If content is King the money is still in the list. What is the one thing that all successful Internet Marketers have in common? What is the one thing that sets super affiliates aside from you and me? What is the one thing that prevents over ninety percent of people getting involved with Internet Marketing for the first time from being successful? The answer, like the money, really is in the list.

Nobody has conversion rates hovering anywhere near one-hundred percent but people do have something that makes up for it. You can not simply generate a blind list and expect to make money with it though. You have to be able to generate a targeted list, fill it with people that already have an interest in your product, give them enough information to prove to them that you are an authoritative and trusted source and get them wanting not only to remain on your list, but to be an active part of your list.

When you have accomplished this, you can honestly say that the money really is in the list. That is because people get bombarded with offers to join this mailing list or that mailing list and even more offers that are nothing more than spam. What will set you aside, make your list more responsive and thus, allow you to gain more money from your list, will all boil down to the content that you provide for your readership. When you understand exactly why your content is king, you can put the money in the list … and keep it there.

Your list is your ticket to financial freedom and what will set aside your successful online ventures from the vast number of failures that abound within the realm of Internet Marketing. Your list is (or at least should be) a recurring source of income and something that you can use to accurately generate a viable forecast into exactly how much money you can earn online.

Mike Filsaime, a name most Internet Marketers are familiar with, claims that he averages one dollar per month per subscriber on his list. That is not to say that he makes one dollar a month in actual cash earnings from the subscribers to his lists, but that he averages one dollar a month in actual cash money for each person that is currently on his list. Thus, if you have four thousand people on a list, you should be able to (realistically) expect to be capable of generating four thousand dollars a month in cash income from your targeted email customer list.

Now imagine that you provide quality content for the subscribers that you have added to your list, you promote lots of really great and relevant offers and you have an average open rate of forty percent on your email marketing campaign list. That is almost two thousand people that you are going to see responding to your marketing and promotions. That is almost two thousand people who want to give you money because they are on your list.

Statistically speaking, that should translate into a couple of hundred sales. Even if you are selling something as small as a seven dollar product, you could quickly replace any income that may have been lost in other areas. If you are selling higher-end products, can you begin to see why it is so commonly said that the money is in the list? Why you may think it sounds cliché, it really is true now, has been true in the past and will remain true in the future; content is King and the money is in the list!

There are many reasons for any Internet Marketer to build a responsive and targeted customer list for their successful efforts in an e-mail marketing campaign. This article will review only the top ten reasons but if you are new to Internet Marketing, suffice it to say that you are going to need both an effective email marketing campaign and a well targeted customer list.

Your success and profits will depend on effectively building a list and maintaining an ongoing email marketing campaign. In case you are in a hurry and just want to review the top ten reasons you can review them here but it may be beneficial to read the rest of the article as well.

Top 10 Reasons You Need to build and maintain an E-Mail Marketing Campaign

1. Build and establish a list of recurring Customers
2. Build and establish a sense of faith and trust among your customers
3. Build and establish customer loyalty
4. Have more people promoting you, your products, your Email Marketing Campaign and maximizing your results
5. Maximize your ROI for marketing campaigns and advertising

One: Build and establish a list of recurring customers. You can easily break your advertising budget trying to continually drive new traffic to your site. Ask anyone who has ever worked with adwords and no matter how successful their ads may be, they are much more costly and much less effective than a well targeted and receptive list on the receiving end of your E-Mail marketing campaign.

Two: Build and establish a sense of faith and trust among your customer base. No matter how much information you have on your web site and no matter how much you continue to provide for your readers, you will always have people who doubt the veracity of your information.

Hold back some information and offer it to your readers in a regular (and free) newsletter and you can, over the course of time, win over the hearts of even the most skeptical individuals within your particular niche. Additionally, they will become even more receptive to any special offers that you make available “exclusively to the list of customers” who are taking advantage of your newsletter … and ultimately, of your E-mail marketing campaign as well.

The more exclusive your readers feel themselves to be, the more privileged they will feel to be allowed to be a part of your email marketing campaign and the more they will respond. Now exactly how effective this is, depends a lot on exactly how much you provide for your readers. That is why it is paramount that you always provide the highest quality information and offers to your customer list with your e-mail marketing campaign.

Three: Build and establish a sense of trust among your customer list. This principle is touched on in number two but it deserves some clarification. There are always going to be skeptics and with literally billions of pages on the internet vying for the attention of your readers, it is no wonder that many people are resorting to selling hype and dreams.

That may be an effective way to get someone’s attention and drive traffic to your site but that is not always the best to keep people coming back to your website for more, much less getting them to become repeat customers buying both your products and those products that you have to offer.

A successful e-mail marketing campaign will allow you to provide your customer list with the very important and relevant information as well as assuring them that you have made it a full time job to look out for their better interest. In other words, you can use your email marketing campaign to let your customers know that you are doing all of the work so that they do not have to.

Four: Have more people promote you, your product and your email marketing campaign. Stop and think about this for a minute. How many newsletters, e-zines and other email marketing campaigns have you personally participated in? In other words; how many customer lists have you subscribed to? How many of those did you unsubscribe to?

If you are like most Internet Marketers, you have likely subscribed to a number of peoples email marketing campaigns … and quickly either unsubscribed or simply marked the emails as spam because the other person did not provide what you believed they would in their mass email promotions to you? Now, look at the other hand for a moment … at least when it comes to Internet Marketing and issues of faith and trust.

How many email marketing campaigns that your friends (not some other Internet Marketer) have told you about have you signed up for? Again, if you are “average” among Internet Marketers, you have probably signed up for anywhere from six to ten of these email marketing campaigns based on the recommendation of friends. You probably have not unsubscribed from many of them either.

The more people that you have on your mailing list, the more likely it is that they will recommend other people to sign up for your email marketing campaign. They are also generally more receptive to your offers and more responsive when it comes time to actually make sales pitches through your email marketing campaigns.

Five: Maximize your ROI or Return On Investment. Again, this is a topic that has been touched upon, and indeed, many of these topics overlap, but it is something that is very important to every internet marketer and something that can be greatly enhanced with an effective e-mail marketing campaign.

Trying to constantly find new sources of revenue can be difficult. Trying to constantly get new streams of “virgin” traffic or unique visitors to your site is also an expensive and daunting proposition for many people. Again, going strictly based on averages, you are probably only showing somewhere around a two percent return for your efforts.

Your E-Mail Marketing campaign should show average results of somewhere between ten to twenty percent average returns. Those numbers may be rather broad but even at the worse end, they still beat the average two-percent returns based on other sources of web traffic and customer generation.

The list of reasons that you need to establish, build up and maintain an effective e-mail marketing campaign go far beyond those few that are covered in this article but that should give you enough food for thought to begin thinking about it. The ultimate success of your email marketing campaign really does depend on you and what you do with it but rest assured that absolutely nothing will happen until you begin building a list.

]]> http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/93/top-5-reasons-to-build-an-e-mail-marketing-campaign/feed/ 2 http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/50/internet-marketing-on-a-budget/ http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/50/internet-marketing-on-a-budget/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:13:03 +0000 http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/?p=50

There are any number of businesses that will happily take your money to put together an Internet marketing campaign for you. And surely you’ve seen banners saying “ADVERTISE HERE $1.00 A WEEK!” but you don’t have to spend any money to give yourself and your business a presence on the web. You do have to spend some “sweat equity” doing the work, but at least you’ll have complete control over the results.

Many companies place ads on the Internet trying to convince you that they alone have the key to helping your business grow hugely profitable in next to no time, with little effort. All you’ll have to do is sit back and watch the revenue roll in. Sorry, no. No doubt they want to sell you their plan for Internet marketing, but there will be nothing in it that you can’t find out for yourself for free.

Writing articles is a great way to define your “brand” and promote your business on the web. If you hate to write, there are sites on the Internet that will hook you up with freelancers who will do the job for you for a small fee. After you have a decent, medium-length article of 500 to 700 words, submit it to the article directories such as Add-Articles.com. In the “resource box” make sure you link to your site or otherwise promote yourself. This is a good way to earn back links for free, particularly if you submit articles regularly.

Joining and participating in forums is another great way to make connections and find people who might be interested in your product or services. Some forums allow those who comment to have a “signature” on their comments with a link back to their site. Some forums don’t, so if you’re not sure, read the FAQs first, or ask. Sometimes forum threads are picked up by search engines and are widely read. You never know who might read it.

And, of course, there’s always Craigslist. Cities all over the world are represented on Craigslist, where people pitch their services or post their resumes. There are also people who use Craigslist to advertise for, um, “unusual” things, but you have your choice of categories in which to post. Craigslist is free, unless you’re selling real estate or advertising a job opportunity.

If your business doesn’t have a website, get one. Even if you don’t want an e-commerce site to sell products online, you should still have a website with useful content and information about contacting you. If your business offers services instead of products, you still benefit from having a website. Web hosting is much more user friendly and inexpensive than it used to be. There are sites that offer free website hosting, as long as you don’t mind the hosting company placing ads on your site. Inexpensive web hosting (without your having to run ads) is available for only a few dollars a month, and often these packages include software you need to create a professional looking, clean website, blogs, guest books, and more.

Remember, you can’t just set up a blog, join a forum, post your resume on Craigslist and then sit back and wait for the customers to show up. You’ll be waiting a long time. Just like with any marketing campaign, you must stay involved and learn what works and what doesn’t. Though there are people who want to sell you their “secret” to instant success and wealth, they’re usually the only ones who benefit when you buy their information. There is no substitute for hard work and consistency when establishing your company on the Internet.

Everyone has heard of the people who struck Internet gold by being in a news story or otherwise in a position to immediately attract thousands or millions of links. Situations like those make it sound like promoting a business on the Internet is an easy proposition. While the Internet gives you a platform from which you can communicate with hundreds of millions of potential customers, it doesn’t actually do that for you.

Successful Internet marketing requires a well thought out business plan just like marketing for a brick and mortar store. Simply sending links and emails in every direction, hoping that the “right” person will see it is not a good strategy, and the odds are heavily against it working.

The biggest challenge to anyone creating a presence on the web is just that: creating a presence. At first, nobody knows about you or your site. Of course you can promote your site offline, with your business cards or print ads, and some of your closest friends and relatives will know about your site, but it takes time, effort, and patience to establish yourself as a “brand” on the Internet. There are so many weirdos out there who set up a “business” that they have no intention of doing any actual work with, that you have to immediately set yourself apart and convince anyone reading your site that you’re for real. There are many ways to do this, and you should take advantage of all of them.

The most important thing you can do is to have a well-made website. If your website is cluttered, overly flashy, or gimmicky, people will not take you seriously enough to buy any of your products or services. Good website design is clean and perhaps a little understated. It should be easy to navigate and easy to understand without “talking down” to visitors. Make sure all the links from your page work. If your website automatically plays music or video anytime someone visits, you will drive away more traffic than you’ll accumulate.

As with having a well-designed website, having good content on that website is vital. Your website is what introduces you and your business to the world. You don’t want it to be full of silly, empty content. Make sure that your text is well-written and well edited. Your text content should also be interesting, but should make it clear that you’re a real grown-up with a real business. Graphics can be great additions to websites as long as they are relevant and well crafted. In short, you want your website’s home page to be a high-quality interface between you and your customers.

You don’t want your website to be a static entity that will be exactly the same now, next week, and next month. A good website engenders a sense of interaction between the business and its clients or potential clients. Updating your website regularly, say, weekly, with fresh articles or other content will keep people interested. And it is perfectly OK to put information to this effect on your home page like this: “Every Wednesday we add a new ‘how-to’ article about some aspect of woodworking. Keep checking back regularly!”

If you keep a blog on your site and regularly update it with fresh posts, you will generate repeat web traffic. Blog posts don’t have to be very involved or formal, but they should provide some nugget of information that will keep readers interested. Suppose you sell knitting yarn. Maybe an entire blog post could consist of a photo of new stock you’ve received along with an announcement: “We just got our first shipment of winter-weight cashmere yarn, and we can’t wait to start making hats!” If blogging isn’t your style, you could instead send out a regular e-zine by way of email. If you do this, put a prominent link on your home page that people can use to sign up for your e-zine.

While you’ll see ads all over the Internet promising blogging or marketing methods that will bring hundreds of visitors to your site overnight, or promising to share their “secret” method of drumming up massive web traffic, in reality, there is no substitute for doing the groundwork yourself. If you put in the time and effort to build trust, communicate with your customers, and make visitors to your site feel like they are interacting with a real person rather than just a web page, you’ll be making a wise long term investment in your business’s profitability.

The importance of back links, or links from other websites to yours, has grown tremendously in recent years. Keywords used to be a big determinant of your search engine ranking, but once webmasters caught on and began stuffing their content with keywords, search engine companies changed their tactics to put more emphasis on back links. There is no doubt about it: links to your site are vital for achieving good search engine ranking.

Though it may sound counter intuitive, linking to your competitors may help your standing if they have higher search engine ranking than your site. If you can get them to link to your site, that will help even more.

There are ways to create your own back links. One way is to create a sub directory and link back to your home page. Of course, your home page can link to the sub directory, too.

There are a number of ways to generate reciprocal links, where you link to a site in return for their linking back to you. Perhaps the best way is to simply ask. If there is a site you visit every day that you consider not only a good read, but somewhat of a role model, then place a link to them on your site, and ask the webmaster if they might do the same. Often, the answer is yes – the big sites like attention just as much as you do – and this kind of high quality back link will be very helpful to you.

There are sites that are devoted to link swapping, such as entrecard.com. To maximize your traffic and back links, you in turn read sites relevant to your niche and either run a one-day add for one of them in a widget on your site, or simply visit the site to help their traffic. There are people who try to abuse these systems, but they are routinely kicked off.

The kind of reciprocal links you want to stay away from are from “link farms,” where you pay for links. Search engines have wised up to this practice, and it can seriously harm your ranking.

Generally speaking, the more effort you put into acquiring a reciprocal link, the higher quality it usually is. One thing you do not want to do is have your site be a page crammed with links, with little actual content. Users, search engines, and other webmasters will immediately write your site off as useless.

You probably already have some idea which sites you would like to link to yours. Think about the kind of sites that potential customers might hang out at. If you sell knitting yarn, for example, getting a link from a top crafting site would be of great benefit. So, craft sites in general might be good link swapping partners for you. Most sites include a way to get in touch with webmasters, so it isn’t difficult to ask for a back link, especially if you’ve already linked to their site from yours.

If you want to try to get a link from a major site in your niche, and you’re worried they’ll say no, there are ways to make your case well. First, as mentioned before, have a link to their site. In your email to them put something about them in the subject line, to capture their attention and reassure them you aren’t a spammer.

In a brief message, tell them what specifically you like about their site, and give details of your product or service and ask if they will exchange links with you. Also, give them an “out,” so they don’t feel like they’re being strong-armed. Tell them that if they don’t reply to your email in some predetermined amount of time, say a week, you’ll take that as a “no,” and take their link off your website.