Subtle Email Marketing

Everyday Internet users receive tons of emails telling them to buy certain products or visit particular websites. While these emails arrive in the inboxes of unsuspecting Internet users each day, most of them pay very little attention to these emails. That is because emails which are blatant advertisements are often viewed as spam. Most Internet users have very little tolerance for spam. Reactions to spam tend to range from simply ignoring the emails and having the email addresses blocked from sending future emails to reporting the emails to their Internet service provider for further investigation. We realize many Internet marketers have difficulty keeping their email marketing subtle. Therefore this article will provide some useful information on how email marketing can be kept subtle so it is not viewed as spam.

One of the most important criteria for ensuring your email marketing is subtle and will not be viewed as spam is to provide something of quality to the recipients. This may include insightful articles, interesting quizzes or other useful facts which members of the target audience are likely to find useful. When email recipients realize an email they received is offering them something worthwhile such as knowledge or information about a particular niche subject they are much more likely to spend some time reviewing the email because they will not consider the email to be spam. In addition to using the creation of this copy to convince recipients that the email is not spam, the business owners can also take advantage of this copy by providing subtle advertising. This may include product references in the articles or links to your website throughout the email.

Avoiding language which makes outrageous claims can also help to keep advertising quite subtle. Using superlatives and describing the greatness of specific products is likely to be viewed as blatant advertising. When this happens, it is not likely that website owners will believe there is validity in anything contained within the email because they will believe the entire email is simply one big advertisement for your products or services.

Another way to keep advertising subtle when running an email marketing campaign is to only send your email to those who are likely to be extremely interested in your products and services. This is important because when email recipients receive an email which does not reflect their interests at all, they are not likely to take the email serious and may view the email as a blatant advertisement. However, when the email is only sent to those who share a common interest the email seems more personalized. In this case the email recipients are not likely to view every product reference as a blatant advertisement because they understand there is sometimes a need to mention products or services.

Finally email marketing remains subtle when the content of the email is written as though it is not coming directly from the business owner. The copy may speak about the products and services as though they are being offered by a third party. This make the advertising seem more subtle because it does not appear to come directly from the business owner.

Finally, business owners can help to ensure their email marketing efforts are not viewed as blatant advertisements by keeping reference to your own website to an absolute minimum. Most Internet users often view links from one website to another strictly as an advertisement. For this reason it might be worthwhile for business owners who are marketing an email campaign to keep links to a minimum and to carefully weave these links into even the most quite benign copy. The links should be provided as though they were only included to provide you with an opportunity to learn more about the products and not as a way to encourage you to purchase these products. It might be worthwhile to consider hiring a writer with this type of experience to ensure the copy conveys the desired message and has the desired effect on the email recipients.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   This one is is especially strong in ad tracking.  I use it for every ad I run and the ease of use is outstanding.   I highly recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a derivative of Internet marketing where the advertisement publisher gets paid for every customer or sales provided by him. Affiliate marketing is the basic for all other Internet marketing strategies.

In this type of marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized to use E-mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, RRS Capturing and Display Advertising for the success of the product. The web traffic can be traced with the help of a third party or own affiliate programs. A lot of work is involved in this process. At first marketing by this method involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc. But, after the invention of complex algorithms and advance security this has been regularized to make it safer for doing business and shopping online. This even led to the better scrutinizing of the terms and conditions by the merchants. Affiliate marketing became more profiting with the opening of more opportunities but at the same time it also increased the competition in marketing.

Due to this pressure in house affiliate programs for merchants became a thing of the past and were replaced by out-sourced programs. The companies that offered this service have expert affiliate and network program managers who have various affiliate program management techniques.  These affiliate networks have publishers associated with them who help them with the advertising part.

Affiliate marketing was started by cdnow.com who had music oriented websites. They placed list of music albums on their site and they paid others if they put those links in their websites when a visitor bought their album through their site. The first company to link with cdnow.com was Geffen Records. Two months later, Amazon was offered by a woman that she would sell Amazon’s books on her website and she should be paid a certain percentage in return if she sold Amazon’s books through her site. They liked the idea and started the Amazon associates program. It was more of a commission program where they received a commission if a visitor clicked their links and banners on other’s site and bought anything through it.

Since its invention, the affiliate network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites, the most common being adult and gambling sectors. In UK alone, affiliate marketing produced £ 2.16 billion.

The compensation methods used are Cost per sale (CPS), Cost per action (CPA), Cost per mile (CPM) and Cost per click (CPC). The first two are the more famous methods today. This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor which turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate commission. CPS and CPA have a compulsion that the visitor not only clicks on the link but also buys something or signs up for some service after it which proves that he is among the targeted audience. Only in the above case the affiliate gets paid. So the affiliate should try to send as much targeted traffic as possible to the advertiser in order to increase his/her returns and for this reason affiliate marketing is also known as performance marketing because it totally depends on the performance of the affiliate. The affiliate team can be differentiated from a sales team from the nature of their jobs. The job of the affiliate team is to drag targeted traffic to a point and from that
point it’s the job of the sales team to influence the visitor to buy the product or the service.

This is a very effective kind of method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant. Many businesses give credit to this method of marketing for their success.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   This one is is especially strong in ad tracking.  I use it for every ad I run and the ease of use is outstanding.   I highly recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Organizing Your Email Marketing Campaign

If you have recently decided to try implementing an email marketing campaign, you can congratulate yourself on becoming involved in one of the most effective types of online marketing for your business. While many business owners tend to shy away from email marketing campaigns because they believe these campaigns are always viewed as spam, others realize the importance of this type of advertising and are willing to spend a great deal of time and effort into organizing their email marketing campaign. These business owners will likely find they are able to enjoy an advantage over their competitors who do not take the time to implement an email marketing campaign. This article will describe the steps necessary to organize an effective email marketing campaign.

One of the first elements you should consider when you make the decision to start an email marketing campaign is the type of information you wish to include in your emails to potential clients. This is very important because the information you provide will help your email recipients to determine whether or not they think your products or services are worthwhile. You can include a variety of information in marketing emails. This may include, but is not limited to, full length informative articles, short articles enticing readers to visit your website for more information, links to other websites which may be of interest to your readers, links to your own website and even advertisements for your products or services as well as other products or services your customers may appreciate.

Once you determine the type of content you wish to incorporate into your email marketing, it is time to consider how you want to structure your email marketing efforts. Two of the most common structures include an informative email with subtle advertising or an in depth e-newsletter with a wealth of information as well as some subtle advertising and even some graphics. Deciding on the format of the emails you will be sending out are important because they will dictate the staff you will need to assist you in your email marketing effort. You will require the assistance of a professional writer to assist you with the content in either emails or e-newsletters but if you opt for an e-newsletter you should also consider hiring a graphic artist to assist you in designing an attractive layout and creating graphics as needed to create an appealing layout for your e-newsletter.

Next you should consider how you plan to create an email distribution list. This is important because simply purchasing an email list is not likely to be effective. You may reach hundreds, thousands or even millions of Internet users by sending emails to all of the members of this email list but there is no guarantee any of them will have an interest in your products or services. However, if you build your own email list of previous customers who have specifically requested additional information as well as potential customer who have also requested additional information you will have a well formulated list which includes mostly members of your target audience. This is ideal because you are much more likely to sell products or services to members of your target audience than you are to sell products or services to members of an email group which is not filled with those who might be interested in the products or services you offer.

Once all of these preliminary decisions have been made, you can begin to create the actual emails themselves and can begin to distribute these emails. Once you have sent out your first batch of emails, you can take some time to evaluate the effectiveness of the first email before you send out the second batch. This will be useful because if you determine the first batch was not very successful you can solicit feedback and make changes to the second email before sending it out. If the second email is more successful than the first, you can conclude the changes you made were beneficial.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   This one is is especially strong in ad tracking.  I use it for every ad I run and the ease of use is outstanding.   I highly recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Successful Affiliate Marketing

There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs out there, all of which claim to be the best.  Many of them try to give you the impression that all you have to do is use their banners and links then wait for the money to start rolling in.  Although this can be the case, this type of scenario normally applies to large sites with a lot of web traffic.

Choosing banners
With most affiliate programs, you are offered a variety of banners to plan on your website, as very few of them will be effective.  The problems with most banners are their size.  If you choose a banner that is high in size, it will take a long time to implement and use.  Therefore, it’s recommended that you use banners no more than 15kb in size.  We recommend My Banner Maker for a place to cut your teeth on making a banner.  Also, a good place to advertise your banner(s) is 50KBanners.   Great value all around.

When you select any types of graphical advertising, you should try and keep the theme of your website in mind.  Even though graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch people’s eye, they shouldn’t be to the point where everything else on the page is completely ignored.

Pop ups and unders
A lot of companies will now give their affiliates the chance of using pop up or pop under ads.  In most opinions, pop ups aren’t the way to go.  They can easily annoy visitors and are normally closed before they even have the chance to load.  You should instead go for pop unders and those types that only display once per visit.  I have a good script that you can put on your page that will load another page on exit.  If you would like to see it, email me at FredRaley@GMail.com and ask for it.  It’s just a few lines of code.

Text link ads
Once of the most successful means of advertisting is text link ads.  They are easy on bandwidth, don’t use a lot of space, and they easily be implemented into most types of page layouts.  Good text links offer some information as to why your visitor should investigate your offers.

Email advertising
The direct promotion via email has really taken off over the last several years, although it has brought tons of spam with it. If you plan to use email as a method of advertising your products, you should stand behind what you sell and make yourself available to answer any questions.  Our blog category “Email Marketing” has tons of information all in one place on this subject.

Patience
If you feel confident that your site can generate great sales for certain company’s, you should contact them to negotiate an arrangement.  If they don’t seem to enthused to begin with, you should remain patient as companies are approaced every day with affiliates looking to make better deals.

The reality remains that most affiliates can’t deliver what they promise, and companies are aware of this.

You should always keep in mind that most forms of advertising will take time.  No matter what methods you plan to use, give it some time before you make any type of decision. Although something may not happen overnight - it very well could in a few days or weeks.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   This one is is especially strong in ad tracking.  I use it for every ad I run and the ease of use is outstanding.   I highly recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Successful Affiliate Marketing

There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs out there, all of which claim to be the best.  Many of them try to give you the impression that all you have to do is use their banners and links then wait for the money to start rolling in.  Although this can be the case, this type of scenario normally applies to large sites with a lot of web traffic.

Choosing banners
With most affiliate programs, you are offered a variety of banners to plan on your website, as very few of them will be effective.  The problems with most banners are their size.  If you choose a banner that is high in size, it will take a long time to implement and use.  Therefore, it’s recommended that you use banners no more than 15kb in size.

When you select any types of graphical advertising, you should try and keep the theme of your website in mind.  Even though graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch people’s eye, they shouldn’t be to the point where everything else on the page is completely ignored.

Pop ups and unders
A lot of companies will now give their affiliates the chance of using pop up or pop under ads.  In most opinions, pop ups aren’t the way to go.  They can easily annoy visitors and are normally closed before they even have the chance to load.  You should instead go for pop unders and those types that only display once per visit.

Text link ads
Once of the most successful means of advertisting is text link ads.  They are easy on bandwidth, don’t use a lot of space, and they easily be implemented into most types of page layouts.  Good text links offer some information as to why your visitor should investigate your offers.

Email advertising
The direct promotion via email has really taken off over the last several years, although it has brought tons of spam with it. If you plan to use email as a method of advertising your products, you should stand behind what you sell and make yourself available to answer any questions.

Patience
If you feel confident that your site can generate great sales for certain company’s, you should contact them to negotiate an arrangement.  If they don’t seem to enthused to begin with, you should remain patient as companies are approaced every day with affiliates looking to make better deals.

The reality remains that most affiliates can’t deliver what they promise, and companies are aware of this.

You should always keep in mind that most forms of advertising will take time.  No matter what methods you plan to use, give it some time before you make any type of decision. Although something may not happen overnight - it very well could in a few days or weeks.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   This one is is especially strong in ad tracking.  I use it for every ad I run and the ease of use is outstanding.   I highly recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Marketing Effectively With Email

Like any type of marketing, email marketing involves a great deal of time and effort to ensure the marketing campaign is effective. This is important because an ineffective marketing campaign of any type is a waste of money and resources. Spending a great deal of time, energy and money into an email marketing campaign which is not reaching the members of the target audience and is not convincing recipients of the email to make a purchase or visit your website is not worthwhile. This article will discuss how to implement an effective email marketing strategy to ensure your business, financial and personal goals are being met.

One of the most important aspects of marketing effectively with email is to ensure your marketing efforts are reaching the members of your target audience. One way to do this is to ask former customers as well as potential customers to join your email distribution list. This will help to ensure the majority of members on your email distribution list have an actual interest in your products or services. This is important because you are much more likely to generate sales when you are marketing to this type of an audience than you would if you were marketing to a much larger audience without an interest in your products.

Another aspect of marketing effectively is to hire an experienced professional writer to draft the content for your emails, e-newsletters, email courses or any other methods you are using to email your message to potential customers. Having your content written can give you a significant edge over the competition if they are drafting their content themselves. The quality of your content is a reflection on your business and poorly written content with no substance will reflect poorly on your business.

Effective email marketing should also be written in a manner which will appeal to the target audience. If necessary you should conduct market research to determine demographical information for your target audience. This research may also determine preferences the target audience may have for receiving marketing information. This may include the type of language used, the format of the emails, the layout of the emails and even aesthetic appearance of the emails. Paying attention to these details can make the email marketing campaign significantly more effective.

Finally, effective email marketing should not be viewed as spam. This is a difficult situation. In many cases an email marketing campaign will involve distributing mass emails but care should be taken in these endeavors to avoid having these emails construed as spam. This is important because many Internet service providers include spam filters which apply algorithms to each email account to determine which messages are spam and which ones are legitimate. Emails which are deemed to be spam may never reach the intended recipients. Emails which may it through the spam filters may also be automatically deleted if the Internet user believes it looks like spam. For this reason care should be taken to ensure all marketing emails provide quality content, advertise only subtly and ideally are only sent to email recipients who have specifically requested information about your products or services. This will give you the best opportunity possible to reach your target audience and have a positive impression on them and hopefully entice them to make a purchase or visit your website.

One excellent resource I use to expand the marketing effect of my articles is Unique Article Wizard See what you think about this! I am pretty sure you will love it.

As with all online marketing, I recommend strongly that you collect information from your leads in a good autoresponder system.   I recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for all of  your marketing needs.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

Email Marketing Mistakes

Many business owners who opt to try email marketing make the mistake of believing any type of email marketing is beneficial. This is simply not true; there are a number of mistakes business owners can make when they organize an email marketing campaign. Examples of these types of mistakes may include allowing promotional materials to be tagged as spam, not following up with promotional emails, not being prepared for an influx of customers after an email marketing effort and not marketing specifically to the target audience.

We will begin our discussion on email marketing mistakes with spam. Spam is a problem which is reaching endemic proportions. Each day Internet users are bombarded with spam from around the world. This may include a host of unsolicited emails which are promoting products or services the recipients may or may not be interested in purchasing. A critical mistake business owners can make in email marketing is to issue emails which are likely to be construed to be spam. This may result in the emails never reaching the recipient or the emails being deleted, without being read, by the recipient. Avoiding the potential of falling into the spam category is not very difficult. It basically involves ensuring your promotional emails contain more useful copy than blatant advertising. This will make it more likely for your emails to be taken seriously.

Another email marketing mistake often made is failure to follow up on promotional emails. Sending out emails to interested parties can be very beneficial but it is even more beneficial to contact these email recipients by other methods such as mail or telephone to answer any questions they may have and offer any additional information they may require. This type of follow up can be much more effective than simply sending an email and allowing it to fall into the abyss of an overcrowded email inbox.

Business owners may also run into the mistake of not preparing themselves for an influx of customers after an email marketing effort. The express purpose of email marketing is to generate increased interest in your products or services. Therefore it is critical for business owners to anticipate an increase in business and be prepared to accommodate this increased demand for products and services. This is important because potential customers who have to wait for products or services may seek out your competitors who are better prepared to provide them with products or services immediately.

Finally a critical mistake made by business owners is to not tailor an email marketing campaign to their specific target audience. This can be a problem because it may result in the email marketing being less effective. Business owners typically make this mistake because they fall into the trap of believing that it is more important to reach a large audience than it is to reach a target audience. You may blindly send your email marketing materials to millions of recipients and only generate a few leads. However, you could send the same email marketing materials to a smaller group of only a thousand recipients who all have an interest in your products and services and will likely generate more leads from this smaller email distribution list. It is not only important to send your message to members of your target audience but to also tailor your message to suit this audience. Creating an email message which will appeal to a variety of individuals is not as important as creating a message which will appeal to members of your target audience.

You will need an autoresponder system to market with email.   We recommend  http://www.trafficwave.net/members/fredraley/features.html for sending your email.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

p.s. Made Your First Million yet? http://www.1stMill.com will get you there.

Advertise, Do not Spam

There is a fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners do not understand the difference between the two. This is important because while a cleaver, well planted Internet marketing campaign can help to attract new customers and keep existing customers loyal, spam is likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers. This can be extremely damaging to profit margins for the business owners. This article will take a look at a few basic Internet marketing strategies such as banner ads, email campaign and message board posts and describe how each can quickly cross the line from cleaver advertising to spam.

Banner ads are one of the most popular strategies which accompany an Internet marketing plan. These ads are usually ads which appear at the top of websites and span the width of the website. It is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to ads of a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website. In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad may also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Banner ad exchanges are situations in which one business owner posts a banner ad on his website in exchange for another business owner posting his banner ad on the other website. These agreements may be made individually between business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party. In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead.

Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be overused and appear to be spam. Judiciously placing your banner ad on a few websites which are likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet users who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere they turn will not likely take your business seriously and are not likely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Email campaigns can also be very useful tools in the industry of Internet marketing. These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services. Loyal customers who opt into your email list will likely not view these emails as spam and may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful. However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam. Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam.

Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience. If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice. Here you will find a large population of Internet users who may have an interest in your products. You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. This technique is smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

Fred Raley
Woodbridge, VA
703 203 4648
http://www.EMailSalesExplosion.com

p.s. Made Your First Million yet?  http://www.1stMill.com will get you there.