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This is a very touchy subject. One that needs to be addressed and that you need to understand. Email marketing falls into three categories. First is simple, you place a signature line in your email program that automatically adds your signature block to each out going email. This signature line identifies your web site and a brief tag line or catch phase. Every time you respond or send an email, your signature advertises your business, no problems with that. However, the next two types of email marketing are very touchy.
By now, everyone has heard of SPAM. Your definition may be different from mine and from the governments. However, you look at it, SPAM is unwanted email. Now email marketing requires that we send emails to our potential customers. This can be done either with or without their permission. Sending email without the permission of the recipient put us in a bad light. Often resulting is negative feelings and responses from the recipient. This is bad for business. If you piss off the potential customer, well, they are no longer a potential customer as they have deleted you email and won’t be visiting your site. You have wasted valuable time and money. So, the only people you will be sending any marketing emails to will be those that have requested information from you or have agreed to receive information from you. This is called permission-based email.
Where can you find people who are willing to receive your emails
? First provide a place on your web site to gather the names and addresses of your visitors. Offer them something in exchange, such as a free publication, or your newsletter, or something else of potential value to them. Let them know when they sign up that you will from time to time be sending them information. Include in the email a means to unsubscribe at any time. As people sign up you are building your email list, which you can market to as often as you like. I wouldn’t recommend more than twice a month.
There are other web sites that maintain a list of people who want to hear from your. This permission-based method is usually based on a particular subject matter. Such as hobbies, business ideas, childcare etc. You can find them on the web by searching for mailing list.
Emails are an inexpensive way to keep in touch with your customers. If you have a brick and motor store, try to get the email addresses of your current customers and add them to the list as well. You will be surprised at how much extra business can come from a personalize email about a special you are offering for their support over the last year etc.
Affiliate programs can add thousands of independent sales people to help market your products and services.
Over the years I have been involved with many businesses, and one of the things I remember from my Amway days was that as an individual, I could only do so much. I have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year in which I can work. I will hit a maximum point of sales that I can handle by myself. After that I’m done. The only way to do more is to automate and have others duplicate what I do. The same is true on the web.
We need to automate and duplicate what we do so we can have others expand our sales for us. The first part of this equation is duplication. We can have others follow what we do and sell our products and services for us and pay them a portion of the profits. This is different than having employees. Employees have no requirement to sell. They are overhead that must be paid regardless of sales. That is NOT what you want for a new business. Keep your hard-earned cash for other things. What we need is someone that is willing to do the work for part of the profits. This is where affiliate programs come in to our formula for success. Affiliates are basically a partnership between web sites to advertise and promote products, services, or information for a share of the profits. When someone they refer to you buys, you pay them a percentage of the sales. Result? More traffic, more sales and less time required by you to find the customers as someone else does it for you.
Wh at else c
an a good affiliate program do for you?
- How about driving more traffic to your site!
- Build brand awareness as more people visit your site from the hundreds or thousands of affiliates that are advertising for you.
- Obtaining qualified leads that you can follow-up on to increase or up sell to.
- Increasing the links to your site, which will increase the ranking of your site on the search engines resulting in more traffic and more sales.
There are all kinds of affiliate programs. Some programs charge to be a member and some do not. Some are web based and some are software programs that you load on your computer to set up and track the sales and affiliate yourself. Which one you use is up to you. Here are a few that I have found.
Affiliate Net – This is one of the more affordable server side affiliate programs. With this software there are no monthly fees only a one-time software charge. At the time of this writing this package sold from $49.95 to $99.95. Referral Software – This package is also server side although more expensive, it has many more features and is worth while to consider if you are serious about earning a lot of money with your Internet business. At the time of this writing this package sold for $299.00.
Click Bank – This is a web based affiliate program. By signing up on their web site you have access to over 100,000 affiliates. ClickBank is free to be an affiliate and has a charge if you want to run an affiliate program for your products.
clixGalore Affiliate Networks – This is a web based affiliate program. There are monthly and set up fees.
I highly recommend affiliate programs. For the reasons listed above. Remember they will help drive traffic to your site, which means more sales and you can use the affiliate programs to offer others services and make the commission once you are done with the client. This could be a good business all by its self.
Classified ads are just like in the newspaper. They are small detailed ads that offer your product or services and provide a contact (your email or web site). A quick search on Yahoo for classified ads will find over 58,000,000 entries for sites and people who will either sell or place your classified ads on their web sites.
Classified ad sites fall into two categories: Free and Paid. Free sites should be avoided. BE CAREFUL… most free classified ad web sites.
are farming your email address to sell to others. You will find you email box loaded with tons of offers and once it starts it will never stop. Paid classified web sites, however, can be like having a store in the world’s largest shopping mall for pennies a day in rent.
One of the largest classified ads web sites is…eBay. Think about this. For about 30 cents an ad (item to sell) you get listed for one week where over 1 million people a day come to shop. I have more information on eBay and other auction sites under Web Basics.
There are other forms of advertising as well. One of which we discuss in part 4 is a newsletter. Others include, your email signature, banner ads, e-books and affiliates. Each are discussed here. Click on the Marketing Resources to review each form of advertising..
Short articles are a great way to generate traffic to your website. Articles can be used to keep the material fresh on the site so that your customers keep coming back; they can also be used to ‘advertise’ your site on web sites owned by others. Placing your article on article submissi
on sites allows others to download it and use your article in their newsletters and on their web sites. Of course there are links in the article that point to your site f or m
ore information or other reviews etc. These links are great as they help increase your standings in the search engines.
The articles can be about any topic and you will find there are hundreds of article submission sites available to place your articles on. Most are free as they need fresh information so that their customers keep coming back as well.
Why choose RD-Webhosting as your Small Business Web Host? A Guide For Business Owners
If you have a business and wish to put it up on the World Wide Web, you need a reliable small business web hosting service provider to make it possible. Thankfully, web hosting services are no longer as expensive as they used to be. Nowadays, you can avail yourself of many affordable packages. We offer packages starting at $5 per year.
When looking for an affordable web hosting package you need to identify what is important to your business needs and requirements. This usually includes storage, connection speed, amount of data that you can transfer per month; email addresses, and perhaps databases to store records, client or product information and even website design tools. A small static website just as a business card site requires very little storage space and bandwidth requirements are usually small. In this case our Starter plan is perfect. If you will want to have an online catalog with order taking and payment processing then the Basic package is for you.
It is very important to have a unique domain name because this serves as your identity on the net. Registering for a domain name can be expensive, but RD-Webhosting is a registrar as well with domain names as low as $1.99 per year on some specials. Out normal domain registrations are $9.95 per year. Domain registrations are centrally controlled and all domain registrars are updating the same databases. Why pay $39.95 a year when your same information is stored in the same databases as those that pay $9.95 or even $1.99 a year?
When you choose your domain name choose something that is closely related to your business and one that is easy to remember.
RD-Webhosting offers website building tools to assist you to build your own website from scratch, if you don’t have one yet, that is. As part of the hosting package we have programs that allow you the ability to customize your site. Programs such as WordPress allow you to quickly put up a professional looking website to interact with your customers, collect their email addresses and even send newsletters automatically. The availability of PHP and SQL tools is essential, as these tools are what make your site go interactive, so see to it that the web host is able to provide these tools to you.
Another important factor to consider when looking for an affordable but reliable web host is the uptime percentage it offers.
Uptime refers to the time your site is available on the World Wide Web.
An ideal uptime percentage should not be less than 99%. RD-Webhosting has maintained an uptime of over 99.7% for the last 5 years.
Why not check out our Web Hosting Packages by clicking on the link above. Start your web presents now. Your site can be up and running today with very little effort on your part.