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Driving Email Open Rates

by on June 13, 2010 in Copywriting, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

There are a number of email marketing metrics a savvy marketer can use to continuously improve the performance of his or her campaigns. I’d like to touch on the factors that impact the open rate of an email marketing campaign.

Whether your email will or will not get opened depends on the time and the day of the week when you are sending it out, how strong the relationship is with the list you have been able to build and, of course, the subject line.

Your autoresponder system should store all the emails you have ever sent out to your list along with the open rates. Note which days and times tend to be better for your list. Once you notice a pattern, start strategically targeting the times that are likely to get you the better opens.

  • The relationship with your list is something that you build over time, before you need to send out a promotional email to your list. It’s a well that you need to dig way before you’re thirsty. That being said, there are still a few things you can do even in a promo piece that will continue the process of building a relationship:
  • Make sure to use the “from” name they will recognize
  • Brand your email messages with the name of the topic you are writing about or the abbreviated name of your newsletter  (put it in the square bracket in the beginning of the subject line.)
  • Work a personal story into the copy or take a short paragraph to tell your list about what’s going on in your life right this moment. (E.g., “I’m just heading out and taking my son to the baseball game but I wanted to make sure you receive this important message”)

As they say, people do business with and refer business to those they know, like, and trust. If you want them to spend their money with you, let them know more about you, get them to like you through your stories and be consistent, and they will very soon will start trusting you.

Now, let’s talk about the subject line.

The subject line is the add for your email and hence all the copywriting principles apply here. Danny Hatch, one of the best copywriters, has identified seven “copy drivers”. They are: fear, greed, guilt, anger, exclusivity, salvation, flattery. Use these in your copy to see more action from your subscribers.

The two types of subject lines that have performed well for me are benefit-centric (“8 Free Special Reports with Resell Rights”) or curiosity-based (“Seen This?”)

You should put as much care into crafting a good subject line as you would into writing a headline for an ad. If you need inspiration to start writing, check out the 100 Greatest Headlines that Jay Abraham has put together.  Some of these could be over 100 years but they still work as well now as they did then.

Treat your Inbox as a gigantic “swipe file”. Read the emails you are getting from other marketers and see which ones you’d be interested to click on and read. Copy / paste the best headlines into a text file and store it on your computer. That will become your personal swipe file and the source of the higher email open rates.

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Internet Marketing Productivity: Taming The Information Overload

by on June 12, 2010 in Internet Marketing, Productivity Tips, Time Management

If you’ve been in the Internet Marketing field (even as a student) for some time, you probably wake up every morning to find several hundred new emails in your Inbox.

One doesn’t need to be a psychic to guess that most of these emails promise instant traffic, loads of subscribers, and untold profits that will be bestowed upon you the moment you click on the link. And on that link you click to watch another video and read another special report. Another hour goes by and you are not any closer to achieving your business goals.

Now, for the record, I’m not knocking email marketing or the products that are being promoted via email. In fact, I sincerely hope you are one of my subscribers and some of the emails in your Inbox have come from me.

The real issue is the “kid at the candy store” syndrome that we all (including yours truly) succumb to so easily. And when we do, not much gets accomplished.

While there are a number of things you can do to eliminate distractions and organize your day, there is one critical step that a lot of people skip.

And that step is making a conscious decision about your Internet Marketing specialty, i.e. the one marketing tactic you are going to master.

As they say, you can do anything but you cannot do everything. You can’t be equally good at SEO, PPC, AdSense, Affiliate Marketing, PLR, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Safe Lists, Traffic Exchanges, Article Marketing, Video Marketing, Podcasts, CPA, Media Buying, etc, etc, etc.

The moment you get clear about who you are and what you do, you can continue to voraciously consume all the information related to that one topic… and absolutely ignore everything else.

The following questions should help you find your Internet Marketing persona (turn off you cell phone, shut down your instant messenger, close your email and spend the next 20 minutes writing down your answers):

  • Would you rather sell information, software or physical products?
  • Do you think you’d be good at creating concepts and “pontificating” or do you think you’d excel at promoting others?
  • Are you an analytical number-cruncher or an inspired artist?
  • Which traffic method(s) have you had more experience with or would like to get really good at?
  • If someone were to put a gun to your head and make you pick just one traffic method, one money-making approach, and one type of product to sell, which three would would you end up with?

Write down your answers. Read what you’ve written down out loud. Note what it feels like when you hear your voice say it.

If it doesn’t feel all that great, re-do the exercise.

And if it does, congratulations! You have just found the key to personal focus, productivity, and, ultimately, Internet business success.

As from now on, you are going to ignore anything that is not directly related to that “one thing” you have discovered within yourself and defined for yourself. And through this simple action, you will eradicate the information overload, slay the dragon, and sail the ship of your fledgling business out of the swamp and into clear waters.

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 2

by on June 10, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

6. Get Paid Search Traffic (PPC, PPV, Content Network, Banners)

Buying search traffic is one of the fastest ways to get the clicks.  If you have some cash to burn, then this may be the right way to test the new market you’re about to enter.

What I like about pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-view (PPV) and other paid traffic methods, is that you can measure the effectiveness of each campaign, each keyword you’re bidding on, and every piece of online ‘real estate’ you advertise on. If you are the analytical type, this may  become your favourite traffic method.

Since you are paying for every click, you need to find a way to immediately monetize this traffic so that you could run a PPC campaign indefinitely at a profit or at least at a break even. This may require a fair bit of fine-tuning, and that’s why you need to have a cash reserve to play this game.

7. Get “Free” Search Traffic (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a misnomer. You can’t optimize search engine. You can, however, optimize your web pages in a way that search engines will find it and start suggesting it to the people who type in certain search words or phrases in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

SEO is something that takes time to see the results of. If this is new territory for you, then pick another — faster — method of acquiring a seed list.

On the other hand, if you are an SEO expert and have websites that search engines send a lot of traffic to, all you need to do is offer all these people a chance to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a special report or other valuable gift.

8. Use Safe Lists and Viral List Builders

A safe list is a special email “club” where each member can send emails to other members. When you join a safe list, you give permission to other members to send you their ads. Don’t expect the leads that you get from a safe list to be quite as responsive as, say SEO traffic. However, you can still successfully market your squeeze page in safe lists.

Viral list builders take the idea of safe lists to the next level and compensate you with traffic credits for referring other marketers into your “downline”.

When you use either safe lists or viral list builders, remember not to sign up with your main email address. You are likely to receive a large amount of promotional emails there. So create a brand-new gmail account and use that instead.

9. Use Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a network of marketers who receive traffic credits for looking at other people’s websites. Since the users of traffic exchanges get compensated for looking at your squeeze page, your conversion is likely to be rather low. However, you will still be acquiring leads.

If you have children at home, get them to login into your traffic exchange and click on other people’s ads. That will help you build up your credits, and with more credits in your account, you will receive more traffic.

10. Buy Co-Reg Leads

Coreg (also “co-reg” and co-registration) refers to a service that allows you to place your ad on other people’s thank you pages.

The responsiveness of a co-reg list would depend on a lot of factors. Remember that these leads don’t come free. You should expect to pay anywhere from 25c – 50c per lead of good quality. And just like with any other method, run a test and see if these leads are going to respond to your offer and products.

Most of the major autoresponder providers don’t allow you to import a co-reg list anymore without your subscribers re-confirming their subscription. Give preference to those co-reg services that already come with an autoresponder.

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 1

by on June 9, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

List building is easy… once you have a list. With a list of your own, you can grow it fast through “joint ventures” or “ad swaps”. (Which I do almost daily.)

The problem is, you need to have a list in the first place to be able to do ad swaps.

The answer to this conundrum is the “seed” list of a few hundred names. It is a starting point in list building. It is your ticket to creating real equity in your Internet Marketing business in the form of a responsive list of email subscribers.

That seed list, however small, will allow you to set up joint ventures with other list owners. You can work with lists of similar size or approach the lists that are 2-3 times bigger than yours, in which case they may send your offer to a segment of their list or ask you to mail multiple times to match the clicks.

So how do you get there if you are starting from complete, utter zero?

The following is a brief (and by no means complete) overview of the methods of building a seed list fast.

1. Get a Friend to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

Several Internet marketers I know got their start in this profession with the help of their friend or a relative who already had a list. Hey, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being lucky or having the right connections. If this shortcut is available to you, take it.

2. Pay Someone to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

In lieu of a friend who would send out your stuff to their list for free, you can find someone who would do it for a fee.

If you don’t have the money to pay for this, trade your time. Everything has value in this world. In exchange for having a successful list owner build your list, you could handle their customer support, write some articles for them, build web pages, sit their baby, walk their dog, cut their grass… you get the drift. Now don’t be shy. Go through your Inbox and reply to some of the emails you are getting from various list owners and ask if they could use some free help around their office (in exchange for building your list, of course). Contact those who appear to be doing everything by themselves, with no staff to help them in their daily “grunt” work.

3. Buy an Ezine Ad

This tactic is very similar to #2. Except this time we are going after lists that routinely sell advertising “space” like solo emails and banners.

A couple of places to meet ezine owners and buy email ads would be Rent-A-List and Directory Of Ezines.

4. Create a Product And Offer 100% Commission

Okay, okay, maybe this method isn’t as easy as some. However, if your talent is in creating content, it won’t take you long to put together a special report, an ebook, a set of videos or audios, or a software tool. Most people don’t have either the skill or the confidence to create their own products. Hence they are always looking for new potentially lucrative things to promote.

Now imagine how excited they are going to be when you offer them 100% of the money! They will promote your product like crazy!

On the technical side, you can collect all the money first and then pay it out to your partners. Or you can simply link the Add to Cart button on your sales page to your partner’s PayPal account(s) and have them receive it instantly. They make all the commissions, and you see your list grow rapidly.

Here are some ideas for you to make the most out of this tactic:

a) Run all the leads through a squeeze page. After all, you want to build a list, right?

b) Upsell the leads with a front-end offer as soon as they opt-in (that’s the one that you are paying 100% of commissions on). This offer should be almost irresistible and a high-converting one to make it worth your partners’ time.

c) Come up with a second and bigger upsell or a continuity program that will put money in your bank account. Now you are growing your list and making cash at the same time. You may decide to offer affiliate commissions on your second upsell to make your deal even more appealing to your partners.

5. Enter a JV Giveaway As a Contributor

A JV Giveaway is an online event that allows you to submit a “gift” and receive leads that are interested in downloading your items. You are usually required to promote a JV Giveaway event. You could promote the event to your list if you had one. Otherwise, you ask a few of your friends to join. They’ll thank you for giving them access to dozens and possibly hundreds of great freebies from all the contributors. You can also promote it through Twitter and Facebook (and it doesn’t take much time make some friends there).

Click here for the list of the upcoming JV Giveaway events.

Tomorrow will we review five more ways to create a “seed” list.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-30

by on May 30, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

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Which Social Media Tool Has The Most Online “Citizens”?

by on March 28, 2010 in Internet Marketing, Social Media

It has become a popular practice to compare the number of the users registered with a particular social media website to the population of some country or several countries together. Hence I think it’s only appropriate to use the word “citizens” when we talk about social media sites.

Now, let’s see how good of an idea you have about the Social Media “geography”. Here’s a little poll that I put together as a quick test. Cast your vote. I’ll post the results and the correct answer in about a week.

Which Social Media Site Has The Most "Citizens"?

View Results

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Internet Marketing Business Is Simple

by on March 25, 2010 in Internet Marketing

I am going to make it super-simple for you …

Today’s lesson may seem too simple.

Maybe it is but lest you think it’s not important: This lesson is very possibly the most critical one to your online marketing success.

Undoubtedly, you have heard that in order to start making money online you need a whole bunch of things:

  • SEO
  • social media
  • squeeze pages
  • autoresponders
  • sales pages
  • blogs
  • products
  • pay-per-click ads
  • banners
  • RSS feeds
  • a kick-ass list
  • hosting account

… and other yada-yada (endless list to follow).

Well, it’s just not so.

No wonder many people look at this long list and are paralyzed by not being able to decide on their next step or by not understanding how it can be possible to fit all this into a normal “human” day.

Here’s the solution.

You really need only three things:

  1. Value (a product or a service that can help someone solve a problem they have)
  2. Traffic (a way to put people in front of you to present them the “value”
  3. Conversion (a way of showing the “value” to your “traffic” that results in more money in your bank account.)

That’s it. There is really nothing more to it. You don’t need the entire long list of “yada-yada”. You just need one of each:

  • one product
  • one way of getting traffic
  • and one way of converting it into sales.

If you have all three things in place, congrats, you’re now in business.

And once you complete one product,  master one traffic method, and fine tune one conversion approach, only then should you start looking into adding more products, more traffic sources and more selling models.

Next time, we are going to cover “value”, i.e. where and how to get a product.

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Review Of Email Marketing Solutions

by on August 31, 2009 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

Came across a question posted on LinkedIn about email marketing.

Omar is asking:

I see opt-in email landing pages everywhere and opt-in email boxes on blogs…I would like to put together an opt in landing page and add a opt-in email box to my word press blog, can anyone recommend a turnkey solution?

Here are some packages I use or have used for myself or my clients and comments re pros and cons:

http://www.infusionsoft.com – The have come down in price somewhat but it’s still the most expensive package on this list. And so it should be. It goes far beyond just giving you and opt-in box. It manages your entire business: contacts, sequential campaigns, direct mail, etc. I’m not using it but some of my clients do. And some who don’t wish they started using it earlier because switching is always a pain. If your business can afford to foot that bill, go with this solution.

http://invite.aweber.com – This one is the “gold standard” of deliverability (is that a word?). Arguably the best autoresponder package on the market as long as you only do online marketing and generate all your contacts via an opt-in. If you need to import a list from another system or need to punch in a bunch of business cards that you’ve collected at a trade show, each contact will receive an email from Aweber saying, “Hey, so-and-so is trying to add you to the list, please confirm you want to be on it!” Obviously, this is not very good for a “normal” brick & mortar business.

http://www.icontactsoft.com – good delivery, broadcasts, surveys, list segmentation, and very user-friendly. One huge advantage over Aweber: They actually allow you to punch in / import contacts. The company has just made the Inc 500 list so they must know what they are doing. I have switched most of my websites to iContact.

http://www.contactcontact.com – popular with many folks mostly due to great branding. A solid newsletter distribution service. Several months ago they (finally!) added autoreponders (otherwise I would not have recommended them at all) and revamped their pricing to bring it inline with Aweber and iContact.

http://www.1shoppingcart.com – an all-in-one autoresponder, shopping cart, affiliate manager and ad tracker. I heard from a number of people 1SC delivery is not as good as some others. Well, dunno. Maybe they have had issues in the past. They seem to be pretty good now. The major benefit is that you get an integrated solution capable of running your entire online business. There are some major online empires running entirely on 1SC so you can’t really go wrong there.

http://www.quickpaypro.com – similar to 1SC but offers a few extra features. Integrates well with WishListMember, a membership site plugin for WordPress. Offers one-click upsell, which 1SC doesn’t, at least not yet. QPP is being re-branded into or merged with Cydec and looks like there is still some dust in the air. I used their 30 day trial and decided to pull out and wait a while. The software looks a bit “undercooked”.  Nothing major, just a few small yet annoying issues here and there. Unless 1SC come out with one-click upsell soon, I’ll be looking at QPP again.

http://www.getreponse.com – A solid autoresponder product, worth consideration. They have improved a lot recently, both in terms of their user interface and deliverability.

http://www.responsemagic.com – This one gives you the ability to create “replicated” autoresponder accounts. That makes it a favorite among the business opportunity folks who need have their salespeople / team / downline send out newsletters and autoresponder sequences to their leads that were pre-written and then automatically personalized and transferred into their accounts. I don’t think that’s your situation but I thought I’d throw this one in because this is a pretty unique solution.

There is also always an option to host the script on your own server (which some people do and which I tried for one site and eventually had to do away with because if was beginning to turn into a full-time job). I don’t recommend this. However, if that’s the route you decide to take, start your research here:
http://www.arpros.com
http://www.sellwide.com
http://www.phplist.com (this one is actually free but no autoresponders)

Hope this helps.

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