apology though for adding to this profusion because the subject is in a constant state of flux and the conventional wisdom of last month may well be ‘old hat’ by now or is at least likely to have been subject to the continuous process of gradual change.

There are several approaches to the search for new ‘sign ups’ which have to be paid for but which are usually justified by the idea that however much is spent in this way, far more will be earned as a result of the expenditure. These however are not the subject of this article or its planned successors. Far more interesting and exciting to many are the abundance of free ways to secure people’s commitment and in that way to create the path to your passive income.

                                                                                                                                    

I shall describe one of these today and more in future posts. Today’s little gem  is Article Marketing. In my next post I will cover E mail Signatures:

Article marketing is exactly what it sounds like. There are dozens of sites on the internet which exist solely for the purpose of providing a vehicle for the writings of authors, amateur and professional of quite short pieces on just about every subject under the sun. The consensus is that one; www.EzineArticles.com is the most prominent of these and that site certainly does make great efforts to secure the originality of its articles and to protect the intellectual property of the authors. Other article directories include ArticleDashboard.com, GoArticles.com, ArticlesAlley.com, Amazines.com and many, many others.

The idea is so simple. An article directory as they are known, provides the opportunity for anyone who wishes and is able, to write a short piece about virtually anything. In time the library of articles thus accumulated constitutes a valuable source of unique information for those in search of it.

For the online marketer however there is another, more significant benefit. The search engines also love article directories and any contribution is very likely indeed to rank highly in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to name only the biggest among them. An article in one of the directories always carries a short bio of the author and invariably a link to his or her website or blog. Articles featured in one place are frequently picked up and repeated in numerous other sites thus creating a network of mentions for the author and for his or her site. In this way people are attracted to the site and the site owner inevitably collects more names for his list.

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What Is Passive income?

The critical part of this is the word "PASSIVE". It means of course, the opposite of ACTIVE. In other words something that happens without a specific action at the time to make it happen. That doesn't mean that a passive income can somehow 'happen' without anyone doing anything to make it happen. Even an inheritance is the result of someone dying (I suppose that's an action!!!).

What we usually mean by 'passive income' in business is an income that is received, not as a result of the recipient taking action at the time but because of actions previously taken to set up the process that will generate future passive income.

These previous actions, in the field of internet marketing usually take the form of setting up web sites, generating traffic to them and building lists from that traffic. The members of those lists become the recipients of marketing messages by automated means resulting in some of them taking some action which generates the income for the initiator. So, it can be passive for the person who does all the work in the first place but someone, somewhere does usually have to take action at the time for that income to flow.

THE EXCITING BUSINESS OF BUILDING A LIST

In order to create a stream of passive income from in internet business it is absolutely essential to build a LIST of customers and potential customers. 

A stream of income is possible without a list but every single individual sale then has to be separately earned. Every customer communicated with and convinced to buy and that purchase provides income but the customer is then lost and if he or she is ever to buy from you again it would have to be as a result of another, separate process of contacting, convincing to buy and so on.

When you have a list and work to maintain a strong relationship with its members, there is always a reservoir of people who have either bought from you before or have at least indicated their willingness to receive marketing material from you. You have their contact details and have had the opportunity to communicate with them so that they are much more likely to trust you and therefore to buy from you in the future.

In recent years, as the internet has become so much more established and entrepreneurs have learnt from their own mistakes and those of others, one clear, effective approach to building a list and the associated relationships and trust has emerged.

That approach is to offer people items of value free of charge in return for their name and email address. The blue rectangle (an Opt-in) on this page is an example of how this is done. There is no hard sell, not even an offer of any product for sale. Just a valuable free gift. That gift may, as in this case, be followed by other free items and those by yet more offers with no attempt to sell anything. In this way trust and a mutually worthwhile relationship are established. 

The people who constitute your list know a little about you, they know from personal experience that you have access to useful information and when you eventually do offer them relevant products for sale, they are far more likely to buy from you.

Come back to this blog in a few days for more on this subject with a series of articles showing how to go about building  your list.

NO WONDER NOT MANY PEOPLE MAKE MONEY ONLINE!!!

We are bombarded with information from those who tell us they are making fortunes from their online marketing activities...

We can get sick of seeing yet another screen shot of someone’s Clickbank earnings showing that they are pulling in more every day than most people get in a month...

We may have tried a few of those programs whose  ‘secrets’ were stolen from the boss’ computer in an unguarded moment or developed by a hitherto unknown software house in India which, for some reason failed to recognise the potential...

How many of us have labored through too many of those four page, MULTI-COLOURED SALES PAGES with the annoying VIDEOS THAT START BUT WON'T STOP that go on for forty minutes never giving any indication of how much longer they will run.............................................

How often have we been seduced by the $4.97 headline price only to be immediately exposed to the $47 up sell which it would be foolish not to add and then the $97 up sell the value of which the wise would immediately appreciate...

Once we actually settle down to put into practice what we have learnt we find that the instructional video which took ten minutes explaining what Google is, actually skates over the identification of those crucial lines of HTML from the autoresponder which we need to introduce to the squeeze page and assumes we already know all about traffic generation.

If we persevere really hard we probably will eventually find someone who is willing and able to teach the things we actually need to understand in a way we can follow. 

We may put in the hours, find out about product selection, create our first web site, set up a decent squeeze page and adopt one or two of the numerous traffic generation methods BUT.........

                                                                                                                                        

Along the way, however hard we try, we will go wrong. We will misunderstand what someone is explaining to us, we will forget how to do something we did successfully only a couple of days ago and we will get confused between the numerous web-based facilities we will need to use. 

                 We may also, eventually untangle the arcane arts of domain selection, getting hosting, blogging, backlinking and ranking in Google.                                                                

We will find out that Facebook, You Tube and Twitter are not really just for fun; they’re serious tools in the internet marketer’s armory. Facebook has Fan Pages, Groups and Events while Twitter abounds with marketing messages to the point where they can almost overwhelm its ‘social’ aspects.

We may discover to our astonishment that we can’t manage without Buzz, Flickr, Digg and StumbleUpon and all this whilst wrestling with the infuriating unpredictabilities of our own computers and peripherals.

 

We will gradually become accustomed to a whole new language in which HTML. SEO, GIF, DNS, DSL and FTP make perfect sense and autoresponder, Applet, Cookie, Favicon, Ping, Java, Spider and Zip become comprehensible.....

It often feels like taking two steps backward for every one step forward but for all this we can sometimes enjoy these mysterious processes and those with the staying power will eventually find that crock of gold at the end of the rainbow....

They deserve to...It is said, with some justice, that those who give up never know how close they were to  

                                                                                                    

 

 

INTERNET MARKETING IS A BUSINESS

Internet marketing is a business, Internet marketing is a business. Why on earth am I repeating myself like that? The simple fact is that so many people are attracted to the idea of internet marketing in the belief that they can make lots of money without the need to organize themselves in a business-like way, that the fact needs to be emphasized.

The idea of getting on line and taking advantage of some of the numerous sites which exist to make it easy for would-be marketers to set up shop, appears deceptively simple. How hard can it be? So many ‘gurus’ sound their siren songs to lure the unprepared into paying them thousands for their ‘can’t fail’ recipe for success and it is in their interests to minimise the need for a business-like approach to the new venture. So often are the techniques for using social media, affiliate systems, CPA, ready-made websites or whatever is the latest version, advertised without any consideration at all of the need to manage all these efforts in a business-like way. 

Merely maintaining a record of your expenditures, which will undoubtedly amount to more than you expected, is an essential pre-requisite in order to make sure they can be set against tax when the money starts to roll in! A logical system for keeping track of the many sets of log-in details which will accumulate as you deal with more and more sites on the web is another. How often have you been blocked when attempting to log in to one site with the details meant for another?

These are almost trivial examples and so easily overlooked when absorbed in the mechanics of setting up a decent squeeze page or dealing with some overseas contractor if you are contracting out some or all of your work. My advice to anyone newly starting in internet marketing, whatever the specific approach being taken to the actual process of marketing would be to take very great care to record every piece of information which may be needed in the future. It is all too tempting, when in the thrall of some exciting new development, to believe that you will remember the details when you need to.  That is a recipe for trouble and is as likely as any technical mistake to lead to trouble in the future.

IT'S SIMPLE BUT IT'S NOT EASY

"It's simple but it's not easy". Many people who have decided to have a go at starting an internet marketing business have slowly and painfully discovered that although, as they have been told by so many glib 'gurus', 'mentors' or 'trainers' it may be conceptually 'easy' but it is actually quite difficult to make a start from nothing.

For some people, stetting up a web site may not be too daunting though for others it would be a venture into alien territory. Similarly, the arcane arts of CPC, SEO and numerous other examples of internet marketing 'alphabet soup' may be comprehensible to some but are almost certain to be no more so than ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to most. For the record, these particular ones stand for 'Cost per Click', and 'Search Engine Optimization'.

Unfortunately, knowing what the letters stand for doesn't help very much, the expressions themselves require quite lengthy explanation. Once explained and understood in theory there is still a long way to go and many choices to be made before these processes, which happen to be fundamental to successful marketing online, can be implemented to start making money online.

OK; enough of the doom and gloom. How is it that so many, seemingly ordinary people do make a huge success of building an online business whilst so many others try and fail? One key is knowledge. Not only knowledge of the techniques, facilities and processes involved but also self-knowledge, recognizing ones own response to the failure of any particular project and, much more importantly, knowing that renewed and continuous effort and application will produce the desired result..

It is one characteristic of the internet marketing industry that it has, of course grown up very rapidly over the very few years that the internet itself has been in existence. Rapid growth always attracts people on the lookout for 'get rich quick' opportunities to cash in, sometimes without regard to the likely, unfortunate effects on others. One of the characteristics of the internet marketing industry is that it is more or less unregulated by governments because of its trans-boundary nature. So 'cowboys' abound. Once you 'put your head above the parapet' ie you and more particularly your email address, becomes known, you WILL receive more and more lengthy, highly convincing, 'Absolutely Guaranteed', 'can't fail, 'instant', 'Push-button', FREE but not quite so free as they sound offers.

There may be offers of these types which actually do what their protagonists claim but for every one of those there must be a dozen others which consist more of unrealistic hype than of genuinely helpful content.

The pessimistic tone of the above paragraphs is intended, not to convince you that you cannot succeed in the field of internet business but to try to alert you to the pitfalls which have been responsible for the failure of so many others to achieve the success that really is there to be had by those who are not sucked in by the hype but who are prepared to spend quite a lot of time initially plus, inevitably, some money to educate themselves in a rational, logical process to understand what is involved.

There are many genuinely educational courses available and much useful material is on offer free of charge but invariably and unsurprisingly, more content is needed and this has to be paid for. Even so, the cost can be amazingly low and the richness of content very high. The primary purpose of this piece is to warn would-be internet entrepreneurs to be wary about the blandishments of the multi-coloured, four page 'sales pages' which definitely will flood into your email inbox. Success is there to be achieved but treat your online business just as you would an off-line business, don't expect instant success and never give up. It is a sad fact that many do give up just when they are within reach of their goals.

20 Marketing Tips...Every Entrepreneur Should Know!

    •    The most important order you ever get from a customer is the second order.

    •    In direct mailing, spend 10 percent of your budget on testing.

    •    Understanding and adapting to consumer motivation and behavior is not an option. It is an absolute necessity for competitive survival.

    •    A well-designed catalog mailed to a qualified response list will probably bring a one percent response.

    •    Processing and fulfillment costs incurred from the time an order arrives until it is shipped should be kept below $10 an order.


    •    Know the power of repetition. Be sure your message is consistent.

    •    The two most common mistakes companies make in using the phone is failing to track results and tracking the wrong thing.

    •    Marketing activities should be designed to increase profits, not just sales.

    •    It costs five times as much to sell a new customer as an existing customer.

    •    Selling what your customers need, instead of what they want, can lead to failure.

    •    Don't think that product superiority, technology, innovation or company size will sell itself.

    •    Don't neglect or ignore your current customers while pursuing new ones.

    •    People don't buy products, they buy the benefits and solutions they believe the products provide.

    •    Any decent direct mail campaign will cost $1.25 per piece.

    •    The average business never hears from 96 percent of its dissatisfied customers.

    •    Fifty percent of those customers who complain would do business with the company again if their complaints were handled satisfactorily.

    •    It is estimated that customers are twice as likely to talk about their bad experiences as their good ones.

    •    Marketing is everyone's business, regardless of title or position in the organization.

    •    Exaggerated claims can produce inflated expectations that the product or service cannot live up to, thereby resulting in dissatisfied customers.

    •    Get to know your prime customers—the 20% of product users who account for 80% of the total consumption of that product class.

With acknowledgment and sincere thanks to MissouriBusiness.net