Well I guess I am not much of a blogger, so I think I will start calling this my, “place where I try to organize my thoughts”.

I have tried using twitter to do this, but I have found that most of the time I can’t clear my head of what I  am trying to get out in 140 character increments.

The Scene

Let me set the scene for you, my reader, for where I am at and what I am doing.  As you can probably recall from previous posts, I seem to spend some time every couple of months re-grouping.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, the problem is that typically I have a good run then something major happens and I never reached that critical mass.

The latest event that has really hurt is the change that ebay made to their payment scheme.  They have gone from a percentage model to a CPC model.  Basically they are going to pay you per click what they feel your clicks are worth. 

I have read a lot of talk of marketers getting hit hard by this, but they also mention that they were making the majority of their income from ACRUs.  I on the other hand had been making almost all of my income from sales.  The difference was that you get paid a set amount for every new member that you get to sign up to Ebay, the other is that you get a percentage of the fees that are generated when someone that you send to the site makes a purchase.  This was my bread and butter, and because of this I foolishly thought that I would get a decent EPC for the traffic that I was sending.

However that was not the case.  From about February till September my effective EPC was about $0.45, now it is $0.15 and lower if someone happens to come to my site, click an ad not like what they see, hit back and then click another.

Where Now?

Needless to say this was one in a line of huge hiccups in my trek. I haven’t given up however, I am flaying around a bit at the moment, but I am starting to dabble in some direct linking with some promising affiliate offers.  If any of them are a hit I will then build a site around it and get serious.  My plan is to go after a bunch, if I spend $50 and not get anywhere I move on, if I see promise I will tweak and let it go for another $100.  From there is when I make the decision whether or not to go for the site.

I will let you know how it goes.

I have some goals for 2009 that I am going to reach.

500 Posts

The first one is to achieve 500 posts on this blog.  Bluenoser.net has been online for years, but I have only around 300 posts and some of those are useless ones that I put up at the beginning just to have content.

MORE PROFIT

In 2009 I have a goal to quadruple my online profits.  This is not an overly ambitious goal, and I think that by the end of January I will be making it a TEN fold increase.  Tim of 4HWW and some of has followers have said that making high goals actually increases your likely hood for success.

More Time

I am in 2009 going to increase my productivity to the point that I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing.  That includes travelling and reading.  This is the first year that I have read less than 10 GOOD books in a year.  I miss reading and increasing my knowledge.

Professional Equity

Along with my various online endeavours I am going to start working on building “professional equity”.  I am not sure if this term has been coined before, if not here is my definition.  Anything that increases your worth to your profession and company which in turn increases the demand in your services.  I have started doing this by achieving my LEED AP designation, and in the first of the year I will be gaining my P.Eng (once I finish my diaries).  There are two more on my list one is to get my FE in April and follow with my PE in Maryland, or another state in the US.

The other BIG thing is staying tight to my chest, but hear is a hint,  it is going to be a teaching program for a tight niche in my industry that I have expertise in, and believe that there is a lack of information available to fellow engineers and industry in general.  I hope for this to be my muse(read 4HWW if you don’t know what this is)

I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing.  This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project.  I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.

I have just got my first pass on the campaign online.  I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information.  I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information.  I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year.   I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts. 

Some of the things that I have learned so far are:

Outsourcing is not the be all end all

As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing.  Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications.  Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.

I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule.  I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it.  I left it.  If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.

With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less

I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time.  But I am working on it.  SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could.  I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best.  I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them.  There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts.  This is something that I think will improve.

However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you.  If you come across such a writer, dump them.  You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS

Choose Your Niche Well

This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now.  The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is.  But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site.  So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow.  The customer that will be visiting your site is broad. 

You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche.  However what type of customer are you targeting?  The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets?  Finding out there is out there for blue widgets?  Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them.  That is really where you want to be.

Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to.  This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic.  There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.

So why bother?

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there.  The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner.  They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.

That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.

Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year.  There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi).  This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing.  I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years.  I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.

I am a huge reader and one of the things that I use my Online Profits for is cleaning out my Amazon Wish List.  Now I have a number of new books that I am going to have to add to the list.  ChrisG has written a post on ProBlogger called “5 Influential Books All Bloggers Should Know“.

This is a relatively old post, but I was going through my starred feeds and noticed it again.

There are a number of them that I have not heard of before, but there are a few books that I would definitely add to the list would be:

ProBlogger

I understand why he didn’t (Chris authored the book with Darren) but it is an amazing book for the beginner blogger, and a great resource for the blogger who has been around.  The chapters on “Blog Writing” and “Blog Promotion” were very useful to me.

The Dip

Seth Godin writes great books on marketing, and the Dip is great.  It is all about teaching when to quit and when you persevere.  I hear a lot of people saying that you should get the audio, but come on it is not that long.  I find that if you read it once, you will understand it better than listening to it 3 or 4 times.

And finally The Four Hour Work Week

This book by Tim Ferris is great, and like Chris mentions when talking about E-Myth is great for teaching what you can do to give yourself more time by having others do your tasks.  Like many I was fooled by the title, there is a lot of work to do before you can create a reasonable income only working 4 hours a week, but the book tells you how and makes you excited to get out there and try.

Is there any books that Chris or I missed that you think should be on the short list of every blogger or small business owners wish list?

I am in the process of writing some great posts, if I do say so myself, on how to start your online presence. One of the things that I have written about on the blogging is working on making your blog sticky. This is something that I realized was lacking on my own site.

So I took some time on the weekend to see if I could remedy that. The first thing that I did was add the WWSGD plugin. This is a plugin inspired by the almighty Seth Godin, I am a huge fan. It basically puts some text at the start of a post depending if the user is new or not. If they are new you try to get them to read some of your better work and of course add you RSS feed.

The second thing that I did was add a Related Posts plugin so that every post I write will have more for people to follow and hopefully get my pesky bounce rate down some. There are a number of them out there, but I chose this one. It seems to do what I want but I may be trying out some other ones in the future.

Thirdly I added the add signature plugin this plugin adds something to the end of every post. Currently I am just begging the reader to add my feed to their reader. I will have to think of something better soon, maybe some advertising.

And lastly I added a bunch of buttons on my sidebar so that people will know how to add my site to the various readers that are out there. With this there is no thought; just feeding.

I did this simply with the Feedburner publize tool. It took a little while, I wish they would simply write a plugin that you can select all that you want and make one cop-paster.

I am hoping to have the start of the posts that I mentioned above by the end of the week. The thing that inspired me to write them is people asking how to start a site, or others asking how I make money with my websites. I am hoping that this series will enable me to simply point them to this site and all of their answers will be answered.

I am not a fan of writing sales letters. However it is not something that I am willing to out-source when I am in the testing phase. There shouldn’t be a need for me to shell out mid-$XXX for a decent sales letter when I am not even sure that there is a market for my idea. So that is why I am stuck doing it myself, and it is not easy. I can write about a lot of stuff and simply ramble on, however to write a good sales letter there is a form that should be followed, and at the end I should be able to convince myself to shell out the dough for my letter.

All of that moaning aside, I have almost finished my first. There is some tweaking, design stuff, etc but the content, flow etc is there and done. I am going to spend a couple of hours this weekend finishing it up and putting it live. From there I am going to start research for an AdWords campaign and then get that started for one week on Monday. I still have to get my newsletter software finished and tweaked so that while I am testing I am building a potential list.

If you are wondering how I am planning on doing a reasonable test without a product, I am going to have the same set-up and when they fillin a bit of information to take them to the paynow page, I am going to have a blank page that describes that the check-out is closed temporarily and if they want to hear back via email when it is online they are to confirm there address.

If I they get reasonable conversions I will move onto the product generation phase. Then really start the marketing ?

But, before I can get there, I still ahve to finish that damn Sales Letter.

Man is the market ever starting to piss me off, I saw the start of the down turn fairly early on and was able to insulate myself somewhat to hold on to some of my gains during the first part of the year. But now I am not sure what I am going to do so that I will be able to see some gains for this coming year.

Since most of my market is in the US, a recession is not going to work out well. I am going to have to hope for th ebest, but realistically I am not expecting to see much growth in my online revenue in 2008. Therefore what I am going to have to do is try to find ways to lower my costs. Become a more efficiently run enterprise.

First thing that I am going to have to do is to find a better CC. The best way to do that would be to compare credit cards for a number of different companies.

Second I am going to have to find some way to keep running and investing into my company. Since revenue is going to be a problem I am probably going to need some sort of loan. Now over at Beat the Quote they have a lot of information on UK secured loans, but since I am in North America I am not going to be able to take much advantage of that. However if you click here you can find out what they do have to offer in your area.

And Thirdly I am going to have to think about taking on some more freelance work if my own ideas don’t pan out. This has been something that I have been thinking about doing for a while. I have a lot of expertise in some very profitable niches that I think that I could become a very good writer for. And on top of that, there is not a lot of writers that can write on this subject, especially on DP.

All in all I am sure that 2008 is going to be a harder year, but I hope to see an over all growth, and stay on track to be completely independant by the time I am 30, 4 years

Cheers

There is a site that I have been nursing along for a very long time, however I have now decided that it is time to either get it bake to life, or kill it.

I am thinking that I am going to revive the site, and document everything that I do to make this happen here.

Currently the stats for the site include .25 registrations a day and 2 new threads a day.
So today we start back at zero. I am going to be doing a couple of things to make the site the place to be.

First I am going to make a minimum of 10 posts a day, with a minimum of 5 new threads.
Second, start working on automated post exchanges
Third, redesign the logo and get some online marketing materials made
And fourth, I am going to start working on contest ideas, something that will generate interest in the site.

I will report back in a week to let you know how it is going. Every month for the next year I will post the average number of posts, new threads and registrations per day.

If anyone has any advice, please post it here. I would be very interested in hearing what you have have done in the past to revive a currently dead forum.

Last night I started to realize that I don’t have a dedicated credit card for my business transactions.  Sure I have enough cash to cover just about everything and I do 90% of my online business through PayPal, but I have been finding more and more that I think that having a CC to buy that offline stuff that it takes to run an online business would be great.  Especially since I do all of my business stuff through my own name so that I don’t have to register a business number and all of the headaches that takes.  I simply claim all of my earnings on my tax return, however for the last couple of years it wasn’t a big deal since I was able to claim expenses and have the business be revenue neutral.

This year however I don’t think that I am going to have that luxury.  I have not had as much time to do investing in online properties so I have been accumulating cash, which is not a bad thing, it just means that I am going to be taxed on it at the end of the year.

Last night I had a pleasant surprise, my new bike was home.  I have a friend building me a new bike since I wrecked my old one.  I have been without for about 2 weeks, and it has been tough.  I don’t think that it is “finished” but it is more than done to get me around before the snow starts to fly.  And then I can get all of the bells and whistles finished.

As for my CakePHP project, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on it.  I am starting to think that it would be much faster to drop the MCV, but maybe that is simply because I am not sure what I am doing yet.  I am going to work on it as is until the new year,  I think that I should have a good BETA online by then.  In the meantime I am going to start to work on a front end.  This is going to be a ready made CMS, probably Drupal since that is what I know, however since Mambo is going Cake I may decide to look at that for this site, since I am going to have a cake install anyway.

As the readers here know, I was planning on having a contest on ThePartyLive, however that has changed, I have more work to do before I do that. 

When I was sitting around with a few friends on Thursday I asked them about my site and why they don’t post.  I told them that there were lots of topics and I am sure that they would enjoy at least one.  Well it turns out that the reason they didn’t click the link in my sig or MSN was because they couldn’t get a feel about what the site was about from the URL.  www.thepartylive.com doesn’t really describe Canadian discussion. 

So following that I feel that the reason I can’t get refferals into members may be that they either don’t know what the site is, or get a different impression from the link, and then when they find the site they decide to turn away.  That is why I am going to get a new URL (done) and start a change over.  I am going to do it slowly, over a couple of months and 301 everything from thepartylive.com to the new site.

When the new site is running and everything is active again I will start the contest, maybe get it rolling in August and then have the draw end of Sept.  By then I hope to have 6 VERY active members and some more people using TPLNews

I will annouce the new Name when I have the domain parked and new logo up.

I have been thinking that I am going to re-start TPL-Canada.  It has been a VERY long while since I have done anything on this site, so I am going to give it 8 months of time to see if I can get it to critical mass and then have it running for itself.

One of my ideas is contests.  The first contest is going to be blogging reviews.  I am going to offer a decent prize, maybe a Ipod Nano, or video to the winner.  The winner would be a simple draw, and an individual registered member can enter as many times as they want depending on the number of blogs they have.  There will be stipulations including, must be registered on The Party Live and must have 5 posts.  The blog posts must also include a link to a list of pages (one link).

The reason I haven’t started the contest is that I am not sure how to market it.  I am thinking of just starting a post and then post in a number of different forums, blogs, etc and then Adsense.  I do have a budget for this so that is going to be important.

If this goes well I will have a posting contest directly afterward and then a maybe mini monthly-posting contests for advertising space, if the winner doesn’t have something that they want to advertise then I will offer a list of charities that they can use instead.

If anyone has any ideas on other ways that I can drive this site to the Canadian public let me know.

Jeff

It seems that lately I have been getting more and more ideas for some really cool tools, companies, websites, and contests.  This is great, I have been writing everyone down and have compiled a pretty good list.  However I have a huge problem.  I don’t have TIME.  My “real job” is starting to get nuts.  I have a shutdown at a pulp and paper plant that I am doing work at and that means a LOT of preparation so that I can be sure that the contractors are going to get all of their work down and there will not be any delay on start-up that was our cause.  This causes major headaches and a lot of finger pointing.

So what does a fellow do?  Do I try to squeeze some time in so that I get something out there?  Or do I just wait it out and hope no one else gets there first.  What do you do when you have a good/great idea, but just don’t have the time to implement it?

I just bought a e-book site that I am planning on doing some cool advertising for it.  This is not the first e-book site that I have owned, but the first one is one that I started from scratch and then got overwhelmed with the work involved in making a start-up so I sold it. 

Now I am ready, I think, to try to give it another go.  The good thing about buying a site that is already set up is that if you don’t have a lot of time at the moment then you can just sit back and let it do some stuff organically.  Then when you have time you can start to actively work on it.  Also since the site wasn’t making a lot of money, I bought it low.  I have calculated that I have to make $20 per month to break even in one year.  I should be able to do a lot better than that with minimal work on advertising.  I also plan on putting together a “real” book store through Amazon Affiliate.  This will also give me another revenue stream.

I will let you know how it goes.  I am looking forward to have some passive income from this site. Wish me luck

powered by performancing firefox

Yesterday I started working on my new site.  I have started working on a layout, and structure of the site.  However the first thing that I did was register a new domain, and then get drupal installed.  I haven’t used Drupal for a large scale site yet so I figured that this was as good of a time as any.  The set up was VERY easy since I have fantastico installed via Cpanel, so it was literally 1 click.  I love it.

Anyway, I have also decided on the modules that I am going to add, and next is the topics that I am going to target first.

My plan is to start the targetting with a blog entry.  The blog entries are going to be on the front page until I have more content and more activity on the site.  After the blog entry I am going to write a story on what ever is happening with that topic, maybe one or two a week.  After about a month I am going to publish an in-depth story on it.  This will be filled with the key-words that I am going to target, and will lead into the next target.

As for SEO I will be doing little for the blog, well I will be doing some for the front page, but I am going to be doingt a lot for the in-depth articles.  This will include buying links, getting some people to write articles on their own blogs, etc. 

Then after the blitz is done, I will spend a week to monitor traffic and revenues.  If that topic seemed to bring in the visitors I will then continue with that one, maybe just take it in a different direction.  Spreading the work out like this will give me time to analyze what I am doing in a manner that I never let myself before and will help me learn how to do it for the next site.

This will be the only site that I build this year, so I better make it good.  If I feel that I have made it grow enough I will move on to another site or two next year.

I think that I have come up with my next theme for my website, its ….

HA!  I bet you thought that I was going to tell you.  Well it is not that big of a secret of one, and it is not really in a market that is THAT easy to break into, but it is something that I am sure going to enjoy writing about, so that makes the task that much easier.  Also I know few people that can give me some help, and the topic is one that most tech savvy people don’t really pay a lot of attention to, so that means it is more likely that these people will hit my ads

Anyway, I am going to start gathering my information in the next couple of weeks.  Maybe get a couple of good articles written from some people on elance and then get a press release written up.

I am going to set a limit on the money that I am going to spend on the site start-up and a specific amount of time before I earn that money back.

Enjoying what I am spending my time on is not enough, if all that I am making is a dollar for every hour of my time I am better off playing low limit poker online.

::EDIT::
Well I have the domain, set up a quick drupal site and am all ready to start adding some content. To do that I have to do some reading, and then do some more reading. However since it is something that I haven’t done a whole lot of reading on before it will be fun to re-learn everything about it.

I have been spending a lot of time researching what topic I would like to build a website around.  There are a lot of things that have to be considered, what I like, is there money in the topic, is there a lot of competition, etc.

However I have also been thinking about doing some more work in PPC arbitrage at the same time.  The plan as it is now is to spend approximately 50% of my time on this until I finally come up with a topic that I feel that is worth the time and effort to put in.  Then I will cut back to be about 25% with the rest of the time being put into my new site.

I am going to pick one product a week, and spend that week testing to see if it is going to be worth my while.  I will be using AdWords to do my testing and if it looks good there, then I am going to try MSN and Yahoo for traffic.  As for the landing page I will buy one from a reputable designer.  I will then test, test, test.

I will let you know how it goes.

First off I sold one of my babies, www.superfreeforums.com The money has changed hands and the transfer shall be complete by end of January. This is a huge lift off of me since I was spending more and more time on this site and not really seeing any results. I guess I was not cut out for the Hosted Forums market.

On the other hand I have been making money with my directory. The directory that I was planning on letting die is simply doing the best out of all of my sites. Not bad for 0 work over the last few months. I didn’t even mention it in any forums. That said I am going to be transferring it to a new script, while archiving the current site. This is simply because the admin features of the one that I am currently using leave a lot to be desired. So I am going to make the jump. I think that the archiving part is going to be the biggest challenge, I don’t want to leave a lot of links just hanging there and then loose rank with the masterful G. But I think that with alittle work I can make it work.

This new script will allow me to use featured sites and have the integration of the paid link directory work MUCH better. I may even try to automate it to the point where I sign in daily, check the queue and that it is it. And for the first few months use ALL of the money that I make for marketing. My other sites can carry the costs so everything I make from the directory is gravy anyway.

I will let you know how it goes.

I am not really sure what direction that I want to take with my online dealings right now. I have not been very focused lately, and I was thinking about selling off some of my sites. Then I thought that may not be a great idea, especially since most of them don’t really cost a lot to keep online anymore so why not keep them. Safety them up a bit and check in on them every once in a while but other than that just hope that Adsense will pay for the BW.

So that is all that I decided. I am going to keep all of the sites that I already have. Great, now what. I have found myself sitting in front of the computer the last couple of nights stumped as to what to do. I have lots of ideas, but no really huge motivation to come through on them at the moment. Also I don’t really feel like writing, so that original content that you really need to have a site, well that has to be paid for until I get out of this slump that I am in right now.

The way I see it there are three avenues that I can meander down to give a shot at. There is CJ and other CPA, and affiliates sites that I could build a site for, market, buy ads etc and make some money. There is contextual advertising, which I have had limited success in. And there is drop shipping, or light wholesale. I already have paid for the World Wide Brands list of drop shippers so I guess I could give it a shot.

Right now I am leaning toward the drop shipping, or CJ. However for both of these there is a lot of market reseach work to do on the front end. You have to find the niche, find the product, find the competitors. If there are a lot move to the next product. Once you have found the product that is not saturated you have to do some test marketing on a small scale to see if it will make you money. Then you have to sit down and anaylze the results, if favouable expand, if not move on to another product.

Anyway we will see what happens. What ever I decide be sure that I will keep everyone up to date with my success.

So I have been drinking heavily tonight, I must say that I am drunk as I am typing this, and when I got home I decided to check my emails.  One of the emails was talking about visiting this site that had to do with trying to get more young people involved.

In my inebriated state I clicked the link and got to the home page, and from there I got lost.   I didn’t know where I was supposed to click or what.  I knew from the article that the site was “designed” for 8-18 year olds however I doubt that a sober 8 year old would know any better where to go than a drunk 24 year old, therefore, in my opinion, the site is usless in the development ofthe engineering profession, or trying to get young people interested in Electrical Engineering.

What the lay person who is into internet marketing should get out of this ramble of a post is that if the visitor has to thing for more than 2 seconds where to click or read nexxt you have lost them and they havealready either clicked the close button or back button.

What is Receive Links and why do I care? 

Those are two questions you are probably wondering about right now.  Well, simply put ReceiveLinks is a program that was developed to help website owners to promote their website.  The way that it works in a nutshell is like this.  You place links from the network on your site via a small php file that they provide.  You can place it on any or all of your pages.  depending on the quality of the page and the number of link spaces you supply, you will receive points.  These points go toward your ads being placed on other sites.

What makes ReceiveLinks better than the other existing systems is the level of control that they give you, right from the basic free to the paid accounts.  You are able to control both what type of ads are placed on your site and where you want to have your ads placed.  Some of the controls include, by language, by category, etc., and the links are all reviewed to enure that they conform to a set of guidelines that both the ads and the sites must conform  Also you can control how fast you place links up to 20 per day.  So you can place 1 link a day, or 10 links every 10 days, etc…

More –>

Looking for a great way to monetize the traffic that visit your sites, opt-in email can help.  Opt-in email is a form of email, where a visitor has consented to receive communications from you on a wide variety of topics or on one specific topic.  Opt-in email is not spam and is totally legal.  Here are some tips on building your own opt-in email lists.

Opt-in lists are extremely easy to build.  Many people create web sites with the capability of opt-in lists already built in.  You can easily leave a place on your web site where people can submit their email address to you in order to receive a free newsletter, gift, bonus, or more information.  While the percentage of people that submit their email address to you depends on the traffic, topic and product being offered it is very reasonable to build up a list of hundreds of people over the course of a few months.

Using your opt- in lists can be extremely advantageous.  You can market your products to this list of people many times per month.  However keep in mind that sending out too many messages each month might irritate some of your list members.  A good rule of thumb is usually once a week or twice a month.  So if you want to grow your business and customer base, use opt in email.

I am sure that you have heard about all of these great schemes that you can get links from.  Even I have told people about Link Vault, which, don’t get me wrong is a great “tool”.  But that is all it is, a tool in your tool box.  Another thing that I am sure that you have heard is that for SEO the big new thing is content.  Well I suppose that it is not all that new, but it is something that is getting more and more important for SEs, and it is only going to get even more importatnt as all of the major search engines get better at weeding out duplicate content.

So why am I mentioning both linking schemes and content in an article talking about how to get links to your site?  Well that is because there is only one sure-fire way to get people to link to your site for the long term, and that is to write GREAT content.  It can’t be just good, it has to be great, it has to be so great that when someone is looking for information online, or if they are looking for a reference that they are going to take the time to both bookmark it and if they have a blog or website they are going to link to it and tell others to check it out.

This is not an easy thing to do, but it is what you need to do.  So basically you have to pick a subject that you know a lot about.  You have to know enough about that subject to teach others, and if you can teach someone that has no experience in that subject you have the background necessary to build a website around it.

Like I said in the first few lines, the big thing these days in the webmaster community is content, but remember this, 10 GREAT webpages on a small website will do a whole lot better than 100 good pages, or 1000 medicore pages.

I was looking around for some BannerExchange programs but haven’t had much luck. BannerAdder seems to be the one for me, and it is my own.

I will tell you why, for one it is a 4:3 ratio Banner Exchange. I have seen many that were 2:1 and worse and very few that were better that have stayed around. I once used a 1:1 banner exchange and when I had about 10000 credits they went belly up. A 1:1 is great but since there is no way to pay the necessary bills it can’t last.

Another of the killers is that a lot of banner exchanges have the link on the bottom of the banner itself. This makes the space it takes greater, and it makes the advertisements look much less professional. This hurts everyone, the people that visit your site, the exchange and the person whose ad is being displayed. Why would I click an ad that got there for free, if it was free I guess there isn’t very “important” information.

That is why I PAY for advertising BannerAdder, I ensure that all sites in the exchange are in the correct categories, which helps CTR, and I check any changes to ensure that they are following the TOS. To entice people to join I offer 1500 free credits, this is one of the reasons why a 4:3 is needed. In the future I will sell impressions to pay for the hosting bills. Hosting banners uses a lot of server load and BW.

So if you are interested in a Free way to promote your site BannerAdder is for you. Join Now!!!

by: Ron Isaiah

Most people don’t realize that the more money you spend for Google Adwords traffic in comparison to the Google AdWords ads in the positions below and above your ad, the less amount of traffic that will come to you.

If you’re looking at it by percentages, ask yourself: If your sales could go up 20%, would that be good if (all things being equal) your cost per click expense goes up by 30%? If this has in fact happened to you, congratulations! You have fallen into the Google Adwords CPC spiral. You have allowed the Google AdWords algorithms which determines the cost per click to add to the Google bottom line at your expense. If none of this makes sense, it should at least be clear that Google is making a fortune and they are only going to make more and more in the future.

This is the hardest thing for some Internet Marketers to understand. Google does not want a scenario where your sales drop 20 percent and the cost per click drops 20 percent as well, even though, if this happens to you, you will have effectively brought down your expenses and surprisingly, your profits will double or maybe even triple.

Never forget and always remember that you decide what you pay Google as well as the quality of traffic that comes from your Google AdWords campaign. Follow the following seven solid pieces of advice and watch what happens to your campaign.

1. Stay out of the top three positions where the lowest quality impulse clicks are most abundantly found

2. Get better traffic by improving your CTR by improving your ad.

3. Being in position 4-8 can be more lucrative by bringing in the more educated and serious buyers and keeping that cost per click down.

4. Don’t be afraid of running the ad on the second page for higher qualified traffic. Remember, the game is to hit the perfect balance between price and position.

5. The higher the CTR you have, the more traffic you’re getting and Google Adwords rewards you for a high CTR by giving you a better position

6. By continually challenging your own ads with simple split test methodology, you can improve the CTR over time. Let two ads run and keep slightly changing the one with a lower CTR in an attempt to beat the leader. This is not rocket science. This can also work with keeping two and trying to beat them with a third ad.

7. Scan your campaign and pull out the lowest converting keywords to improve your overall CTR. Don’t throw them away, just separate them into their own Google Adwords Ad Groups.

Keep the following line in your head till it makes sense without thinking about it…

SALES CAN GO DOWN and still profits can climb higher!

About The Author

Ron Isaiah is an expert online marketer. Get free eBooks, mini-courses, tips and tricks by visiting http://www.superiormarketingpartners.com.

The other day I made some money so I decided to get a banner designed for my directory BluenoserLinks so what I did was open a contest at NamePros and got a really cool banner for only $15.

Then today I decided that I wanted to show this banner off on a test site. So I browsed the directory at AdBrite.com and found a site that I thought fit. Then I started through the check-out procedure, but wouldn’t you know it, the animated gif banner that I had made was too large, and me being at a computer that isn’t the one that I usually use, didn’t have any editors. That is when I came acorss a cool site www.gifworks.com

GifWorks.com allows you to do image editing online for FREE, and as far as I can tell no catches either, there wasn’t even a pop-up, or notice of one getting blocked. That is what I call a clean site, and as far as ease of use goes, it was great. Mind you I don’t think that I would like to use it to create design banner ads, but it worked great in a pinch when I had to reduce the size of my banner a couple kB.

Over the Christmas break I bought a new webmaster related site. Well actually it is a Free Banner Exchange Network. There wasn’t very many active users involved in the network, but I am working on changing that. Also I am going to be spending some time playing with the script, and figuring out exactly what is going on, currently the redirects to a subfolder, something that I don’t like, and I am planning on fixing that. Also there seems to be multiple versions installed on the site, this is something that I am going to have to fix both for security and administrative reasons.

In the mean time, please help me out by joining the new site, you can find it at www.banneradder.com There are a number of categories to choose from, and I will be adding more as the need arises.

By Meryl K. Evans

I know that seeing ads everywhere in a blog annoys and I’m guilty of it. I do the best I can to provide you with information that you can use or find valuable. Many quality Web sites are using ads and I respect that. I even click on them when I find something interesting.

The ads are there for the most obvious reason. Since becoming a full-time content maven, I’ve had to explore various routes to support the family and that includes ads. This may not matter to you, but I simply want to be up front with you about this.

Ads come with the risk of losing readers. Master New Media, Engadget, Gizmodo (ooh, I listed competitors next to each other), and Boing Boing are well-respected and full of traffic, right?

I draw the line at animated ads or ads that appear in front of content. One site drives me nuts as an ad appears whenever the mouse pointer hits a certain spot. It happened so often that it was like a blinking ad. Some folks have trouble controlling the mouse pointer, so if you’re going to use “in front of content floating ads,” then at least have a close button instead of a “depends where your mouse” goes and it appears ad.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl’s notes, eNewsletter Journal, and The Remediator Security Digest. She is also a PC Today columnist and a tour guide at InformIT. She is geared to tackle your editing, writing, content, and process needs. The native Texan resides in Plano, Texas, a heartbeat north of Dallas, and doesn’t wear a 10-gallon hat or cowboy boots.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Meryl_K._Evans

How to Save Hours a Week, Be More Focused And a Lot More Productive
By Dave Origano

Within the next few minutes you will hear a secret that changed my life quite a bit. It was no drastic change, though it helped me save hours a week and got me to do much more work for my business too.

The reason why I want to share this is because of the big amount of pressure and stress this world evokes on people like you and me. This little secret will sure come you handy, especially when you are trying to start up a new business, on the internet.

A problem which you might haven’t discovered yet…

You probably already know that almost anybody on the internet publishes a newsletter, and that’s actually a good thing. People all around the world send their information to you for free. But there is also a downside to that story, which is the time is consumes to shift trough all kinds of articles, newsletters, blatant promotions and more.

And please believe me that this really is a problem. It’s a problem because you spend countless hours a week reading all those promotions, ads and gimmicks. You are wasting those hours to those self-proclaimed guru’s who want to make a buck or two for a six pack of beer.

But in the meantime you can do an enormous amount of work for your business. Hours a week can mean another two or three pages of content, extra subscribers to your list, some interviews for information product, and much more!

You need to take action now!

It’s time to unsubscribe of all these newsletters and advertisements. And now pick out five of your favorite newsletters. The ones that give you the most information and the less ads. Those that are focussed on your market, your niche or your situation.

But that was only the first part of the solution!

Second part is to make a new email account dedicated to those five newsletter subscriptions, something like newsletters@yourdomain.com or maybe you can try Gmail and setup a Filter for the newsletters. (Don’t have gmail? Subscribe to my newsletter and mail me for an invitation!)

And last but not least, the third part! I recommend you to read your newsletters and other emails only at specific times. Like 3 or 4 times a week, at 8 PM. Another handy tip could be to setup a timer when reading emails and only give yourself 30 minutes to read the newsletters.

Dave Origano is author of “Motivation & Inspiration” and “Momentum Based Marketing”. For his free newsletter with articles, secrets, tips and more, go to http://www.MrOrigano.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Origano

Ways to Gain Web Exposure
By Anthony Bae

Whether you want some exposure or massive exposure, especially on the internet, you got to put some work into it. Just think about it; either you are trying to advertise a product or a website; you will have to start somewhere. People are not just going to be able to find your site or product; out of 3 billions websites in this world, what are the chances that one will accidentally type in your domain name.

Many advertisers use search engines to get exposed, paying so much per click that does not even guarantee that that click will get them the sales to justify the money that they just paid to the search engine for that particular click. Unless you don’t care about losing $100 daily in Google or Yahoo!, you may want to stay away from search engines for now—check out Search Engine Optimization.

How about banner advertisements? Not only does it have lower conversion rate than search engine CPC (cost-per-click) advertising method, it costs you more up front, if you want the right audience. Unless you have a couple of thousand to spare, without any guarantees, try to avoid banner advertisements—and that goes for banner exchange as well, which I personally find totally worthless unless you receive so much traffic to your site that you will get more from the banner exchange program. But by the time you receive so much traffic, you won’t need to go looking for banner exchange software or programs to gain more exposure; they will come looking for you.

The simplest solution I found for product advertising, spending the least amount of money, is advertising on eBay or any similar marketplace. I’m not talking about listing just one lousy listing. List multiples of them. Don’t be like the ones that list 10 at the same time. If you are thinking about listing 10 of them, spread them out maybe in one hour intervals. The more you list, the more exposure. Some marketplace will cost you, but some are free (eg. craiglist.org). You can’t list so many on craiglist.org because they are very strict with spammers. They will even block your IP address for 24 hours so you can’t access their site. If you can come up with different titles and descriptions for every listing you post, you will probably avoid the trouble of getting caught by craig.

If you are trying to get your website exposed, eBay is a bad idea. People don’t go to eBay looking to find another site to shop at; eBay is probably the consumer’s final stop to shop. If you really want to get involved in getting your site exposed on the web without throwing your money away at search engines, go submit your site in web directories. There are thousands and thousands of web directories where you can submit your site to—and majority of them are free. Some of them you got to pay to submit, but it’s only a one time thing, and usually, the paying ones receive more traffic. Don’t spend time submitting to web directories that bring in like 10 unique visitors a day. Start from the busiest ones first, and move your way down. To make your life easier, download Alexa Toolbar, which will show you where the site you are at that moment is ranked, and by clicking on the number rank, you can sort of see how busy the site really is.

Another way to get exposed on the web is through an affiliate program. Your site will have to be a bit established before starting up an affiliate program not only because it may cost a lot to create such program, but your site will also need traffic to have interested affiliates to post your banners or products on their website. Big sites like Amazon.com, Buy.com, Overstock.com, and even eBay.com have their own affiliate programs, which brings them massive traffic resulting in millions in revenue and sales. If your site has traffic and something to show, affiliate program can really get you going.

If you have another way of getting more exposure that I haven’t mentioned and you would like to share, please feel free to email me at missing@imbae.net

By Anthony Bae
http://lessons.ImBae.net
Copyright © 2005, ImBae.net, All Rights Reserved.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anthony_Bae

Effective Advertising Through Ezines
By David Bell

Everyone knows there’s a world of information and services on the Internet. So what does that mean for your business? Do other businesses or consumers that are looking for a service or product that your business offers discover your service? The answer might be a big “NO” to you. Just like us, you have placed advertisements in newspapers and magazines and the results were not as good as you expected.

We once we placed an advertisement in a magazine that claimed to have over 1.5 million subscribers nationwide. We spent nearly a thousand dollars for the ad and only got a few responses. What went wrong? The answer is very simple!

Our ads were buried among dozens of advertisements, and it was not targeted to the right audience. We learned to advertise smarter and now we are getting good responses from our Ezine ads.

As businesses are shopping around for the right publication in which to advertise, they are learning that the Internet online newsletter, or Ezine, often provides a better chance for online advertisement. Internet businesses find they can communicate with customers and market their services more efficiently via the online publications. A key advantage of Ezine advertising is that it is more targeted and much more cost-effective.

What are Ezines? Ezines are content-rich and informational online publications that are delivered to subscribers with permission through email. Most Ezines are free to subscribers. Individual Ezines may focus on a particular topic or subject. For instance, our own B2B Ezine covers news and the latest trends in business-to-business markets in cyberspace.

Each Ezine usually displays classified ads or feature advertising placements. More and more businesses have come to realize the importance of advertising on Internet Ezines and newsletters. Here are some of the main reasons why you should focus more of your budget towards Internet Ezines advertisement:

Cost-efficient

Print publications such as magazines and newspapers usually charge $15 to $25 dollars per word for classified ads, or $200 to $300 per inch of column space. Needless to say, these are very expensive options to small business operations. Most Ezines are able to deliver at a much lower cost because of their low overhead for production and delivery.

In a print magazine you will see full color glossy ads that were produced for thousands of dollars. In Ezines, even feature advertising can be found between $300 to $800, much cheaper than traditional advertising.

Instant delivery

Most Ezines are published on a daily or weekly basis. When you place an ad with your favorite Ezine you can always expect to see it in circulation the next day or within a week. With traditional advertising you will normally wait up to two or three months to see your advertising in print. With a good Ezine, advertisement information is just a click away for your audience since your ad is hyperlinked to your website URL, Ezine subscribers can simply click on your URL or email address and get your information within moments.

Less competition

A print magazine usually has dozens of ads while an Ezine only has about a dozen. Would you rather compete with many other advertisers or just a few?

More targeted

Almost all Ezines are opt-in mailing lists. People who subscribe to a particular Ezine are willingly receiving them. Ezines are targeted to those who share the same interests. Eventually, they will read your ad.

Global audience

Ezines are one of the very few ways to truly reach people all over the world. Even though I live in the central Illinois, my B2B Ezine reaches subscribers from over twenty five countries. It doesn’t cost me a penny to send the Ezine directly to them. If your services are available globally you need to consider advertising in Ezines.

If you are looking for a cost-effective alternative to print advertising, Ezine advertising is one of the most efficient ways to reach people who might be interested in your services or products.

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

David Bell

Advertising research and development center

# 1 Internet Marketing Agency -Online Advertising Agency

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

10 Effective Ways To Gain More New Ezine Subscribers
By Ken Hill

1. Swap ads with other ezine publishers.

Swap sponsor, feature, classified or solo ads with
publishers who have subscribers targeted to be interested
in what your ezine covers.

This will provide both you and the other publisher with a
terrific way to get more subscriptions at no cost.

When choosing ezines to swap ads with, pick ezines that
offer content that your new subscribers would be interested
in, but not ezines that compete directly with you.

2. Write articles.

Your articles will give you a powerful way to get more new
subscribers through your resource box at the end of your
articles.

Submit your articles to article directories, article
announcement lists and also to ezine publishers looking for
articles to run in their ezines.

You could also create a list that announces when you’ve
written a new article or articles to get more publishers to
run your articles on a regular basis.

3. Create an ebook compilation of your articles and use it
as a bonus for subscribing to your publication.

Multiply the number of subscriptions you get from your ebook
by letting other ezine publishers use it as a bonus for
subscribing to their ezines.

You can also let people rebrand your ebook with a link to
their site or ezine to get more people to offer your ebook
as a bonus or on their sites.

4. Swap recommendations with other ezine publishers.

You could recommend another publisher’s ezine in your own
words to your subscriber base in exchange for her doing the
same for you.

You could also run a recommended ezines section in each
issue or recommend other publishers’ ezines on your “thank
you” page or in your welcome message in exchange for the
same to get long term promotion of your ezine.

5. Submit your ezine to ezine directories.

Your submissions will get your ezine noticed by people
interested in the topic your ezine covers.

Submitting your ezine to ezine directories can also help you
find more advertisers for your ezine and also other
publishers who would like to participate in joint ventures
with you.

6. Use ezine announcement lists to promote your ezine.

Many ezine announcement lists allow you to post ads for your
ezine on a weekly or monthly basis giving you an easy way to
successfully promote your ezine on an ongoing basis.

7. Make a sample issue available on your site or by
autoresponder.

Your sample issue will increase your subscriptions by
providing your visitors with a taste of the quality content
to be found in your ezine.

8. Use your signature file to promote your ezine.

Add a signature file that promotes your ezine to your
outgoing emails and also to your posts to discussion lists
or online forums.

9. Purchase advertising in other ezines.

Run your ad in ezines that you enjoy and reach your target
audience or search ezine directories for ezines that offer
good advertising rates.

Place your ad for at least three issues in a row as
repetition will help you get the most new subscribers from
your ads.

10. Place f~ree ads in other ezines.

Many ezine publishers allow their subscribers to place a
f~ree ad on a weekly, monthly or per issue basis as a
benefit to subscribing to their publications.

Track your f~ree ads so that you’ll know which ad copy
produces the greatest results and which ezines would be good
choices to pay for advertising in or swap ads with.

Article by writer, Ken Hill. Do You Publish an Ezine? Want
more subscribers? Put your ezine promotion on autopilot with
this must have ezine promotional tool. Over 1600+ places to
promote your ezine. Find out more now at:
http://netpromarketer.com/ea.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Direct Marketing Puts Information In The Buyer’s Hands
By Daegan Smith

Direct marketing is advertising from a manufacturer or front-end supplier directed to the ultimate consumer of a product or service. Another way of looking at direct marketing is selling to a consumer directly, whether is from a printed magazine campaign, TV or radio spot, or from a direct mail package. It means that salespeople are not physically moving your product; promotions are. Direct marketing is a simple approach but also can be useless if not done right.

In today’s worldwide marketplace, direct marketing takes on many different shapes and sizes. Some companies use direct marketing as just one of the ways to sell their product. Others use direct mail ads exclusively to attract their buyers. For most, direct marketing is integrated into the entire scope of a marketing campaign.

Smart direct marketing people are using more and more sophisticated ways to reach their target market. Databases are used to examine who would be their most likely customers. Their habits are tracked in a number of ways including questionnaires, polls, studies, and by placing “cookies” on their computers to track their movements on the Web.

The most common and most recognized form of direct marketing is a direct-mail campaign. A database is generated to form a list of potential customers and specific information and promotions are aimed especially for them. This gets the information directly into the hands of the people most likely to purchase the products being offered.

Direct marketing offers advantages over other forms of marketing such as network marketing and broadcast marketing. With direct marketing, you can target a very specific group. A company can make the campaign large or small, depending on their budget. Ads can be test marketed to see if the response rate is good before a larger campaign is started. Also, you can customize your direct marketing efforts to your former customers by compiling a database from past orders.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Richard Grady

I attended a presentation a couple of weeks ago given by Internet marketer, Michael Green. Michael runs the ‘How To Corp’ and has created numerous information products covering a wide range of topics.

There were a number of very interesting points that came out of the presentation but I wanted to ’steal’ one of them as the topic of this newsletter. I am sure Michael won’t mind

The point in question is a simple one but one which is regularly overlooked by people just starting out in Internet marketing and that is to get into affiliate marketing later rather than sooner.

Many people jump at the chance of selling someone else’s product as an affiliate as there are many obvious advantages:

No need to create a product of your own
No involvement in the delivery or support of the product
Minimal contact with customers
No need to have your own website

At first glance, affiliate marketing can appear to be the ideal business opportunity and in many ways, it is. However, if you are new to Internet marketing and have no website, no email list and no traffic, affiliate marketing will almost certainly be a lot of hard work.

The key to being a successful affiliate is to be able to drive reasonable levels of traffic to a sales page that is relevant to the traffic in question. If you don’t have any existing traffic or a mailing list, the chances are that you are going to have to pay for this traffic (at least initially). Whilst this can be very effective, it can also take time to get right and will be costing money in the process.

Therefore, to go back to the original statement, getting involved in affiliate marketing is definitely a good idea but if you start to work as an affiliate once you have built up your own website, traffic and mailing list, you will find that it is far more rewarding.

To illustrate this further, when I first started writing this newsletter, I would often throw in the odd affiliate link but they rarely resulted in any sales. The reason for this was simple – I hardly had any subscribers on the mailing list! Over the years, as my list has grown and as subscribers have ‘got to know me’ and I have gained more trust, my affiliate sales have increased.

Looking at it from another angle, I find that my most successful affiliates are those that have an established website or mailing list. Of course, this makes perfect sense since there is already existing traffic to sell to and often no effort is required other than adding a hyperlink to a web page or giving a product a mention in mailshot.

Once you have an existing website and customers/subscribers, you will also start to build credibility in your chosen field/industry. This means that your customers are more likely to trust your recommendations and actually purchase something if you promote it as being a great product.

In the early days of my Internet marketing career, I would regularly try and promote products that were about making money online. I wasn’t very successful with these promotions and one of the main reasons was that I wasn’t personally making much money online. Once I started to become more successful and my customers/subscribers were able to see that I did actually know what I was talking about, they were far more willing to purchase these types of products from me or on my recommendation.

Therefore, in summary, get your own website/product/newsletter/whatever up and running first and then concentrate on adding additional value to your product range by promoting relevant affiliate products.

If you choose to go down the road of only selling products as an affiliate, remember that this is perfectly possible to do but it will take time, hard work and a fair bit of patience.

Of course, the other benefit in selling your own product is that you don’t have to share the sales proceeds

Copyright 2005 Richard Grady

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Lois S.

Affiliate marketing is a very hot topic on the web right now. Not surprising when you consider the fact that a vast majority of successful online entrepreneurs make their money from affiliate schemes and programs. Since the early days when Amazon was being set up and founder, Jeff Bezos was establishing affiliates as key marketing tools for any online enterprise, affiliates and affiliate marketing has come of age.

The amounts of income being made have clearly transformed affiliate marketing into a very serious business. There are more and more affiliates comfortably raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.

The first important affiliate marketing secret to bear in mind is the reason why affiliate marketing remains the most effective way of marketing any online enterprise. It is all about the power of the referral. It is rather awkward when a website is trying to promote itself directly to prospects. Actually very different from the situation where somebody else refers the business to others, including people they do not know personally.

This works out superbly for several reasons. Firstly the affiliate as a consumer themselves is able to quickly identify the strong attractive points of the business that will best attract others like them.

The other little known affiliate marketing secret is that most of the top-earning affiliates have their own websites and blogs. Having their own websites gives these affiliates a tremendous edge over others. The sites are usually very closely related to the affiliate program that they are promoting. By having their own site, they are able to harvest the email addresses of the traffic to their sites.

Usually, most people you send to your affiliate site will not end up purchasing anything. However when you have their email addresses in your opt-in email list, you can continuously market to them and the affiliate will automatically end up with a much higher conversion rate from the traffic they generate as opposed to an affiliate without a website who just sends traffic to their affiliate website.

This is the affiliate marketing secret that makes a difference between affiliates struggling to pull in a good income and those comfortably making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Paul Crabtree

Adestra provide email marketing services to a host of UK marketers operating within travel, event organising, publishing, charity, entertainment and other industries.

We’ve spent time analysing client campaigns, and have created a handy checklist for getting better quality email contact records by using optimised data capture vehicles

1. Explain why you want their contact details

Tell sign-up why you want other data fields. Telling them they will receive information by email will encourage them to ensure their email address is accurate

2. Stay compliant with latest email marketing legislation

Keep up to date with the latest legislation and standards to ensure your data capture vehicles continue to be compliant

3. Check quality of email addresses etc on the form

The more fields collected, the more validation required to avoid bad input. The more validation leads to less completed forms and more abandonment. Collect only what you need. Asking for information that you have no use for, will increase form abandonment. Test your data set to see where the optimum is.

4. Future proof

Ensure you state how you will use data into the future. Future-proofing email addresses will allow you to rent/ sell lists whilst staying compliant with email legislation

5. Resource your email contact data cleaning operation

You need someone who actions requests to unsubscribe / ‘Mr Angry’s to ensure fast processing and keep your contacts happy.

More information on Adestra’s email marketing services

Adestra provide welcome tactical advice and input on our clients email marketing program. For more information about how we can work together with you to improve your email marketing, please contact us to discuss your email marketing. Adestra’s site is at http://www.adestra.co.uk/email_marketing and our best practice centre for email marketers is at http://www.adestra.co.uk/best_practice_email_marketing

About the author

Paul Crabtree is presently Marketing Director of Adestra (http://www.adestra.co.uk), a UK based digital marketing agency that specialise in inbound and outbound email, fax and SMS broadcast solutions. Adestra’s client portfolio includes many UK based publishers including Janes Information Group, Informa, Lexis Nexis, OUP, Blackwells and others.

Previous to this role, Paul was responsible for heading-up online marketing for Informa Telecoms’ publishing division working on a portfolio of reports, newsletters, ad-led vehicles and the industry portal telecoms.com.

Paul will draw on his 5 years of focused experience in working in online marketing for publishers

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Jim Edwards

If you are looking for an immediate increase in your website traffic, and you don’t want to shell out a lot of money for pay-per-click search engines, I’ll let you in on a secret that has helped me make many sales and build large lists very quickly with zero cash up-front: it’s called “OPT” (Other People’s Traffic).

Other website operators have the targeted website visitors you need right now – you just have to convince them to funnel some of it your way. Your mission is to find people who can refer you their traffic either for a percentage of the sale, a flat fee, a trade for services, or on a per-click basis.

NOTE: I prefer to pay people a big percentage of the sale – as much as 50% – because it has the lowest risk for me as the merchant. I only pay when a sale is made and, therefore, I make it well worth someone’s while to work with me. That’s the whole idea behind a successful affiliate program.

The quickest way to find people who can refer you traffic is to take inventory of whom you know. Who operates a site drawing the type of visitors you need?

For example, if you have a website that sells fishing lures, then you want to find ezines, websites, and discussion groups dealing with fishing rods, tackle boxes, fish hooks, fishing trips, fishing supplies, etc.

Get the picture?

Once you have exhausted the list of people you know, go to the search engines and do a search for the keywords that would bring targeted traffic to your site. Make a list of the websites that rank well in those searches and approach those individuals with related, but non-competing sites about a traffic deal.

To continue the above example, that means go to the search engines and do searches for “fishing rods”, “fishing trips” and related keywords to your site to find others who already have the traffic you need, but who don’t directly compete with you.

Try to work all your agreements on a traffic trade or per-sale basis first so you won’t have to pay any cash out of pocket until after a sale is made.

If you don’t have any traffic to trade, or they don’t want to get paid by the sale only, then you should negotiate a per-click or per-signup deal.

Paying by the click or by the signup means you only pay when a visitor comes to your site or signs up to receive your newsletter or other information. With this structure you only pay for performance and don’t waste any money on advertising that doesn’t directly result in bringing visitors to your site.

You have 3 main choices for funneling another site’s traffic to yours: endorsed mailings, pop-up windows, and link trades.

1. Endorsed Mailings

Endorsed mailings are by far the best way to funnel traffic from another site. A well-written endorsement letter by a website operator who already has a relationship with people who can buy from you is often worth its weight in gold. An effective endorsed mailing can result in traffic, sales, and money in your pocket within just a few hours of sending it.

2. Pop-Up Windows

Focused “pop-up” windows represent the next fastest way to funnel traffic to your site. When used incorrectly, pop-up windows create an annoying distraction for web surfers. Make sure your pop-up windows are relevant to exactly what visitors came to your site for in the first place!

My experiments have shown that a “pop-under” works best. This is where your website pops behind the other person’s page. Go to http://www.7dayebook.com for an example. You’ll see my other ebook, “eBook Secrets Exposed,” pop *under* the 7 Day eBook site.

When the visitor is finished viewing the main page and closes it… your page is right there!

TIP: For maximum sales, make sure that your page is closely related to the page that is referring traffic to you.

3. Link Trades

The next way to funnel traffic from other sites is using “Reciprocal Links” – which is a fancy way of saying trading links with someone. Make sure you negotiate a high profile spot for your link on the other person’s site.

Creativity is key when negotiating with other websites to steer some or all of their traffic your way. Show them how sending you traffic will make them money through affiliate commissions, how their readers will appreciate being introduced to new and valuable products (yours), or how you can open a new stream of income for them by paying them a few cents for every unique visitor they refer to you.

They win by making extra money and making their customers happy. You win by attracting traffic to your site that is focused and highly targeted to your offers.

Creating win-win scenarios like these will cause people to jump at the chance to work with you and send you all the “OPT” you can handle.

About the Author:

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links…

Simple “Traffic Machine” brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months… without spending a dime on advertising! ==> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/