Candid Reviews

Email marketing is considered as one of the cheapest and fastest ways to get to your target market. In this day and age, most everyone has an email address. And everyone with an email address is a potential audience to your marketing campaign.

Although, of course, doing email marketing is easier said than done. There are several steps to take even before you get your first email out. These steps should be thoroughly thought of and executed. There is the risk of being labeled as spam and your campaign should follow the set rules that prevent one from unscrupulous flooding of the internet with unwanted emails.

Here are the basic six steps that you should follow when email marketing:

1. Have an objective: Every plan or campaign should have an objective. Ideally, this objective should be measurable.
Let us say, your company just launched a new product and is looking to email marketing as one of the methods of promoting it. A fitting objective here is to increase online purchases or referral purchases. You can do this by designing a creative email campaign that encourages people to buy your product. With most email marketing software, people in the email lists are assigned database IDs. These IDs can track click-thrus the email campaign: say, the recipient was made interested enough by the email such that they clicked on the emailed link. Likewise, you can include a how did you hear about us field in your online purchase form. In the end, you will end up with data about your objective and how successfully it was met.

2. Zoom in on a target: This step considers that not everyone is likely to purchase your product. Take as an example real estate properties in Ontario. Someone living in San Francisco would most likely be not interested in that. Hence, you need to filter the recipients of an email campaign for Ontario real estate.

3. Gather an email list: Email lists should be gathered legitimately when email marketing. This means that everyone on your list should have opted to be in that list. Purchasing email lists is not encouraged. Aside from being unsure about where the list came from and how many email addresses in it are real email addresses, most purchased email lists are not targeted lists. You will just be shooting emails blindly if you rely on these types of lists.
Gather your own via opt in forms on your website.

4. Draft an email campaign: This is the start of the creative and analytical process in email marketing. You will now need to create an email campaign that includes several promotional emails and follow-up emails. This is the hit and miss stage where you will find that some emails work, while others do not. Once you find a formula that works, stick with this.

5. Follow rules: After the deluge of spam emails in the early 2000, certain rules of engagement were set up for email marketers to follow. This includes emailing only those who agree to be emailed and having an opt-out option in all your emails. Stick to the rules to prevent being labeled as spam and being blacklisted.

6. Follow-up: One of the secrets to a good email marketing campaign is to follow up. Messages do not always get through your prospective clients after an initial try. Always follow-up to keep your product and message in your audiences memory.

Successful email marketing doesn’t involve emails alone. It usually includes a web landing page that your interested prospects land on when they click through from the email message to follow your ‘call to action’. You can get a high open rates and a very impressive CTR, but if your landing page doesn’t funnel the prospect through to your email campaign goal, it is pointless.

So how can you making those landing pages effective in working with your email marketing message? Read and implement these valuable tips for more effective landing pages in your next email marketing campaign.

1. Send Your Email Recipients to Your Landing Page not Your Home PageSending email recipients to your home page is the easiest thing to do. It is also the laziest thing to do and the most ineffective. Especially when the product or service you’re promoting in the email does not appear on the home page (I have seen it done so many times it is crazy!). Absolutely do not make people search for what you have told them is there. Take them straight to your landing page!
2. Avoid being a Broken Record - Do Not Repeat YourselfWe have all seen landing pages that tell you exactly what the email told you — no more, no less. Why prepare a landing page that does not add any value? Get your interested prospects directly to the next step from your email! If you would like them to register for a free report bring them to a register landing page or if you have made a special sale offer or promotion bring them to a landing page where they can purchase the special offer or register their interest in the offer.
3. Match Your Landing Page to Your Call to ActionA good email message engages your prospects by telling them about something important and relevant to their business, then setting an expectation for what they’ll find when they click through. If you’re promoting a new product with a link to “learn more,” your recipients expect to land on a page with more information. If it’s “order now,” they expect to land on a page to begin the order process. If it’s “read the full article,” they expect to land on a page with the full article. Be sure you deliver on your call-to-action’s promise.

   Now your email may have more than one ‘call to action’. It’s fine to include several calls to action in your email. With clients I often recommend “learn more” right next to “order now” to see if we have provided recipients with enough information in the email message to go directly to the sales order page. Just be sure that all calls to actions lead down a path to your end email marketing goal. You should not send your email recipients to an “About Us” page if there is no direct link there that they can order from.

4. Use a Look and Feel That’s Consistent With your Email MessageHave you ever experienced clicking through from an email and being brought to a web page that has not similarity to the email? You feel lost and unsure what to do next. Likely you will just abandon the page. Do not let this happen to your interested prospects. Make sure the landing page has a consistent look and feel. Something as simple as having the same image on the landing page and in the email quickly lets your email recipients know they’re in the right place. Repeating the benefit-oriented headline is another way to do this. You want the email to flow naturally to the landing page, so there is no disconnection for the email recipient.
5. Define a Clear PathI like to think of the email message as a starting point. The landing page is the next step toward the end goal. You will need enough content to make your case, but do not create multiple pages that your prospects will abandon the path before they reach your end goal. The more streamlined you can make it, the better.
6. Minimize DistractionsOnce you have set your path, don’t distract your interested prospects with other things. You have to question why every piece of information is on each web page, and remove any distracting information that does not help your prospects reach your end goal. This is especially true of links that take your recipients to other third-party web sites. It is also true of any internal links to other pages within your own web site.

It’s easy to read these tips and agree; it’s much harder to implement them. However it’s worth the effort. Practicing a little with your landing pages is a quick way to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are some steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

2. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

3. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

4. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:
http://www.submitfire.com

5. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

6. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

7. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

8. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

9. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

10. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

11. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

12. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

13. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

14. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box.

15. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

If you are looking for effective tips that can help you create outstanding articles, you will not need to look any further. In here, I will share with you some of my secrets that have taken my article marketing strategies to overdrive. So, read on!

1. Start with keywords. Keep in mind that keywords are your best friends when writing your articles as they help you easily connect with your target market. Before you start writing your content, I suggest that you do a keyword search first using either paid or free keyword suggestion tools. This is the easiest and fastest way to get the pulse of your target market and learn about the information that they are looking for when they go online. You will need to list down all the popular keywords and convert them to great topic ideas.

2. Go with interesting titles. Never underestimate the power of well-written and interesting titles as they have a direct impact on your success or failure in this endeavor. An outstanding article title has these elements; keyword-rich, benefit-driven, descriptive, short, and thought-provoking.

3. Write well. Of course you would want to give online users great reading experience so you can make them feel that you do appreciate the time they spend reading your articles. Avoid annoying them by making sure that your articles are well-written and easy to understand. Aside from using perfect grammar and the most appropriate words in getting your message across, it would also help if you can punctuate properly.

4. Empathize. One of the best ways to build rapport with your readers is to make them feel that you do understand where they are coming from. Make sure that you empathize with them when you are discussing about their pressing issues and make them feel that you are genuinely interested in helping them out.

5. Love what you do. It is virtually impossible to excel in this field or in any other field if you hate what you are doing. Treat article writing as an enjoyable task and don’t force yourself when you don’t feel like tapping on your key board so you will not sacrifice the quality of your copies.

6. Proofread. Don’t post your articles online unless you are 100% sure that they are free from any error. Your content must not only be well-written but it must also flow smoothly.