Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
November 29th, 2009 | 
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Christmas is nearly upon us and if you haven’t already, it’s time to up your marketing campaigns to boost your online traffic and sales. If you are yet to start your Christmas marketing campaigns, then you need to get started. With less than 12 weeks to go until Christmas, most marketers are already busy in the execution of their Christmas marketing strategy.
But, if you haven’t already started – do not worry, there are still practical steps you can take that can have a significant impact on your pre-Christmas sales.
1. Consider Affiliate Marketing – Speak to affiliate networks now about sourcing publishers to participate in your affiliate campaign. The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you pay only for successful conversions or sales.
2. Online Advertising – Use online display advertising to run special offers across relevant sites to your target market, to increase interested visitors to your website. Or try a more blanket approach and display advertise with Google, Yahoo! or MSN. Increase your web presence in the run up to Christmas, but don’t forget a strong call to action or reason to click. And don’t forget the power of blogging to increase your search engine visibility. Start contributing to the blogs your customers read.
3. Pay Per Click – as well as ensuring your site is optimised for natural search, look at running additional pay per click campaigns in the run up to Christmas. As people search for specific gifts for their loved ones, make sure your ad and site is there at the top.
4. Email marketing – Now is the time to contact your customers with Christmas gift ideas. Use a Christmas email template to set the festive mood for your campaign and don’t forget to add a forward to a friend link so they can send the email to their friends and family to tell them exactly what they want for Christmas.
Don’t forget – you can be emailing your clients up to a few days before Christmas (don’t underestimate your delivery times however!). Find a good Christmas e-card or Christmas email template to get cracking on your Xmas e-campaigns today and don’t forget to send a Christmas e-card thanking your customers for their custom and reminding them about your January sales.
Article Source: Reagan Quanah
CPA networks are one of the most talked about subjects in internet marketing today, but what are CPA networks? Well, CPA stands for cost per action and a CPA network pays marketers a certain amount for delivering a specific action to an advertiser. Most marketers are used to only getting paid if they make a sale for a seller, but with CPA networks you can get paid if a prospect signs up for an email list, fills out a one page form, or even something as simple as filling out their zip code. For most of these deals the prospect never needs to pull out their credit card to get paid, which means higher conversion rates and more consistent profits.
How Much Can I Earn With a CPA Network?
Just like a regular affiliate network the amount of money you can earn is directly related to how much traffic you can send them. CPA networks’ payouts are usually not as high as selling an affiliate product, but you will see a much higher conversion rate. For a simple one page form or a zip submit you can usually expect to make $1-$5 per action. The higher paying programs usually pay based one the prospect enrolling in a free trail or giveaway. Free trials are great because you can earn $15-$50 for just giving away something for free. Not only will these convert at a high rate, but your referrals will love you for sending them to such a great free offer.
Which Is More Profitable CPA Networks or Affiliate Networks?
I wouldn’t say either one is more profitable, because it is all dependent on the offer that you promote. You should not just focus on one or the other, but look for the most profitable offers each have to offer. For those new to internet marketing it might pay off to promote CPA network offers because they are usually an easier sell than promoting a product. It’s a lot harder to convince people to buy an expensive product than it is to get them to fill out their zip code. If your sales skills are still new than you could really benefit from promoting CPA offers.
Article Source: Dean Dreyer
The simple answer is when it does not sell. Now while that may sound like a bit of a throwaway line it does not make it any less true.
The function of a sales letter is fairly basic but a basic letter will not get the job done think about the last time you walked into a store and after you told the assistant what you wanted, say a camera, if all you were told was “Here are the cameras, this is what they cost let me know when you pick one”. How likely do you think you would be to hand over your cash at the till?
Before I go into the differing areas of the letter with you there are two things to remember. The first being, as much if not more effort goes into writing the sales letter for a free item or service as goes into a paid one. The paid item already has a perceived value in your readers mind while with a free item you need to convince them of the value. The second thing to remember is that your aim is to get your reader to want the item, there is a saying in marketing circles that people buy what they want not what they need.
Right, now for the breakdown of your letter. Let’s say your product is called Joe’s Wonder Book.
First on your list is the headline/subject line. The headline is your shop window, it is there to grab the interest and make them read on or open the email. Instead of, Use Joe’s Wonder Book To Improve Your Business, you need to create a need in your reader to keep on reading so try something like 3 Simple Changes That Could Double Your Business In One Month. See the difference, already they can see in their mind what doubling their business would mean to them and if they can do it in one month just by doing 3 simple things it must be worth having a look at. Mission one completed.
Now that you have them reading you need to get them on your side and wanting to know more. The best way for this is to personalise the letter, by this I don’t mean having their name plastered all over it but by making it seem as though it has been written just to them.
One of the simplest ways is to open the letter with a few well chosen questions, but they do need to be worded in such a way that the answers are already known. Something like,
Want to stay one step ahead of your competition?
Do you feel that your business could grow quicker if only you knew how?
Another thing not to forget is the power of just the right amount of fear, fear that their competitors might know something they don’t or that they are not keeping up to date, so you could try,
Do you know how many businesses’s fail because they don’t grow quick enough?
Want to know the one thing that could make sure you are still in business this time next year?
You get the idea. You would of course word these to suit your product but the principles are the same no matter what you are offering. You now have them eager to know more as you have asked the questions that they want the answers to even if they have never asked themselves these question before, all backed up by the fear of not knowing the answers.
In part two we will cover the middle section, the all important closing and the one section that is either left out or even never used that is just as important, in fact could almost double your sales if done correctly.
Dont forget about my free letter writing course, get it HERE
See you then.
Gregg Montgomery
Posted in Marketing, Sales Letter Writing, Training | 
Tags: letter writing, selling, Training | 
1 Comment »
Give-away events, everyone must know what they are by now. You can’t open your inbox without someone promoting one, two or even three of them.
Just in case you have missed seeing these, I will give you a quick rundown on what they are all about. The idea is that everyone gets together and offers a free downloadable gift each. Then you all mail to your lists to get people to sign up and when they download a gift they of course have to supply their name and email so if it is your gift, your list grows, and that’s it in a nutshell.
This worked fine until about a year ago. Up until then there would be one event every month or two, so each one was getting really large numbers of sign ups and you could grow your list by several hundred each time and most of the gifts were fresh and new.
Since then the number of events has started to outgrow the number of people signing up. When you have three or four each month of course, fewer people will be joining each one. Not only that but the same old gifts get recycled event after event and month after month, which also causes fewer to sign up.
How can you tell they are no longer the little goldmine they used to be?
Just look at how they are now run. Keep in mind that the reason you join is that your list is on the small side and this should be the quickest and easiest way to grow it, the guys with the large lists are the ones who run them as they can kick start the event with one mailing.
The big listers grew their list by adding every person who signed up, I don’t have a problem with that, it is their event and they have put the effort in, your list grew by getting people to take your gift. All cool and dandy. Now here is the big BUT, now that numbers are down they feel the need to squeeze the little guy at the bottom but making it a condition of the event that they get sign ups or their gift will be deleted.
The problem with this is that if you have a smallish list not only are you mailing them about the event but so is everyone else so the chances of you getting a sign up are small, therefore you get told to mail harder or get deleted. If you over mail you will lose people of your list because they will see it as spam. Not really what you are after.
There is a way around this and that is to upgrade by paying $17 or $27, good idea if you were getting the numbers out of it but as numbers are low at the moment and not really worth it.
If you want my advice it would be to grab yourself three or four good free products from a recent event, sign up to every one going and rotate the products through them. Then after a month or so grab a couple more new products and repeat. Don’t worry about being deleted, this tends not to happen until a week or two in and the busiest time is normally the first five to eight days. Therefore, you get the best of the event and still have another three or four on the go anyway.
So sign up, enjoy and watch your list grow, slow but grow.
For a list of running and up coming events try HERE
Gregg
The three myths about list building that tend to get banded around most are for the most part true. Unfortunately only two are really true and the third, well lets just say that most of the mail you have in your inbox would not be there if it also was true.
Myth 1
You need a list to sell online. This one is true. No one really expects to make sales just by putting a site on the web and waiting for people to find it. Yes you could spend a fortune on Adwords etc. to get it to the top of the search lists but if you had that kind of money to spend why bother trying to sell when you could be on a beach somewhere. So yes you do need a list to sell to if only to off set your Adwords costs and get you in the market.
Myth 2
The money is in the list. Also true but it needs to be qualified by saying that size does matter in this case. It is all a game of numbers. The generally accepted number is 1%. That is an average conversion rate of emails sent out. By that I mean you can hopefully expect 1% of the people who read your mails to buy something. So if you send 100 mails you might expect 1 sale. Not really going to get you far. If you have a list of 10,000 well you do the math.
Myth 3
List building is easy. NOT true, again qualified by unless you already have a large list. Have a look at your emails, how many are promising huge numbers of sign ups in 7 days/30 days or whatever? Oh and just as an aside, how do you get to be told all these wondrous secret plans, that’s right you sign up on to their list. So their list get bigger and you get, well more emails really.
There are many ways to grow a list from scratch but they tend to be slow, time consuming and require a lot of work. This is why so many people give up early on. The pay off though is that once you have a fair sized list it does get easier because you can then be taken seriously by other marketers who will be willing to enter into ad-swaps with you etc.
So be prepared to spend the first several months doing not much more that list building, with the odd sale here and there.
The many list building tactics are matters for many more articles and I hope to get down and have them written up soon.
But whatever you do, stick with it and don’t give up.
Quick Video Of How PLR Can Work For You
If you didn’t know it before, I’ll tell you today. If you want to make big money online, you have to create your own products.
Forget about all the noise about AdSense and affiliate marketing. I’m not saying they cannot make you money, but if you want to build a sustainable internet business, then you must have your own products.
Or why do you think that the big AdSense and affiliate marketing guys have their own products. Even if you don’t sell them well at the beginning, you can offer your products as bonuses to people to come to your site and buy other products through your affiliate links and even to click on your AdSense.
Having said that, I must confess that it is a lot of hard work to create your own product. You have to do the following and more.
- You have to do a market research
- You have to write pages and pages of book
- You have to create ecover graphics.
Heck! Small wonder many people don’t do it.
You can however avoid the above problems and have your own product with your name and copyright on it by investing a little amount of money on Private Label Rights products. It is very easy to do.
So here is a breakdown of how to do it.
1) Purchase a Private Label Product.
2) Brand it as your own by putting your name as the author.
3) Edit it by adding what you want to the contents and also by removing what you don’t want to give it a personal touch. This is important because there will be others out there with the same rights.
4) Create a new ecover for it or edit the source file you were provided with.
5) Go online and sell your product or give away to build your list
Last note: Do not go for a right that is too cheap. If you’ve got a package of 20 products for just $5 then you should know that thousands of other people out there have the same rights.
Also you should buy rights directly from the creator of the products only and not those that bought the rights and are reselling the rights. Buy from only those that say you can only use it for personal business and not the rights to give the rights. No master resell rights.
Follow these tips and you will be creating your own products in the next 24 hours.
Article Source: Akin Alabi
When you submit articles to a newsletter/ezine publisher or a website owner as part of your article marketing campaign, you have to remember that they aren’t going to publish YOUR article for THEIR customers and visitors unless it is high quality content that gives something of value.
If you’re writing articles like crazy as part of your article marketing, but getting very few of them actually published, then you might want to re-evaluate your approach. Are you making one of these crucial article marketing mistakes?
1. Poor Subject Matter:
If you’re going to bother writing articles, write about something that people are interested in reading about. In other words, address a problem and provide a solution within your content. This is your best bet when in comes to article marketing. Content pieces that approach an old problem in a new way or with a new twist work well too — you don’t have to necessarily discover a whole new problem that no one else has ever though of before (If you discover a whole new problem and have the solution you better be thinking of product creation not just an article marketing!).
2. Write With Personality:
No one likes to read text books. Put a little of your own personality into your article marketing and make your content engaging and entertaining as well as informative. If you have a sense of humor, use it.
3. Write For Your Audience:
Don’t distribute content about the value of protein in the American diet to a Russian Political website or the publisher of a podiatry newsletter… They don’t care.
4. Write A Decent Sized Article:
Most publishers would rather an article be a little bit too long than very short. Four hundred word articles just don’t have enough meat in them. Don’t ramble when you’re writing articles, but you’ve got to provide some details if you want to be published.
5. Break Up Your Article:
When writing articles, don’t use three long paragraphs. Break it up into smaller paragraphs with a few single lines, bullets, etc. to make it easier and more enjoyable to read. Again — no one likes to read text books.
6. Spell Check And Grammar:
If you’re writing articles as part of a serious article marketing campaign, then you’ve got to spell check. No one will publish your content if it’s full of spelling and grammar errors.
7. Don’t Write A Sales Letter:
No one will publish an article that reads like a sales letter… period. Article marketing isn’t about selling, it’s about pre-selling.
8. Forget About Affiliate Links:
Use your head… why would anyone use your content article if it’s full of your own affiliate links? Ever hear of the “Golden Rule?” It applies to article marketing too. Would you publish another writer’s article if it were full of his affiliate links? I doubt it.
9. Create A Reasonable Resource Box:
A resource box should tell me who you are, what you do, and how I can get in touch with you. It’s not unlimited advertising space for you to describe every website you run and each product you sell. Article marketing is about providing content, not advertising. That “Golden Rule” thing applies to resource boxes too.
10. Only Write About What You Know:
Even if you’re writing articles based on opinion, get your facts straight. Don’t write content filled with advice that you have no business giving… it will hurt your article marketing campaign.
If you take nothing else away from this discussion, remember that a good article writing campaign always answers “What’s in it for me?”
When you’re writing articles to send to newsletter and website publishers, you have to answer that question on two fronts…
What’s in it for the publisher? Why should they show your content to their customers and visitors? Does it give something of value?
– AND –
What’s in it for the people who will ultimately be reading your article when it’s published?
After all, the idea behind article marketing is to provide some worthy content that compels readers to visit your site, subscribe to your newsletter, or buy your product.
Article marketing can be extremely lucrative… but you’ve got to do it right.
Article Source: Chris Yates
