The Gist of the Marketing Trend Email Marketing 101
Author : Victor Green
Since the genesis of internet marketing more and more ways to market through the World Wide Web have come to light. One such method of cyber marketing is email marketing. This method of marketing sends promotional email to potential or existing customers a company has. The emails sent are not limited to mere advertisements, of course. They can be a series of useful content requested or permitted by the client related to the goods and services offered by the particular company sending them. You yourself are probably receiving some every so often or on a regular basis.
Email marketing should not be mistaken for spam. Spam is unwanted, unsolicited, and unwelcome junk email that is sent to email addresses by companies or organizations that don’t even ask for the addressee’s permission. While all legitimate marketing through email does involve a first email, that message is only sent once permission has been secured. Spam is utterly useless, never asks permission, and may prove harmful to your email address or even your computer. Marketing email offers something you may want, and only sends it to the people that want it.
Internet based industries and even companies in the real world spend millions to incorporate an effective email marketing campaign in their marketing schemes and programs. Software developed specifically for marketing email is available all over the Web, ranging from being free to as much as $500, sometimes even requiring a monthly fee. Bigger corporations can spend even more than that on a monthly basis on their cyber marketing partners to market through email. These software typically include email template generators that pre-load graphics and some of the usual content found in marketing email, the rest of the content would come from the user of the software. The mailing list will always be supplied by the user of the email marketing software to ensure that it is completely permission based to their organization.
In fact email marketing software has several major advantages compared to marketing through other contemporary forms of marketing. Among the advantages of email marketing over traditional mail marketing is obviously the time it takes for the mail to get to the recipient. Aside from that, email is paperless and “green.” Marketing through mail is also very low cost compared to other marketing strategies, plus email can be sent to a great number of recipients as fast as it is low cost. Advertisers can also actively push the message and ads to their audience as opposed to website based marketing where the internet surfer needs to visit a particular site before any marketing is achieved.
With half of the billions of internet users checking their email in a regular day, there are more chances for affordable repeat business. Depending on actions done in a marketing email, more email content can be sent or information regarding the preferences of that particular costumer or potential costumer can be updated in the advertiser’s database. In the same vein , metrics can be easily kept track of and the process of marketing through email itself improved depending on resulting statistics from current marketing schemes. All these and more are contributing factors why marketing through email is one of the leading strategies in internet marketing.
And that’s why you will just have to get used to it, if you still aren’t. You can even take advantage of it and engage in marketing through email yourself to start your own business.
Victor Green is an Account Executive at EliteEmail.com, the trusted email marketing solution used by businesses. Harness the power of email marketing with the complete email marketing software. Try it free today! Get insightful tips on Burko’s Business Blog.
Use Mini Sites As Profit Generators
Author : Jimmy Cox
You might want to try your hand at building and monetizing mini sites. In recent years, online marketers have begun to discover that they don’t need to develop large websites to earn well. A small online presence can actually already be a business in itself.
Small Websites
There is no concrete definition of what a small website is. In a lot of cases though, a small site means having more or less ten to fifteen pages. Each of these pages would normally contain good, quality information about a product, service or topic. What net entrepreneurs do first is pick a topic and then generate content that revolves around it with each specific page focused on a very specific aspect of it.
On the side, an owner of a mini site can choose to monetize it. Monetization can take on many forms. For a limited number of pages, some monetizing methods that work best are affiliate programs and PPC or CPA advertising. If you have good, useful content, you won’t have a problem with earning from these.
Diversity
Lots of internet marketers set out at first with only one website. Eventually though, when they get the idea and the hang of maintaining their online properties, they begin to explore the possibilities of building more properties. The key to get the most out of this concept is to diversify.
Diversification is a must for every serious online marketer. You stand to have a more successful network of mini sites if they are grouped around a variety of topics. This is because some topics have low seasons. Auto insurance for example can have a natural drop in user interest in the summer. The same can be said for vacation destinations during school season. If you focus on both topics or a similar pair, you are guaranteed to have interested visitors regardless of the time of year.
Offsite Optimization
Having a website does not give you the assurance of instant gains. There are a couple of things you need to do to make sure that you are able to draw interested traffic. Among other things, offsite optimization is a procedure that can help you get a slew of interested folks to your mini site.
There is more than one way to achieve offsite promotion. One popular method is through article marketing. You can generate content that is related to what you have on your pages and submit these to directories or other similar services. This is an excellent way to get back links to your site and to grab the interest of browsers or readers.
Content Quality
A very crucial point to remember in building any kind of site and monetizing it is content quality. You have to make sure that you provide only relevant, original and useful information both in your pages and in the articles that you submit to directories. This is the only way you can ever keep the attention of both search engine robots and real readers. Your mini sites will fail if you put profit considerations over quality content. To make sure you are providing only the best, pick topics that you love or are passionate about.
Yes, you can profit by maintaining a couple of pages online. Just remember though that you have a moral responsibility to anyone that lands on your pages. Prioritize quality over your desire to make profits.
Find out how search engine optimization training can put your mini sites on top.
Visit http://www.theseomethod.com/ to discover more.
Distributed by ContentCrooner.com
Create a Site Map For Better Traffic
Author : Karen Scharf
I think every website should have a site map since it does help in traffic generation. As the term suggests a site map is a map of the web site and can be a simple list of links or a more complex representation. The type of site map you’ll need depends on the type of website you have.
Your site map actually has two audiences: the search engine spiders and your human visitors. Since spiders and humans use the site map differently, it’s often a good idea to have different site maps for each purpose.
If your website is small, less than 10 pages, chances are you won’t need a site map for your human visitors. More than likely, all of your pages will be linked in your main menu bar navigation that appears on every page. If your menu bar is easy to use and all of your pages are accessible in one click, there won’t be any need to create a human-specific site map.
However, if your site is very deep, if your navigation is more complex, or if your menu bar is written in javascript, a site map is a great idea and it may help pull your visitors deeper into your site.
The simplest way to create this site map would be to create an HTML unordered list such as:
.Page 1
.Page 2
.Page 3
And if your site is very deep, nested lists work perfectly:
.Page 1
.Page 1a
.Page 1b
.Page 1c
.Page 2
.Page 2a
.Page 2b
.Page 3
.Page 3a
.Page 3b
.Page 3c
.Page 3d
.Page 3e
This will allow your human visitors to find anything they are looking for quickly and easily. It’s also a great idea to add this site map to your 404 error page.
** Site Map For Spiders **
The most accepted format for your spider site map is an XML document. If you’re not familiar with XML, don’t let “technology” get in your way. There are tons of on-line site map generators; just do a Google search for “site map generator”. Once you find the service you’d like to use, simply enter your URL, the service will crawl your site, and the XML document will be created. You will then need to download the document and FTP it to your web server. Be sure to add the XML document to your root directory.
In addition to the XML site map, you’ll also want to create a robots.txt file, especially if you have documents or directories that you do not want to appear in the search engines. The robots file is typically the first document the spiders will look for, so it’s good idea to point them toward your site map by referencing the XML document in your robots.txt. Just add a line for your site map like:
sitemap: http://www.YourDomain.com/sitemap.xml
And the final step is to keep both your site map and your robots file current at all times. Every time you add or delete a page on your site, you should update your site map. If your site is extremely large you might want to implement an automated site map update on a monthly, or even weekly, basis.
Creating and maintaining your site map is a relatively easy step that can improve traffic from both your human visitors and the search engine spiders. Why not set aside 20 minutes or so and create your site map today?
Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her FREE Can-Spam checklist and FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at http://www.ModernImage.com.
-
More Useful Links!
