Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, but it’s long time to get serious about your marketing efforts here. Just like the retailers offline figuring this is their time to make 40% of their sales, in essence the same is true for us online.

This time of year there are probably more “Giveaways” than any other time of the year. This is the time that you truly can build your list. One Giveaway I joined has 100 contributors. If they promote to each of their lists and each list only has 10 subscribers, that’s 1000 people getting notification that this is going on. Now just between you and me, we know that these people have more than 10 subscribers, so imagine how much free advertising that can be. Each giveaway usually has their own rules. Some run contests with prizes for the most referrals. Others pay cash, etc. Any way you go, it’s a worthwhile venture.

The first thing you need is a product. If you don’t have something of your own you have put together, such as an ebook, etc., there are plenty on the web. A lot of them are free. Just make sure they have Private Label Rights and or Master Resell Rights so you are free to give the item away, brand it your own, etc. You need to read the rights of each product as the licenses sometimes differ from product to product, but for the most part you’re pretty safe with Private Label Rights.

Once you have your product, the next thing you need is an autoresponder if you don’t have one already. I personally use Aweber, but there are a few good ones. Some others are Response Marketing, Constant Contact. Just google “autoresponders” and compare services and prices. Also be sure to check reliability.

You need to set up your autoresponder with a “webform” for getting people’s names and email addresses. Once you get this set up in your autoresponder, you can get the html code to put on a landing page, or sales page. People see your product, click it, go to your landing page that tells them about your product, they enter their name and email, it bounces back to your autoresponder. Your autoresponder sends out a link for them to click on in their email to verify the email address. When they do that, it should take them to a Thank you page that you have created that has a link for the free gift download they signed up for, or your autoresponder sends a link to their email where they can recover their gift.

This is the first time I have ever done this. It took me 2 full days to get it set up. I pretty much let everything else slide but I figure the time was well spent. The product I offered is valuable to all kinds of people, not just internet marketers and I’m confident my list will start growing soon. For the people who sign up for this particular product, I know what I need to send them in the future. A much more targeted market which will be a lot easier to market to.

If you want to check it out, this is the one I joined. This lady is super helpful and has a whole pdf you can download that gives all sorts of pointers, etc. along with the rules. Just click on the banner below.

If you would like to contribute, it’s not too late. Just click on the link and you’ll go to the contributer part.

http://www.myladywebsgiftgiveaway.com/go/ldbeams/jv/

I as well as the next one believe in Holiday promotion, tying into what ever’s going on to help you promote your stuff, but don’t fire off some warm and fuzzy email to me on Thanksgiving Day, telling me how much you love me and appreciate my business, and then try and sell me something. If you want to send me a “Happy Thanksgiving” and thank me for my business, that’s fine. In fact that’s good business etiquette. I know the big dept. stores are sending out their ads, etc on Thanksgiving Day, but you’re not them.

They are not wanting a “personal relationship” with me. They are not wanting me to believe that they can teach me how to make millions of dollars running another store just like them. They are not trying to convince me that the products in their stores are going to change my life because they did it. If you are just sending me another affiliate link or link to one of your products to buy on a holiday, don’t bother.

This is how your email affected me. On Thanksgiving Day, I am not interested in buying anything to do with work. On Thanksgiving Day if you have to spend your time sending emails trying to get me to buy just one more product from you instead of spending time with family and friends, you need to go find a “guru” that can help you. You obviously aren’t doing very well and if that’s the case, I probably can’t learn a whole lot from you anymore. Thus the unsubscribe button. Oh and by the way, if your unsubscribe button takes me to an error page or another sales page and I can’t opt out, I’m reporting you.

So if you are an Internet Marketing Newbie, don’t make this mistake. People will want to buy, but they don’t want to be insulted, which is what you do when you try to make it sound like you really care about them and then jam a product in their wallet.

Well, we’re on a downhill slide to Christmas from here, gang. It will be here and gone before we know it. I’ve taken the Halloween and Thanksgiving freebies down and will add all the new ones for Christmas as I get them. These are a great way to build up your library. Just don’t get too carried away. LOL.

Your potential customers can’t hear you. With the average person exposed to anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand ads a day, you need to make sure you stand out. You can’t be vague in your messages to your customers. You must make sure you are reaching your target audience, and then make sure you are communicating the benefits of your product to them. You need to get potential customers interested enough in your message and your product to reach out to you. To visit your store or Web site. Then you can develop a relationship with the customer, which is the first step in the selling process.

How do you effectively communicate with your potential customers and make sure that you are heard, seen and read above your competitors and other advertisers? Target your market. Decide who you want to reach with your marketing efforts. Define as much about your target customer as possible. Is this person (or people) men or women? What age group do they fall into? Do you want to narrow it down further by occupation or lifestyle? What about the area they live in? If you have a clear idea of who you are trying to connect with, you’ll have a better chance of actually connecting with them while you create your marketing messages.

Market to a broad audience. Act as a specialist by targeting your market, but deliver your message broadly. If you are marketing a dermatologist’s office, yes, you want people with skin problems so you market to their general doctors, but who else could use a dermatologist’s expertise? You could use postcard marketing and mail some informational full color postcards pieces to a cancer center. With skin cancer on the rise, market to cancer centers, supermarkets that sell sunblock and you can get more generalized from there.

Speak directly to the customer. Tell your prospects their needs and wants. Tell them how you can fulfill their needs and wants, but focus on them, not you. Focus on how you can help them with a solution. Show how you’ve helped others just like them with similar problems or wants.

Talk about your benefits, not just your features. People don’t care about the newest technology. They care about how the newest technology will help them. How will it be a benefit in their lives? Meticulously define your benefits and the best way to communicate them to your customers. Will you save them money? How? Give an example of how your product or service benefitted someone else.

Complexity does not impress. Don’t convolute your message with big words, industry jargon or long sentences. People understand simple words in simple formats. Don’t try to impress by throwing in words they’ll have to look up – no one will. You could “complicate” things by mailing out full color postcards – the color is enough interest to draw the customer in. Your simple message will do the rest of the work.

Come up with a catchy slogan. A slogan is a phrase that expresses something about a benefit or feature of a product or service. Burger King for example uses “Have it your way.” This clearly states that you can have your food any way you want it. They exist to accommodate you.

Get feedback. Show your ads or copy to friends, family or co-workers before you let the world take a look at them. These people are part of your world, and could be in your target audience. Getting their opinions can make your ads so much better. If you have the resources, use a focus group of your target market and use their feedback to make changes for the better.

Provide easy-to-understand information. Use words that your target market will understand. This applies to everything from your postcard marketing campaign to your Web site. Clearly label your Web site address, your business address and phone number, and any other information the customer needs to know. Include any instructions needed, like directions to get to your store. If your store is online, sometimes people need instructions to get there also.

A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is excellent news for those companies who use self-propelling word-of-mouse” e-mail techniques to sell their products.

The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded, as well.  The most popular content is humorous material.

The second most popular category is news, (this year is was probably political news), followed by healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies… in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.

Not long ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle.  The title of the picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it works.

I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture… and thus the advertisement for Disneyland.  The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.

One particular way to  build your list is to join a Give Away event. In a real sense, it’s a huge way of conducting an “ad swap”.  If you have joined any of the Give Away events I’ve listed on the “freebies” page, you might have an idea of how it works in general. If you have no idea of what a Give Away event is and how it works, let me explain.

Give Away Event Explained

Basically, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event. Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass, or a product he is already selling (if he is

kind enough to offer it into the event). The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list. When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then send an announcement about the Giveaway event to their own mailing lists. The result? Lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners! With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list! Many times these gifts come with some form of resale rights that let you give it away, sell it or whatever the rights stipulate.
There Can Be Some Problems

For starters, a lot of Give Away events often require the potential Joint Venture partner to have a minimum of at least 1,000 subscribers in order to participate. Therefore, if you do not have that amount of subscribers or

more, there will be a lot of giveaway events you will be excluded from. You could set up your own Give Away event. You should probably have the idea of paying your Joint Venture (JV) Partners a decent percentage of commissions for every successful One Time Offer sale. You might also want to know which partner is doing well in referring subscribers to your event and who isn’t, so you’ll want a way to track.

Usually, the one who runs the Give Away event wins the most in terms of subscribers and One Time Offer sales, if any. However, this is where the second problem is: if you don’t have any programming skills, you can kiss this idea “goodbye”!

A third problem is that big time Give Away event runners often suffer these throughout the start, run and end of the event: sleep deprivation, stress and lots of hard work! In fact, in some ways, being a participating partner can be even more appealing to most list owners even though the reward is proportionally smaller in terms of success, new subscriber counts and sales, if any.

If you have a decent gift to give away, and you’re set up right, and the giveaway has a lot of partners mailing to their mailing lists, you have a good chance of getting a good targeted audience to your mailing list.  This is especially true if you have a specialty niche that your gift is connected to, so when people want to download your gift you know they are interested in what you have to offer.

Put that website up, and they will come… NOT! And even if they were to come looking for you, standing on the street corner, shouting your name, will you be ready to respond? If you’re starting a business on the internet, you better fall in love with Internet Marketing.

Bill Gates has been quoted in 2000 saying “There are 2 kinds of businesses going forward: Those who have an internet presence and those who are out of business.”

Let’s face it, you must become knowledgeable about the internet. There is so much to learn and it seems like you’re just getting a handle on it, when something new comes along. In fact, unless you already enjoy having marketing experts on your team, you will need to make marketing your new love.

Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is much more. It’s who you are in the marketplace. It’s what you represent. It’s what folks think when they think of you. Marketing is the way you compete for brain space. It’s your message. Most important, marketing is your road to wealth. If you are waiting for folks to find you, you will go broke. If you get in front of the people who are looking for you, and you communicate in a way that is compelling, you win. Marketing is the art of getting in front of those people who are looking for you and communicating in the language that they want to hear.

So here is the deal: Fall in-love with marketing. Make it a game. Keep score. Develop the marketing skills that will take you where you want your business to go. I believe strongly in finding a mentor in whatever area I want to master. I find the best for my current education level and my ability to afford them and study. I do what they do. And I make a point of learning from multiple sources. If you can’t afford to study personally with a mentor, read their books, listen to their programs, get on their email list and get busy.

The great thing about internet marketing is the tons of free information and strategies available. You can begin by searching out every marketing guru out there reading the free materials they offer. By starting with the free education, you learn the vocabulary and strategies that are currently available on the internet. I don’t recommend buying anything initially. Take a look at all the offerings and work to get your head on straight about what is available vs. what you need in your business. I make a point of subscribing to a number of internet marketing newsletters. I download Podcasts, those audio shows that are free for the download. I watch videos. Don’t forget to take advantage of our “free resource” page to get you started.

While I don’t do everything that is suggested, I find that the constant exposure to new marketing ideas keeps me fresh. I understand that marketing doesn’t come naturally to me: I must learn my game. This is a free and gentle way to keep myself thinking about marketing.

Affiliate marketing has many descriptions, yet all have the same meaning. Affiliate marketing is a huge business on the Internet. It is a cooperative effort between merchants and an affiliate’s website. For many years now, affiliate marketing has proved to be a cost-efficient, measurable method of delivering long-tern results. It has become famous for Internet sites who are trying to make some extra or additional income for their site. Every day, people get interested in affiliate marketing and want to make money out of it. In many cases these new affiliates do not fully understand the affiliate world and make costly mistakes. In other words, affiliate marketing has often been misunderstood.

One of the common misconceptions that are being associated about affiliate marketing is “selling”. Selling is an important activity of affiliate marketing and the central function of a business operation, but it’s not the only component. Another is that affiliate marketing is commonly linked with “advertising”. While the importance of advertising in marketing a certain product is not to be underestimated, the fact of the matter is, advertising like selling, is merely a part of the many functions of marketing.

In affiliate marketing, an affiliate is compensated for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. The said compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit. The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing from the merchant’s viewpoint is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are produced.
Affiliate marketing is typically being run by affiliate networks and these affiliate networks are composed of two functional bodies, the group affiliates and the group merchants. Each has their special function and role when it comes to affiliate marketing. The affiliate network acts as a third party between the merchant and the associated affiliates. The network provides the technology to deliver the merchant’s campaigns and offers. The affiliate network also collects commission fees from the merchant and then pays the affiliates which are part of the program.

The merchant is any web site owner that wants or desires to take advantage of performance based marketing. The benefits to the merchant are many. First, the merchant maintains and operates the affiliate program. If it would be extracted, the merchant needs to do their part by researching interested affiliate websites to ensure that they are a good fit for their particular product. Finding a fit for their merchandise would be the key to more generated income. The merchant has access to markets and customers without him spending valuable time searching out. Banner ads on affiliate sites are not distracting to the site user. It might produce interest for that product and drive the consumer to the merchants’ website. It is also the merchant who decides how much he is willing to pay for each sale that results from a visitor sent from an affiliate.

The affiliate or the affiliate marketer also sees a lot of benefits. The affiliate is a web site owner that promotes one or more merchants and their affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can generate a full-time income for the affiliate. But this is not an easy task to accomplish. The affiliate needs to have a good understanding with the merchant what the commission will be, expected payment method and time involved in the contract.  The affiliate has also the responsibility to stand for the merchandise their user base would be most interested in. For example, if the site has a user base of mainly stay-at-home mothers, then on-line job openings such as surveys would be a good match for them. This group would also appreciate direct links to children’s products and informational sites. Merchandisers often provide targeted, best-seller items and personal support to their affiliates. They often offer sales promotions that will benefit the merchandiser as well as the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a great situation for both the marketer and the affiliate. If they would work together, they can be an advantage to both. Plus the fact that it seems to make sense, it is easy and inexpensive way to start, and you can be up and running within a few days. But there is one thing to consider, it is how to get traffic and make your offer different than all others.

Another component is being able to track your visitors to the merchant’s site. Unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous merchants out there, like in any business, that aren’t forthcoming with the commissions you’re owed. We’ll get into more about that later.

We all know how important traffic is to our business online. It’s like someone told me once concerning a sign out side of my brick and mortar business-

“A business with no sign is a sign of no business”

In the beginning, e-mail was the one way that viral marketing was started. Since that long ago day, viral marketing has gone from a marketing strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of creating a successful viral marketing campaign.  Seven of those ways are:

1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however, getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are placed on it. Still… it does work. It does help deliverability by using an autoresponder, as explained in my last post.
2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it a very effective tool. If you include enough timely    and valuable information, a good newsletter can drive up the number of visits to your website.
3. Blogging: Providing the tools on your website to enable bloggers to interact with one another is a terrific way to get the message about your product or service out there and being talked about. Bloggers have their ears to the ground for new products and services.
4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can and does encourage interaction among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer questions on a given day at a given time.
5. Tell-a-friend Script: If you add this with a statement saying that e-mail addresses supplied will never be shared with third parties, you can increase your potential customer list greatly.
6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the interest up and increase traffic.
7. Flash Games: Although they are a little costly to start, they are an extremely effective tool to get your viral marketing campaign going. Once they are launched, they require nothing more from you. Update: There are quite a few “free games” out there. Like everything else, just google it.

Using a combination of these will keep people coming back or help keep you in constant touch with them. Just make sure when you add scripts, etc to your websites or blogs, they don’t take forever to load or all your hard work will be for nothing. Very few people have the patience to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load.

The Difference Between Autoresponder Programs and Autoresponder Services

An autoresponder of any kind is vitally important to your Internet business. If you have gathered information from the internet at all, you have undoubtedly signed up for a newsletter or something where you entered your name and email address to get something from the site. When you did that, you more than likely got an instant email message in your inbox with a link to confirm that you signed up. This is usually from an autoresponder, which just like the name implies, automatically responds to data input. Many newcomers to the Internet marketing arena are not aware that there is a vast difference between an autoresponder program and an autoresponder service. Not knowing the difference, they often purchase the wrong type of autoresponder, and find out too late that they have wasted money on a program that is useless to them.

An autoresponder program is a program that is set up on your web server. This is usually a free autoresponder that comes with your web hosting account. It usually is your site email account. With a lot of them, the most you can do is set them up to respond the first time someone submits their information, but then after that you’re on your own. Some people don’t like the autoresponder programs that come with their hosting accounts so instead, they use an autoresponder program that they have more control over. They will purchase autoresponder programs or scripts that must be installed on their web server.

Other people are quite happy with using an autoresponder service. This is a service that is usually paid for on a monthly or yearly basis. The fees are ongoing, and everything is browser based. In other words, you can set up your autoresponder messages and manage your opt-in list through your web browser – just as you can with an autoresponder program that is installed through your web hosting account. The difference is that the service runs on the autoresponder service’s web server – not yours or your web hosts.

Beginners are usually better off using an autoresponder service. These services are very easy to understand and to use, and no technical knowledge is needed to set things up. As a newcomer to the field, however, you might be concerned about the costs of an autoresponder service. If this is the case, you have the option of signing up with a free autoresponder service.

Free services make their money by placing advertisements in each autoresponder message that you send out. Sometimes these ads appear at the top of your messages, and sometimes they appear at the bottom. Some of the free services are simply an enticement to purchase the professional version, and have many of the more advanced features, such as tracking, disabled.

One autresponder that a good percentage of the “gurus” in internet marketing use is Aweber . When you visit their home page you can get the info on pricing, etc. Their pricing is based on how many subscribers you have per month and goes up as you build your list. They just added a bunch of email analytic tools to the service and will even let you take it for a test drive first.

Another very popular autoresponder service is GetResponse. They are a little cheaper per month and claim to have more tools than the other autoresponders, but since Aweber added so many new analytics, I’m not so sure.

The thing about using autoresponders that make it worth the money you spend on them is your emails are more apt to get to your customers instead of to their spam folder. Another great thing about them is you can do a “broadcast” where you write one message and send it to your whole list all at the same time. This is very much a time saver as you don’t have to load up everyone’s email addresses one at a time. Whichever program you choose, if you don’t have some way of capturing names and email addresses, your leaving possible customers on the table for someone else.

Building Your Mailing List with Downloads

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.