For anyone who gets involved in an internet home based business, one of the first things that they are taught to do in order to build a successful online business is to get a website, a blog and an auto-responder. In fact these three things are the most important tools when starting an internet business.

What we are going to discuss here is ways to get your list building and blogging activities to synchronize in such a way that your marketing efforts will support both these activities at the same time. In other words, your blog will support your list building and your list building will support your blog.

Let’s begin by looking at how you can use your blog as a way to build your list.

When setting up your blog make sure that you add an opt-in box to your auto-responder and place it in a prominent position where your visitors will see it on arrival at your blog. Near to the top and either on the left or right hand side is good. You could offer a free report or e-book as an inducement to sign up to your list.

Whenever you make a new post to your blog, sign off with your name and a link to your squeeze page. Encourage your visitors to sign up to your list so that they will be notified every time you make a new post on your blog.

Another way that you can promote your blog is by inviting people to comment on your blog posts. The advantage for them is that their comments can link back to their websites when they enter the URL field on the comment form.

If your business is internet marketing then make posts about this and teach your subscribers about the benefits and etiquette of commenting and linking back to their sites from the blog comments. Make sure that they understand that spamming is not an option.

Whenever you make a new post about something controversial or a review on a product or service, email your list and ask them to give you their opinions on whatever you have blogged about and include a link to your blog post.

You should see a significant increase in traffic to your site from your email list if your post is well targeted and also a big increase in the number of comments that you get to each article.

Offer your readers the opportunity of using your posts on their own blogs provided they include a link back to your site and acknowledge you as the author of that post. Also submit your articles or posts to other peoples’ blogs for possible inclusion on their sites. Invite your email list to submit articles for possible inclusion on your blog with a link back to their sites and inform them of how guest blogging will help to increase their own profiles on the internet. This will help to keep your blog loaded with fresh content at all times.

By adding these tactics to your list building and blogging efforts you will be creating a well synchronized and effective marketing strategy for your internet home based business.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Make Money Online …
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Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for a business to promote themselves and increase sales but it must be done right in order to be effective.
In this article I will touch on the art of email marketing- (What works and what does not) and how you can get more bang for your marketing buck when selecting an email marketing service.

A word about spam.

Unsolicited email or “Junk email” also called “Spam” is living proof that email is a powerful way to reach an online audience.

Spammers know that for all the emails trashed in every bulk mail out, they will still get a few unsuspecting readers who will click on their links and make a purchase. While their shotgun approach is annoying to the majority of us they still persist because of that reason.

On the other hand, email marketing should not involve spamming a harvested collection of email addresses, but rather contacting a list of individuals who have actually said yes to receiving your material.

How to get people to subscribe to your mailing list.

There are some of the ways to get people on your mailing list.

The first and most obvious option is that they fill out a form on your website specifically designed for the job.
You can add a special offer such as a free report, a tutorial, discounts or even a prize draw in exchange for their contact.

The second way (if you are a local business) is to have some printed material such as a flyer with a special offer, competition or similar that people can fill out and return to you.

Hint: In all these cases, it is worth adding a note to your forms telling people that you will not share their email with other companies and that you will not swamp them with emails either.

The third way to get more subscribers is to actually purchase a list of verified email addresses from a reputable provider. They must be interested in your subject material and have opted in to receiving emails from you.
There are a number of companies that specialize in providing leads, but it is worth doing some homework to find out what value this method will give to you.

What makes a marketing email work.

These items are very effective in encouraging readers to continue to look at the emails they receive from businesses.

How to’s and tutorials.

People love do-it-yourself articles that show them how to solve a problem. The added advantage of posting material like this is that you are not only helping existing customers and encouraging loyalty (and repeat sales) but you can use opportunities such as this to address potential issues before they happen and so reduce calls for customer support.

Video and Audio content.

This is the best format for the above, as well as tours, testimonials…the list goes on. Video gets noticed and is highly memorable in comparison to text.
Audio sessions are great for podcasts too which means your listener can take your article with them.

A pleasant layout with some color.

This will help make your email stand out from your competitors and add to the reader’s enjoyment. You can incorporate a template and produce something really effective.

Nice pictures that are both relevant and of good quality.

A picture paints a thousand words – so make sure you include at least one to illustrate your point.
Include photos (they need not be professional) but in focus and a reasonable size. Hint: not too large though so they do not take several minutes to download.

Humor (in good taste).

A laughing reader is likely to be a repeat one.

You might want to enlist the help of a cartoonist to create something original. Add a funny video, quote or even a brief story.

Relevant news.

keep your readers informed on new products and developments and how improvements to your offerings will help them.

Competitions (with a nice prize).

You can gain a lot of interest from readers simply by creating a competition.

An opportunity to share an opinion.

People will often happily share their thoughts if you ask them to because it gives a sense of belonging and community. It is also a very cost effective way of finding out what your customers want. Make it fairly short and offer a prize draw or other incentive as a token of appreciation.

What makes a marketing email suck.

Hard sell.

“Buy now!!!” will soon become “Bye now.” from your readers.

An email every day.

This is the death knell for emails via annoyance and plain overkill – try and control your enthusiasm to market by limiting your email frequency. This will give you time to produce quality content too.
Quality beats quantity.

Bad layout (such as none).

Lots and lots and lots of text with poor spacing all crammed up with no places for the eyes to rest. (and besides who has time to read a newsletter that is 149 pages long during their morning break)?

Lots and lots and lots of banners.

“Ohhhh my eyes my eyes!”
Save the flashing logos and bright colors for Las Vegas.

Poor writing skills and grammar.

Forgetting to check for spelling mistakes is more than just another annoyance (believe it or not, but people are influenced by this).
Poor spelling and grammar presents an unprofessional / lazy picture for your readers.

What to look for when choosing an email marketing service.

A good email marketing service should have a number of features that will allow you to tweak things so you can get the most bang for your marketing buck. Here are a few features to look for…

Firstly there needs to be flexibility and creativity to get your message across.

This includes the ability to combine text with pictures and video as well as some html so you can make your message stand out.
A good email is more than just a page of text – it needs to be memorable and the way to do that is by being visually creative.

Secondly there should be a way to find out if your email marketing is being received and read.

This feature is called tracking and basically means you should have a display somewhere that will show you exactly where your emails are going, what addresses are incorrect (your emails are undeliverable and bounce back) and what emails are actually being delivered, clicked on and read.

Thirdly you must be able to automate and adjust everything so once you create an email you can set it to deliver to your recipients at a set time.

This can also include auto responders (An email that goes to a visitor as soon as they fill out a contact form or make a purchase from your website) which help you communicate with your potential customer when you are not online. You should be able to do split testing too (in other words create two different emails and send them to selected groups so you can find out which one works best).

Fourthly you should be able to see how your email list is growing over time.

Data like this is not just for statisticians and geeks who like to crunch numbers – it will help give you an insight into what is working overall so you can refine your marketing.

Marketing is an art, but with the right tools and know-how it can work for you.
Here’s to your success.

Time for the 5th and final article in my step-by-step list building series. In the first 4 articles I have focused on setting up a full list building system, monetizing the sign up process, and putting up a great follow up series, featuring good affiliate programs (you will find links to the first 4 articles at the end of this post). Today we’re going to take what you’ve learned so far, and explore how you can take it to the next level.

So How Do You Get Filthy Rich On The Internet?

Following the steps in the first 4 articles is a very good start. Building your
own list is extremely important if you want to be successful in internet marketing, and you can make a very decent income just from promoting affiliate products… But in order to take your internet marketing career to the next level (the filthy rich part), you really need to have your own products. As you are about to discover, setting up your own product isn’t that difficult. But first lets take a look at some of the benefits from having your own products.

Leverage Your Affiliate Program

If you have your own product, you can also have an affiliate program. By giving your affiliates an incentive (usually cash commissions) to promote your pages – you can move from just you promoting your squeeze pages, to having hundreds, even thousands, of people driving traffic to your site. Sure you give up a percentage of each sale, but the extra sales will outweigh that by far… Being able to run an affiliate program is one of the biggest reasons why you want to have your own products.

Leverage The Power Of Joint Ventures

With your own products you are also poised to do joint ventures with other marketers… You can promote their products to your list of customers/members, and they can return the favor. You can find products related to your service and add them to your auto responder follow up series. Not only will you earn commissions on any sales you make, but you can get your JV partners to turn around and add your product to their follow series. You can also do various other forms of integration marketing with your JV partners, including swapping thank you page ads, log in/log out ads, exit pop ups etc. Doing joint ventures like this is arguably the fastest and most profitable way to grow an internet business.

Leverage Your First Product To Expand…

Launching a product, doesn’t matter if it’s a free or paid service, ultimately comes down to building a list of customers/members. Chances are that your original customers will be the people most likely to buy from you again. In other words you can leverage your original lists to launch new products and services. This particular strategy is very well covered in Robert Puddy’s Mastering The Membership Model ebook, you can download a free copy here.

Setting Up Your First Product…

… Is actually quite easy. In line with Robert’s ebook above, I highly recommend that you set up your first product as a free to join membership site. I use and recommend the full version of the Launch Formula Marketing Script. But if you purchase the one time offer at either Floating Action Button or TweetMyBlog you will actually get a free copy of the LFM Lite script, which is perfect for setting up your first product. Creating a free product, that people want to sign up to get, is very similar to the process I described in How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process. Here’s a rough battle plan for you.

1. Create a free product that has enough value to make people want to sign up at your membership site to get it.

2. When they sign up for the freebie you present them with a one time offer. This could be for an upgraded version of the product, some related products, rebrand rights to the ebook etc. This will of course generate some profit that you can reinvest, and thus grow you site faster. But the real purpose of the OTO is to generate commissions for your affiliates and JV partners – keep them happy and keep them building your list.

3. Then you have your follow up series for your new customers. With a free to join program you want to monetize it the same way as I explained in How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy. Of course now that you have your own product, with an affiliate program – you should put more effort into finding JV partners, so you can swap auto responder emails.

4. Use your new list of members (and affiliates) to launch new products and services. Using something like Launch Formula Marketing, makes all of this very easy. It has an inbuilt affiliate program (every member is automatically an affiliate), it automatically integrates with your auto responder and it presents the one time offers to your new members.

Some Ideas For Your First (Free) Product

Write a short ebook on a topic people in your niche are interested in. If you don’t want to write your own ebook you can go to elance.com and hire a ghost writer. You can get a super quality ebook written for under $500. If you go the ebook route, it’s pretty simple to come up with a good one time offer – you can offer rebranding rights or maybe resale rights, plus some related bonuses.

Doesn’t have to been an ebook, you can give away software, scripts, plugins etc. TweetMyBlog is a good example of free to join site, giving away a free WordPress plugin. Again you can go to a freelance site like elance and get a programmer to create something for you. Another (very simple) option is to grab one of the many private label rights products out there, and put your own spin on it. New graphics, edit the sales letter a bit, maybe bundle a few products together. Resale Rocket is my favourite place to hunt for good PLR and resale rights products.

You should also consider making your first product an interview product. Get on the phone and interview some marketers on a topic your target market would be interested in. By interviewing successful marketers you get the benefit of becoming "famous by association" – and if they are willing to do the interviews in the first place, chances are that you can also get them to promote your product (instant high profile JV partners right there). I highly recommend that you grab a free copy of Bob Jenkins’ Teleseminar Formula – It will show you step by step how to get an interview product set up in 10 days or less.

I also recommend the Dominating Clickbank Videos. They will show you step by step how to take a resale rights product and turn it into your own successful product. I actually used Dominating Clickbank as the blueprint for one of my first product launches, and as you might have guessed, that turned out pretty well for me

We’re At The End Of The Series

I hope you have enjoyed these list building articles… And that following the steps, have gotten you started building a list and that you are starting to see some profits from your efforts. As I said the first 4 articles deal with laying down the foundation for internet marketing success, and it’s something I believe everyone should set up… before even starting on creating their own product. But as we have discussed here today, creating your own products is the key to taking it to the next level… and possibly getting filthy rich on the internet.

Here are the first 4 articles, in case you missed them:

1. How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process
2. How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy
3. How To Drive Massive Amounts Of Traffic To Your Squeeze Page
4. How To Drive Even More Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

What About The Ebook?

As I’ve said before, I’m going to take this article series and turn it into an ebook. However I have a bit of work to do before you get to see that. I want to add some more content, make the ebook rebrandable and add a killer affiliate program to it. In other words, you’ll have a to wait a bit, but I can promise you it will be well worth the wait.

Got Any Comments, Requests Or Rotten Eggs You Want To Throw?

Feel free to leave a blurb below if you have any questions or comments about todays article (or the series as a whole) – or maybe a few suggestions for what you would like to see in the final ebook – thanks

by Soren Jordansen

You have been building your list for some time now.  Perhaps you have 100 subscribers to your list, or maybe you have 500 or 5000.

You have heard that some internet marketers can earn up to one dollar for every name on their list, per month, but you aren’t near that.  Why?

One of the most important things to know and remember about list building is that list building is not just about assembling a collection of emails.  If that were the case,  you could buy a list of one million and make one million per month, right?

So the key with list building is not the volume of subscribers, but the relationship with those subscribers.  Sure, as your volume of subscribers goes up, your revenue goes up, holding the relationship with your subscribers constant.

The mathematical formula for revenue from your list is:
List size x relationship with list x quality of list = revenue from list.

It is just that simple.  But it is multiplicative, not additive in nature.  No matter how large one or two of the elements of your revenue formula is, if any of the elements is = to 0, your total revenue will be 0.

If you have a relationship quantity of 0, then your revenue will be 0.

How do you develop relationship with your subscribers?

You must communicate with your subscribers.  Note I say subscribers, not list.  You must communicate with your subscribers personally, not as a group.  Sure, your auto responder will go out to the entire list, but as much as is possible, personalize the list.  Use the subscribers’ name.  Write the email to each person individually by using the word ‘you’- never, ‘my list’ or ‘you guys’ or ‘my subscribers’.

- Ask your subscribers questions. 
- Ask them what they want to learn about. 
- Encourage them to ask questions. 
- Answer the questions in your auto responder campaign. 

Your subscribers will begin to feel a sense of community.  They will begin to relate to you personally–hence a relationship.

As your relationship with your subscribers grows, so will your revenue.

If you want to learn to make more sales from email marketing, it is crucial you follow a proven formula. Here’s the one I use in my email marketing:

Get Your Subscribers To Open Your Email

If your subscribers never open your email, well, you’re a dead duck. This is the first thing you have to overcome. And you can do it by writing an intriguing, benefit-laden subject line that gets your subscribers wanting to open your email right away.

Give Out Free Content

Don’t continually pitch products to your list, if you can help it. You must send out content to your list at no cost on a consistent basis to build trust with them. If your subscribers don’t see any value in staying on your list, you guessed it, they will hit the unsubscribe link sooner rather than later.

Get Your Subscribers To Click Through To Your Links

The next step after your subscribers open your email and read it is to click on your links. This is important because if your subscribers don’t see the need to click on your links, you won’t make any money from your products or your recommendations. Always include a call-to-action in your emails.

Offer Bonuses To Your Products

If you are promoting your own product, or even if you are promoting an affiliate product, always give out free bonuses that accompany the product. This increases the perceived value of your offer and you will make more sales of your product.

Albert
List Builder