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Archive for March 4th, 2010

How To Setup Your Own Email Marketing Campaign

What is the biggest mistake people make in their email marketing campaigns? Its not bad strategy although poor strategy is a major factor in ruining any profitpotential a website product or idea might have. And no its not a lack of leads building your list is surprisingly easy once you know the right way to go about doing it. The biggest mistake people make is this: They assume that email marketing should be left to experts and dont bother learning anything about it!

Folks Im not joking about this. There are tons and tons of websites out there with perfectly profitable business plans who are missing out on pure gold by ignoring their email marketing campaigns. And no sending out monthly newsletters about so and so updates on the site does NOT constitute as email marketing. Email marketing is a process of generating business through maintaining a list of email contacts people who signup to your list for one reason or the other usually to gain access to information or some other resource. A properly run campaign involves at least the following:
* Building a positive responsive relationship with your list.
* Providing your list with a reason to trust you and your advice give quality information first ask for their money later.
* Promoting targeted useful products to your list related directly or indirectly to the reason they signed up for your list.

Youll see from that list of points that simply mailing promotional offers to a bunch of email addresses does not qualify as email marketing. No. That is spam. Dont be like most people on the Internet. If youre operating in a niche online youre almost guaranteed to be sitting on a small gold mine. Profit from it by all means possible and make the effort to set up your own email marketing campaign.

The Tools.

To setup your email marketing campaign you need the following:
* A reliable autoresponder.
* A lead capture form / landing page.
* Means to bring traffic to that landing page.
* A set of prewritten messages for your list.
* An email marketing plan.
If that sounds like too much dont worry about it. All five points are explained in full detail below.

The Autoresponder
An autoresponder is the most powerful tool in your email marketing arsenal. Essentially it not only automates list management including subscription and unsubscribe requests but it can also automate the process of sending emails to your list. You can load a set of emails / messages to your list in your autoresponder and the script will automatically send the emails out at the dates you specify. The two autoresponders I would recommend are AWeber and GetResponse. Both are reasonably priced and have excellent features. I personally use Aweber myself although if you want to test autoresponders and see how they work I would suggest that you sign up for the free version of GetResponse and experiment there first. Setting up an autoresponder is fairly simple. Both AWeber and GetResponse have a straightforward sign up procedure and once youre in they provide detailed tutorials to help you set up your list management process.

Prewritten messages
List management is really simple with autoresponders. You can preload your account with template responses for any of the following occasions:
* When someone signs up through a lead capture form.
* When someone confirms their subscription to your list.
* When someone unsubscribes from your list.
* When someone sends an email to your autoresponder email address you can configure this message to tell the sender that you will respond within a certain time or redirect them to a different email address.
In addition you can write up several emails in advance in case you want to send messages to your subscribers at specific dates in the future and load them in your autoresponder. Then just specify the dates you want each message to be sent on and your work is done . The autoresponder takes care of everything else. Preloading messages into your autoresponder is a great way to schedule an informational email course or if you want to send several promotional emails for the same product. Most autoresponders including AWeber and GetResponse offer templates for generic messages such as the list above making your job a lot simpler. All you really need is to customize these templates if necessary and then upload your own messages.

Building Your List.
Once youve set up your autoresponder its time to build your list. For this you need to do two things:
* Set up a landing page through which people can sign up on your list.
* Drive traffic hint: targeted traffic people who are likely to be interested in hearing what you have to say i.e. people interested in your niche to that landing page.
Lets look at these individually.

Landing Page
A lot of people simply use a sign up for our newsletter type of box on their main pages and expect people to come barging in. Thats not how it works. For people to sign up for your list they have to be interested in what you have to say. This means that first you have to educate your potential subscribers to what they have to gain by handing over their email addresses to you. Set up a separate page on your website a landing page . On this page you would include a description of your newsletter as well as the key benefits to your subscribers for signing up to the newsletter a free report on plus weekly updates or regular dating tips or whatever your niche is. The key here is to convince the reader that if they are interested in your field its in their benefit to sign for your newsletter because it is THE place to get the best information about that field. And of course provide a simple form for the visitors to fill in and sign up to your newsletter.

Drive Traffic
By now youre all set to build your list and crank out the sales pitches through your autoresponder. But first you need to drive traffic read real people to your landing page so that they can sign up to your list. Heres a quick discussion of a few tactics you can use:
* Write and submit articles in a niche article directory . Make sure you include your resource box at the end of the article with some text describing your email course and a link going back to your landing page. This is fairly elementary but its still surprising how few people end up taking advantage of this technique.Make sure that you focus on the top contentrich sites in your niche when you are submitting these articles.
* If you expect to profit significantly from your subscribers in the next lesson Ill tell you how you can calculate the lifetime value of your subscriber you can afford to spend some money on building your list. Use Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing to drive targeted traffic to your landing page. The key here is to bid on very specific twoword and threeword phrases so that not only your traffic is targeted but that you can get these clicks for cheap.Make sure that youre not paying too high a price for each click 1 visitor otherwise the process might backfire on you.
* Simple as it sounds make sure to promote your newsletter on your website . Dont just settle for a link on every page include some text and actually explain in a few words what the newsletter offers kind of like a PPC ad.
* Offer a freebie this could either be a free tool or access to a section of your website where you keep the good content or even a downloadable report. This is by far the most common hook marketers use to build their list.
* If you have a sales pitch on your website make sure that your free newsletter features prominently in it. It will provide readers with a riskfree alternative to test you and find out if you can really deliver on any claims you make in the sales pitch. In addition many people dont buy immediately they tend to evaluate the pros and cons and deliberate over buying decisions especially costly buying decisions quite a lot. By offering them an option to sign up to your newsletter you secure an inside track to the buy or not debate in their minds and are in a position to win their trust and earn their money.

About the writer:  If you would like to learn more internet marketing strategies for optimizing the amount of money you make online you can get a free copy of any of our best selling courses. Just tell us where to mail it and we’ll send it straight to your front door. Go here: http://www.bradcallen.com

Mideast Firms Vie For Dot Me .me Domain

Mideast firms vie for dot me .me domain

By Abdul Wasey

Almost all the big and mediumsize companies institutions organisations and group in the Middle Eastern countries have their own websites. And those who dont have are in the process of getting one.

Most of the firms have either .com as their extensions or .qa .ae representing their respective countries. Some of the companies have both.

The importance of a website in the success of an individual or a business organization is an open secret. The rule is simple: If you dont have presence in the cyberworld your reach is extremely limited.

According to the latest study by digital research firm comScore the global number of Internet users has crossed onebillion mark. A website makes an individual or a firm accessible to more than onesixth of the worlds population.

Having a .com as an extension to a website address is the ideal thing as people generally type the name of the company or organisation followed by .com. Then there is also trend to look for a firm by typing its title followed by countrys domain such as .ae .qa .sa etc.

If youre doing a business or running an organization in the Arabian Gulf region or Middle Eastern countries you can now extend your reach by buying a new domain which has been in quite demand for last few months.

These days people in the Western countries have developed a tendency to search for a company by typing .me as an extension. They think .me stands for Middle East.

Interestingly .me was introduced to give a personal touch to domain names. For example www.contact.me or www.John.me etc.

However now more and more Middle Eastern firms are vying to acquire this new domain as a step to secure businesses particularly during the time of current global financial crisis when every deal be it small or big matters.

.Me is available with quite limited number of domain registrars including www.gainfromdomain.com and can be bought at a very nominal price. All need to be done is to acquire the domain extension and forward it to the companys present website address and the Internet searchers would be redirected to the companys website.

Companies should not delay buying .me domain extension at the earliest as internet squatters are out to grab the name of all the big firms and organisations possible and sell it back to them at a much higher price.

About the writer:  Abdul Wasey is a Senior Journalist working with a Dubaibased newspaper. He helps individuals and organisations in creating and running their website through his online store www.gainfromdomain.com.