6.6.3 Email Content – Text vs. HTML

This is probably every Email marketer’s dilemma. More so, due to the fact that there is no clear majority of people preferring one format over the other. Some people will always prefer text to graphics, and some email readers only support basic text. A

prominent Internet Marketing website recently carried out a survey asking not only which format was preferred but why one format was preferred over another. Over 600 people - mostly marketers and small business operators - responded.

55% favored HTML and 45% preferred Text. Given that well over 90% of email readers can view HTML, it is surprising that almost half the people would prefer to receive Text. To investigate this point further, the survey gave those who chose Text a list of possible reasons to explain why. On average, people listed about two and a half reasons each. They said:

• Can't read HTML 6%
• Just want the meat without the distractions 32%
• Like to read offline 15%
• Ads are more intrusive in HTML 22%
• Slow to download 14%
• Other 11%

The most popular reason for choosing Text over HTML was an interesting one. People were clearly expressing a desire for email layouts that focused on the message, and they often saw HTML emails as containing elements that distract from the content - the content being the reason they signed up for the email in the first place.

11% of the people who selected “Other” as their reason gave their own reasons as:

• Text takes up less storage space 28%
• Security - fear of viruses 22%
• Easier/faster to read/scan 13%
• Text is easier to read on a PDA 9%
• Text is more reliable, formatting/forwarding etc. 7%
• Easier to save/file/copy text 6%
• Like to read email in preview pane 4%
• Text is more personal 4%
• Fear of tracking/being spied on with HTML 4%
• Text is more easily searched off line 1%

The fact still remains that readers are almost equally divided on their preference. The best way to get around this is to give your subscribers an option of receiving messages in Text or HTML.

6.6.2 Growing your Email lists

A key concern of most marketers is how to build their Email lists without compromising on the subscribers that already exist. After all, Email marketing is about building relationships with your best customers without neglecting others. The process of growing email lists can very easily turn into spam. This is something all marketers need to steer clear of. Most companies are always looking for ways to get their email marketing address lists together. Large companies are trying to get email addresses for their existing customers and prospects, while small or startup companies are just trying to create any list at all.

With careful and meticulous planning, you can build strong relationships with new subscribers. Here’s how:

Collect only relevant information

While requesting a visitor to sign up, collect information that is relevant to your business. A recent study lamented that most of the corporate probing was unnecessary, given that most companies never act on the information they extract from their customers. It is crucial that you know exactly what you intend to do with the information you’re going to collect. Moreover, you should also be able to prove to your visitors that information you would be collecting from them is actually vital for your business.

Do not make your customers repeat information

Most customers don’t mind telling their banks the ages of their children if they think the bank will use the information to help them sort through the myriad college savings plans or make them aware of estate planning issues. But nothing irritates customers more than having to repeat the same information to each channel as if it’s the first time they've ever heard the information. This is especially true in the case of Email lists on web sites.

Focus your list

We have discussed the importance of focusing or targeting customers earlier as well. Current customers are the most important e-mail addresses to collect, much more so than prospects. They’ll be more receptive to your communications and likely to respond, since they’re familiar with your company and its products. Do not run campaigns that attract a high number of visitors that have no interest in your products or services.

Scrutinize and leverage all available data

Scrutinizing all data that is collected is vital. This is particularly true for bigger companies. Let the rest of the company know what you’re doing—they may know of a quick way they can help you. There have been many cases when employees come and go, unknown projects sprout up and wither before anyone discovers them and multiple, redundant databases flourish.

Special Offers and Discounts

Special offers like coupons and discounts are classic direct marketing techniques that translate extremely well to email. In order for an offer to be effective, it must provide something of real value to the recipient. Minimal discounts are not enough to get the readers’ attention; you have to offer something of substance. Don’t discount lower than your profit on the transaction, however. Having a time limit on these types of offers is extremely important, in order for the call to action to work.

Apart from using the Internet as a medium, there are also some ways you can use your marketing efforts in the real-world to help build your Email lists.

Networking Meetings

From your local chamber of commerce, to specialized industry groups, the meetings of many organizations are great opportunities to make contact with new people. You are exchanging business cards with interested prospects or possible referral sources, so make sure that you send appropriate email communications to these people. Start with a personal email recapping your conversation with them, and letting them know that you will be adding them to your monthly email list. Don't just start sending a barrage of email to every person that you come in contact with, however. Make sure that the person indicated some interest in what you have to offer first, or your contact will become quickly unwanted.

Trade Shows

Whether you have a booth, are one of the presenters, or are simply attending a trade show, you have an excellent potential opportunity similar to networking events, but at a much greater scale. Organizing the follow-ups to people you actually spoke to yourself, and then adding the person to your personal list is a given.

The general information requests gathered by associates at your booth can be handled in a similar way. Lastly, you may have organized a giveaway or contest to gather more leads at the show. These people are frequently less interested in what you have to say, and more interested in whatever they might be getting or winning. As a result, it may require secondary contact to obtain the permission to add them to your regular communications. In general, hitting contest winners with a "hard sell" is not usually effective. Seminars

Organizing informational seminars is a great way to build a healthy relationship with prospects and potential referrers. One effective technique is to have advance registration, and to ask permission to send regular emails at that time. This way, even if the person is not able to attend the seminar, you still have an opportunity to stay in touch with them. After all, they were interested enough to register for the seminar.

Events

Concerts, parties, art openings, or any other occasion that gathers people together can provides an opportunity to build your email address lists. Having a registration or check in location, or associates with clipboards working the room are just two ways to make contact. In the case of events, it is a good idea to offer some kind of incentive to boost signups. However, make sure that the person can only receive the incentive via email. This way, you will improve the quality and accuracy of the lists you are collecting. Post Cards/Direct Mail

When a company has an existing database of postal addresses, direct mail may be the best way to get the email addresses for your existing customers and prospects. Again, offering an incentive always helps stimulate a greater response, and is particularly effective when there is a pre-existing relationship. This helps increase the typical response rate of converting postal address recipients to email recipients. Publish a specific, but simple, web site address on your mailing to direct people to a landing page with the list signup on your site.

6.6.1 Writing Headlines That Grab Your Customers and Sell Your Goods!

Headlines are absolutely vital for all your marketing efforts. Whether you plan to use them on your website, your emails, your newsletters or anywhere else, they’re the hook that grabs your readers, reels them in and turns them into customers. There are dozens of different kinds of headlines that you can use and some of them are better than others. These are the ones that I use, and that I’ve found the most effective.

The No Nonsense Headline

The first type of headline you can use is the simplest. No frills, no tricks, no hooks, just a straightforward description of the contents of your message. You could produce something like:

Tips To Save Money On Your Weekly Shopping
The Best Way To Choose Your Next Car
Real Estate Agents That Shift Property Fast!

Notice that you can still use explanations and hard-hitting adjectives to get your point across, but these headlines do little more than tell the reader what to expect.

The advantages of these headlines is that they’re easy to write and easy to read. You don’t have to try to come up with some hard-hitting sales message and customers aren’t put off by a document that looks a piece of promotional material. On the other hand, they’re a bit weak and that makes them hard to turn into cash.

When to use it

You can use No Nonsense Headlines when you don’t need to work hard to make the sale. If you’re sending information that you know your customer will read, either because it’s free or because it makes no obligation on them, these are the kind of headlines to use.

The Question Headline

Question headlines work by asking customers a question that plays on their worries and promises a solution further on. These are great devices when you really want to grab a customer and ram your message home.

Want To Save Thousands On Your Home Insurance Bills? Learn How To Cut Your Costs In Half!
Where Do You Look For Love? Discover The Best Places To Meet Your Match!
Suffering From Termites? Drive Them Out With The Extermite-Ator!

To write these headlines, think first of what problem your product is actually going to solve. (If it’s not going to solve a problem, then you’re going to have a problem selling it!) In the first half of the headline, you ask your customers if they’re suffering from the problem. Just by asking, you’re suggesting that they do. In the second half of the headline, you tell them that you have the solution. Dead easy and dead effective.

This is a really simple formula to follow: all you have to do is state the question and promise the answer. And it sells too; you’ve put the problem in the reader’s mind, now you’re offering the solution.

Of course, these kinds of headlines depend on the reader empathizing with the problem. If they don’t, or if they decide that the headlines looks too long to read, they’re not likely to buy.

When to use it

Question Headlines are most effective when your product is going to clearly solve someone’s problem—and when you know your customers are going to empathize with that problem. If they don’t say yes to the question, they’re going to say no to the sale.

The How Headline

This is pretty similar to the Question Headline—but only offers the solution. It makes for a shorter read than question headlines so you get your point across faster, but you lose the empathy.

How To Fix Up Your Home Without Breaking The Bank!
How I Made $3,000,000 With One Phone Call!
How I Lost 33 Pounds On A High Fiber Diet And A Revolutionary Light Exercise Plan!

These kinds of headlines cut straight to the problem-solving aspect of your product. They’re short and to the point and can be easily absorbed with just a glance.

When to use it

How Headlines are great when the rest of the document is going to reveal information. That information might just be details about your product, but the focus should always be on telling customers how they can solve a problem. These work best when you’re selling information products like books or newsletters.

The Numbered Headline

There’s a good reason that magazines like Cosmopolitan use headlines like “6 Ways To Drive Your Man Wild!” They work. Most people are put off by the sight of a giant slab of text. They want their information in bite-sized chunks. When you put a number in your headline, you let your reader know that the information you’re offering them is going to be easy to read:

7 Ways To Make Your Computer Run Faster
15 Top Tips To Turn Your Website Into A Money spinner
23 Sales Tools That Guarantee A Sealed Deal

The advantage of these headlines is that they promise easy reading, increasing the chances that your text will actually be read. It’s also easy to slip a call-to-action sales message into these kind of documents: one of the tools, deals, or ways etc. will be “buy my product”!

On the other hand, easy reading isn’t the same as interesting reading. The headline still has to grab your readers to make them want to read it.

When to use it

Numbered Headlines are most effective when you’re confident your readers will find your message interesting and you don’t have to fight to make them read on. They’re best used when you’re competing against other articles or sales letters. I use them a lot in newsletters, especially when I know it’s going to published in a joint venture partner’s newsletter.

The Testimonial Headline

These are some of the toughest headlines to write. You take a chunk of text from a letter written by a satisfied customer and use that as the headline for a sales letter:

“Last Year, I Was Working 12 Hours A Day And Making Just $36,000. Last Month, I Made $32,000 And Worked Three Days A Work—And It’s All Down To Your Amazing Methods!”

“I’d Tried Every Weight Loss Program Ever. I’d Tried Dieting, Exercise, High-Fiber, Low Fat, High-Carbs... You Name It, I’d Done It And Nothing Worked. Then I Tried The Lose Fat Fast Program. I Lost 33 Pounds In The First Two Months And I’ve Never Felt Better!”

“Within A Week Of Sending Out My Resume, I’d Got Three Interviews And A Fantastic Job Offer. I Couldn’t Have Done It Without You!”

These headlines puts your reliability right at the top, increasing the customers’ confidence to buy. They explain in detail precisely what you’re offering and what you can do for the reader. They also create massively long headlines that are difficult to absorb at a glance and can put a reader off.

When to use it

Testimonial headlines are best used in industries where reliability is a bit of a problem. If you’re selling weight loss products for example, or any other life-changing service, then a headline like this goes some way towards proving to the buyer that you’re on the level.

Those are just five kinds of headlines that I use in my businesses every day. There are dozens more, but these are the ones that I’ve found the most effective. There’s certainly enough here for you to get started. Play around with them, figure out which ones would work best for your business and try them out.

But even the best headline will only grab a reader’s eye and get him reading. They won’t close the sale. After the headline you’ll have to describe all the wonderful benefits of your product—you’ve got to get the reader to actually take the action that will seal the deal. That’s the call to action.

6.6 Email Marketing Tactics

All right, so you’ve got the addresses. Now what are you going to do with them? Obviously, what you’re going to do is send your users marketing material in the mail so that they’ll know all about the great stuff you’ve got on offer.

There are two ways you can do that: you can send them a newsletter every couple of weeks or so; or you can send them a sales letter. Newsletters are hugely important. In the next chapter I talk about newsletters in detail.

In the rest of this chapter, I’m going to explain how to write simple sales material that gets results. I’m going to do that by concentrating on the two most important parts of any sales material: the headline and the call to action. Get those two right, and any piece of marketing material you produce - online or off - will get the results you want.

6.5 Creating Pop Ups (How to Create Pop Ups)

Pop ups are mini windows that open when a user takes a particular action. That action could be anything from reaching the site, clicking onto a particular page, or even leaving the site.

Many businesses use pop ups in collaboration with joint venture partners as a way of sharing traffic, but they’re also great ways to trap users’ email addresses so that you can keep them informed and send them marketing material. It’s very effective.

So how do you add pop ups to your site?

One of the best things about pop ups is that they’re dead easy to produce. It takes just a few lines of script inserted into the <HEAD> part of your website. You don’t need to hire a programmer to do it for you. I’ll give you the script right here. All you have to do is paste it into place and customize it to meet your needs:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
function popup(mylink, windowname)
{
if (! window.focus)return true;
var href;
if (typeof(mylink) == 'string')
href=mylink;
else
href=mylink.href;
window.open(href, windowname, 'width=400,height=200,scrollbars=yes');
return false;
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>
Don’t worry about how the code actually works; the important thing is that it does. Simply swap the parts in bold for the name of your link and the name of the pop up.
Of course, you’ll still need the trigger that gets the pop up popping:
<A HREF="popupbasic.html" onClick="return popup(this, ‘notes’)">The link</A>
Use that as the link, with the right URL and the word ‘notes’ replaced by the name of your page, and you’re in business.
Finally, when you build the pop up page itself, make sure you include the following line of code:
<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
window.focus();
//-->
</SCRIPT>

This just makes sure that your pop up stays in front of the main window instead of disappearing behind the browser and getting lost. Very important, otherwise your users won’t see it to sign up.

So pop ups are dead easy to make. Anyone can do it. But there’s no point in having a working pop up if the pop up itself doesn’t have persuasive enough text to close the deal. There are a number of sales tactics that you can use on your pop up to make sure the user actually fills in the form and sends you his details:

1. Give them a reason to play

If you really want to make sure your users hand over their email addresses, offer them something in return. Free reports are good, e-books are fine too. In fact, anything that’s free and relevant is likely to get results. You don’t have to go overboard here; if you can find a goody that won’t cost you anything, fantastic. If you’re going to pay, make sure it pays overall.

2. Make the Title tell

The title tag of your pop up isn’t going to push it up the search engine listings, but it’s still important. If you leave it out, or worse, write something daft, like “mypopup”, no one’s going to take you seriously. Be professional and you’ll achieve professional results. Use a real title.

3. Use a hard-hitting headline

I talk about headlines in more detail later in this chapter. I can’t stress how important these are. You’ve got about two seconds to grab a reader’s attention and make them read. That’s the job of your headline. It’s got to focus on the benefits the user can expect by signing up:

“Increase Your Sales By 127%!”

“Learn How To Speak Swahili In Three Weeks Or Less!”

“FREE Marketing Newsletter! Sign up here!”

Use a duff headline and you’ll get a duff bottom line.

4. Keep it slim

If your users have to wait more than a few seconds for the pop up to download, the chances are they’ll close the window before it’s finished. Use minimal graphics and make sure everything’s optimized before you put it on the server.

5. Make it sexy!

Slim doesn’t mean the same as dull. You can still use cool colors and attractive fonts, but make sure the pop up looks professional. The copy has to be easy to read, and the whole page has to be good on the eye. Balance and simplicity are key when it comes to pop up design.

6. Offer a close button

You might think it’s a good idea to keep the pop up open until the user signs up. But if they’re not going to register to get the benefits you’re offering, are they likely to opt in just to get rid of the pop up box? And if they do, are they likely to buy from you? Keep your users happy; let them close the box easily if they want it out of the way. Maybe they’ll go ahead and buy something instead.

6.4 Renting or Buying Lists

Many marketers peg acquisition-based e-mail response rates at historically low levels, primarily due to the high volume of messages in everyone's inboxes these days. Some believe that allocating any percentage of a marketing budget to acquisition-based e-mail is waste. However, this is not true. Although the true response rates for acquisition are

typically lower than those for retention-based e-mail, renting lists to win over prospects and grow a customer base can work wonders, if you do your homework.

Here are some guidelines that can help in buying or renting lists for achieving high ROI.

• With email, just like direct mail, how precisely the list is targeted to the marketer’s offer is critical to the success of the email campaign. The marketer will need to test a variety of email lists in order to find the most responsive names for their offer. Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value are important within email lists. Thus, where applicable, focus on lists of recent online buyers or registered users.

• More importantly, when researching email lists, focus on the origin of the list to ensure compatibility with your offer. Make sure you obtain names from branded, well-recognized sites or sources. Since an outbound email announces to the recipient, in the form of a header, exactly where they gave permission, a well recognized source would lend more credibility to the message.

• A frequency cap can ensure lists aren't over mailed. If a list manager can't provide the details on mailing frequency, look elsewhere. That organization probably lacks the control, technical expertise, and reporting basics. Also ask about recency selects. Newer names offer access to new subscribers.

• Frequent uploads of new names and instant suppression of unsubscribes are a must. Your brand will be associated with spam by those who unsubscribed but still receive mailings before their request is processed. Lists that are housed and resold by multiple managers are probably mailed more frequently. This negatively impacts performance, brand equity, and deliverability.

• As filtering becomes increasingly dominant, you must make sure list managers are up to speed on delivery techniques and processes. ISP relations and white listing are critical. Check all available blacklists for the list manager's IP addresses. List managers should be able to monitor delivery of their campaigns and ensure messages are delivered to the inbox, not a bulk mail folder.

• Finally, the best-performing lists provide the most ability to slice and dice the file to find the right people for your offer. Leveraging selects based on demographics, psychographics, and even specific stages of the buying cycle will almost always outperform untargeted mailings.

6.3 Intelligent targeting through tailor made research

As with any other marketing campaign, careful planning and proven techniques are the best way to deploy the most effective campaigns and to realize the highest response rates. The key: putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. Targeting your emails is crucial for any Email marketing campaign. No product or service can be all things to all people. Acknowledging this reality, targeting is simply focusing your marketing onto a specific niche. The two factors that you alter to target your email campaigns are targeting the message, and targeting the list.

Targeting your message means tailoring your message to the expected audience. For example, you may have two pitches for your product: one that concentrates on the radical new features of the product, and another that details the tremendous cost savings from using it. You can also target the creative used for the email campaign. You might have two versions, one that uses a clean list of bullet points, and another that features highly stylized text that flies across the screen.

You also need to target (i.e. subdivide) your email lists. Targeted messages will be more effective when sent to an appropriate group of recipients. Continuing the example above, you would send the product feature pitch and technical information to technical people, and send the cost savings information to finance people.

The primary rule of effective targeting is deceptively simple: figure out what your target groups wants, and then offer it to them. How do you go about doing that? Try asking some of your existing customers. Another way to know what actually works is to send a

test campaign to a sample of your targeted group. Once you have the attention of the recipient, for an all too brief moment, the biggest factor in obtaining a positive response is usually how valuable the offer is perceived to be. Providing something of actual value that really speaks to the target is a requirement.

Tell a story to each targeted group over a series of messages. This will help lead to increasing the permission level with each recipient. As you learn more about each other you will be able to utilize more sophisticated targeting. Once you begin to establish a dialog with your target, eventually a true one to one marketing relationship can develop.

Unless you have an unlimited budget for your marketing efforts, you need to make sure that every dollar invested counts. You need to target your email campaigns, or else at best much of your efforts are being wasted. Be careful to target accurately, or your campaign might miss the target or even work against you. Deliver the correct message to the correct group of recipients, and the results from your campaigns will "hit the bull's-eye" and deliver a great boost to your profits.

6.2 Double Opt-in

Marketing by e-mail can attract new customers, keep existing ones, upsell, cross-sell, and cut costs. E-merchant Wine.com, for example, found e-mail campaigns drove twice as many "best prospects" to their site compared to banner ads or other Internet marketing programs.

If executed improperly though, e-mail campaigns can backfire with disastrous business consequences. How to minimize the risk and maximize the return? Part of the answer is a common sense approach called "permission" or "opt-in" marketing, in which customers or prospects volunteer to receive e-mail.

The odds of users joining a list can be improved by providing three opt-in opportunities, all with low entry barriers. First, there should be minimal sign-up work. Many sites require only an e-mail address; all other personal information is optional. Second, there should be several sign-up opportunities on a site, including on the inquiry, order, and feedback forms. These forms may use a checkbox asking prospects if they would like to receive occasional special offers/newsletters by e-mail. If so, it must be placed conspicuously on the form. Third, a privacy policy that addresses what will be done with user information should be posted in an obvious place.

Continuing on the lines of “opt-in” marketing, one of the most successful methods is the double opt-in technique. In double opt-in a user elects to receive e-mail newsletters or standalone commercial messages. A confirmation e-mail is sent to that user, who is not required to take further action to be included on the list. The confirmation e-mail includes an opportunity to unsubscribe or opt out.

Although, the double opt-in techniques runs the risk of losing subscribers during the confirmation process, it gives the subscribers more control and thus, has proven to be more successful. That said, here are some measures e-mailers who practice, or are considering, double opt-in can take to reduce confirmation drop-offs.

• When a user enters his address, mention an e-mail will be sent to him and include its estimated arrival time. Indicate the user is required to respond to that message to receive subsequent mailings. With transactional customers, consider placing this information on the page with order confirmation.

• Ideally, a confirmation message is sent immediately. It should be sent while the subscription is fresh in subscribers' minds and they're still engaged in an online session. If you notify them it will be within a day or two, make sure you follow through on that promise. If your systems are slower, then requirements related to message content are even more relevant.

• If you need a confirmation, that's the only thing you should ask for. Explain to users they will not be added to the list until they take the necessary action. Most desirable is a one-click confirmation link embedded in the message. Giving users a reply option with subject line intact is another good approach. Requiring them to write something in the subject line or body of the message or asking them to forward the e-mail on to another address is not as effective. Ensure the brand is clear, the list subscription is identified, and contact information is included. It's also a good idea to link to your privacy or e-mail policy.

6.1 Collecting Opt-In Email Addresses

Email is still the most popular and most used application on the Internet. It’s also an efficient means of distributing your message to large numbers of people who have requested that information. As a form of marketing, it generates high response rates - and gives you measurable results with instant feedback.

But because email marketing been so abused, it’s just not accepted any more to send emails to people who haven’t chosen to receive them. Bust that rule, and there’s a good chance you’ll be out of business. That gives you the problem of building up a list of willing subscribers.

When you’re first starting out, there’s often a temptation to simply purchase an opt-in email list. Lots of people sell them and you can easily pick up a million or so addresses for just a few bucks. But while that may appear to be a fast, easy way to build up customers, the names on the list may not be up to date, or even opt-in contacts at all. You could well find yourself inadvertently spamming.

Similarly, there are also programs that surf the Net, recording every email address they find. These will let you quickly build up a huge list of e-mail addresses - none of whose owners will thank you when you stuff their inboxes with marketing material. Forget about them; they’re not worth the effort. It’s much safer, and much more effective, to take the time to build your own list.

6. Exploding Your Profits through Email Marketing

Off the Web, mail marketing is hated by customers. It’s unwanted, uninvited and stuffs mail boxes. But it’s pretty clear that it’s also incredibly popular with advertisers. Why? Because while most potential customers toss away their junk letters with barely a glance, enough take action to make it all worthwhile. They do buy - and in high enough numbers to more than cover the cost of those who don’t.

Email marketing is pretty similar, but with one important difference: on the Web, you can only send marketing emails to people who have already chosen to receive them. A bit tricky. On the other hand, because those people have already chosen to receive your emails, you can be confident that they’re going to buy.

In this chapter, we will read how to produce marketing material that gets results!

5.8 Affiliate management in-built with your payment gateway - ClickBank

ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com) has a built-in affiliate program. It offers all features of a good affiliate program. There is no need to install any expensive scripts on

your website. You can start signing up affiliates right away as soon as you open your account.

The beauty of ClickBank is that it integrates the affiliate management program with an in-built payment gateway. ClickBank is one of the most popular and easiest services to use for payment processing online. Sign-up is quick and you get approved and running in one day.

The ClickBank Control Panel is easy to use. You can get familiar with the whole system in no time. It costs $49 to open a ClickBank account. This is pretty cheap when compared with other payment processing systems. Once you open an account, all your transaction money gets deposited into your account. You are paid the full balance every two weeks.

I’m a member of probably about dozen different affiliate programs, and have literally hundreds of webmasters signed up in the programs I run myself. If you’re serious about earning serious money on the Web, then you’re going to be spending a lot of time checking out affiliate programs and tracking your responses. It’s one of the easiest and most reliable ways to make cash with a website.

So far, we’ve talked about the kind of marketing plans that work through your website: banners, links, affiliate programs etc. But the website isn’t the only way to get the traffic you need. In the next chapter, we’re going to begin talking about how you can use e-mail to drum up business. 5NS3842W5EC7

5.7 LinkShare - Affiliate program that can bring you great results

LinkShare hosts a password-protected website that offers affiliates a choice of hundreds of merchant programs. On the site, affiliates can join new programs, get links to put on their sites, and then see reports about how their links are performing and how much they have earned.

When a visitor from an affiliate's site clicks on a link and goes to a merchant's site, LinkShare keeps track of all of the transactions that the visitor makes. If that visitor buys something on the merchant's site, you get a commission. In some cases, affiliates are compensated even if the visitor doesn't buy anything, just for having driven traffic to the merchant's site.

LinkShare also provides affiliates with customer service, notifies affiliates about new programs and new opportunities, and offers resources for affiliates to learn about how to get the most out of their programs.

5.6.2 A few avoidable errors

• Many affiliate marketers make a huge mistake of posting their ads on forums. Forums can be used to promote your affiliate programs and your website but in a proper manner. Posting banners is very similar to spamming and may easily upset forum administrators.

• Always do your research before promoting your affiliate program to a potential customer. Do not offer affiliate programs to visitors who are not at all interested in the products associated with the program. This is a futile endeavor.

• If you promote affiliate programs offered by other merchants, ensure that you develop your own advertising copy. Many websites commit a common mistake of using the same advertising copy as used by the merchant themselves.

• Avoid Copyright infringement in all cases. Always use original content or ask permission to use graphic images or text found on other websites.

• Do not submit your programs to free websites. These may be free but your programs would hardly ever be noticed, especially by Search Engines. Moreover, your own ranking would get lowered if you submit your affiliate programs to such websites.

• Avoid using caps on your web page or email ad. Using caps is symbolic to shouting, which never goes well with potential customers. A few words may be written in capital text to give them additional emphasis. However, such practice should be limited.

• Always respond to all queries sent by visitors as soon as possible. A slight delay in your response could easily result in loss of a potential client.

• Do not use pop-up ads along with your webpage. Most surfers are likely to close their browser if they come across pop-ups.

• Do not host your website on a free server or use free email accounts. This gives a negative impression to visitors. Using free hosts and email accounts looks cheesy and loses sales.

• Many websites do not have an opt-in list. Create an opt-in and opt-out list for your visitors. Without these, there is no way of tracking potential customers. Visitors should be allowed to opt-in at any time as well as opt-out at any time.

• Most sites have a poor tracking mechanism. It is essential that you track all business activities. Accurate record keeping is crucial. There are many software tools, discussed earlier in this chapter, than can automate your record keeping process with minimal error.

• A 'mall' site is best used as a central hub to send visitors to your other domains. As a main or only site, unfocused mall sites don't get traffic from the engines, and they don't convert well to sales. Highly focused theme sites attract traffic and sales.

• Offline advertising may not be effective. A lot of money and effort should not be wasted on offline advertising. Most people rarely check websites that are advertised in local magazines or newspapers.

• Avoid focus on animated banner ads. These simply use up bandwidth, thus making web pages load slower.

• While advertising do not degrade other competitors. It is recommended that you highlight your products’ uniqueness and superiority but never mortify other products.

• Banners or text links that expire are guaranteed to eventually send your visitor to a broken link or show a broken graphic on your page. Time sensitive advertising is best used only in email advertising campaigns.

• Never put affiliate links on your homepage. This is similar to asking your visitors to leave immediately. Give them a chance to browse, sign up for your newsletter and decide that they'd like to come back to your place before introducing them to your affiliates.

• Technology changes with amazing speed. To keep up with this rapidly evolving industry, you must invest time and money in research. The investment is a tax write-off, and will pay you back many times over in additional revenue.

• Finally, persist with your plan. It might take you time to get established even if you have a solid marketing plan. Persistence is the single most important factor in determining success online or off.

5.6.1 Classifying Affiliates for better management

The hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily

determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them. The plan given below helps in categorizing affiliates in order to manage your affiliate program better.

The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliates. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic. Here are some examples:

• Level of Sales - You may find that your affiliates are so completely different that it's hard to find something to classify them by. Try classifying them by the level of sales they've reached with you. You'll most likely find that you have a few forerunners that lead the pack with a number of sales, quite a few affiliates that have sporadically made a sale or two and some that have yet to make a sale. This will help you classify them based on sales.

• Products - If you sell a wide variety of products for specific interests/needs you may be able to classify your affiliates by product. For instance, a financial site could classify types like Personal Finance, Small Business Finance, and Corporate Finance.

• Industry - If you market commodities like office supplies, health and beauty products, house-wares and so on, you may find that your affiliates come from a wide variety of industries. You can most likely classify your affiliates according to their industry.

The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.

Here are some basic things to look for:

• Linking Methods - Different types of affiliates will need different linking methods. Let's use the example above where we had different groups based on sales. Your low sales group may be satisfied with a banner or two to place on their site. Your medium sales type may be interested in an article or two for added content on their site. Your high sales group will probably pass up banners for articles, guestbooks, email ads and signature files.

• Capturing visitors is what you want. In order to do so -- you have to know what they want. Visit your affiliates' sites to see what visitors are looking at and looking for. Ask yourself, "How does my product relate to what I am seeing?"

• Different types of affiliates may expect different commissions. You'll have some Affiliates that have joined your program "on the side" and others that plan on earning a substantial income from the program. Determine what effort they are putting into advertising, how much other programs in your industry are paying, and the amount of time they devote to your program.

The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type. Here are a few linking methods to think about.

• Banners - Though they aren't as effective as other linking methods, banners are still widely used and expected. Make banners in a variety of sizes to fit tops of pages, bottoms, toolbars, sidebars and other miscellaneous areas.

• Articles - These are great for affiliates that need content for their websites and newsletters. Be sure that your articles are articles and not ads.

• Email Ads - Your active affiliates may be interested in placing ads in e-zines or their own newsletters. Try writing a few ads in different lengths.

• Signature Files - Dedicated affiliates may even add your tag to their signature line. Give them a few witty lines to choose from.

• Guestbooks: - Let your affiliates help you build your Opt-In email lists with guestbooks. Offer them a commission for each email address they send you, or each resulting sale from the subscribers they send you.

• Product Images - Give your affiliates images that show and link directly to specific products. They'll be able to choose an image specific to their site, or choose several images to display.

• Review each affiliate Type and match them up with your new linking methods. You may have some linking methods that overlap Types -- this is okay. Just be sure you are concentrating on the affiliates' needs.

The Fourth Step is to decide commission levels. Your first decision will be to determine whether you want to pay a flat rate or percentage of each sale. Based on the needs you identified above for each of the affiliate types, decide on a commission amount for each Type. If you have a two-tier program, consider the possibility of different second tier rates as well.

The Fifth Step is to devise promotions for affiliate groups. Once you have your affiliates properly categorized and your system under control, consider developing promotions for your affiliate groups. Give them special incentives to sell more during a certain time frame, move seasonal products, or increase business during your slow months. Offer them additional commissions, or even bonuses for reaching a specific amount of sales.

5.6 How to attract affiliates

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

• Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are a sites that sell products or services that compliment your offerings. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate. If you sell software, try looking for sites that sell computers or computer parts. Finding sites that already attract your target market, and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors, is the goal.

• Find content sites – There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content-oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

• Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs. Get your program listed in these directories.

5.5 Evaluating your website’s performance

Website statistics and affiliate sales figures are essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your affiliate programs. Before you start recording and analyzing data, it's worthwhile to know what statistics you're trying to calculate - and why. Following are some of the key questions that need to be answered periodically to ensure the success of affiliate programs.

• What percentage of the website visitors become customers through affiliate programs?
• What percentages of sales are new or renewals?
• What is the average revenue per visitor?
• What is the average revenue per sale?

The most important figure you need to keep track of is the visitor to customer conversion. It tells you exactly how well you convince your visitors to buy your affiliate products. Average conversion ratios for affiliate programs range between .5 and 1.5 percent. Anything above 1.5% is really good. This figure, however, indicates the total conversion for all the affiliate programs. If you promote more than one affiliate program you need to also calculate the conversion rate for each of the programs.

Knowing how conversion rates compare between programs is useful when deciding how to direct your promotional efforts. For example, if you discover that Program 'A' converts at 1% and Program 'B' converts at 2%, it might be time to spend more time and effort to promote Program 'A'. Most tracking software would give you detailed information about each of the affiliate programs promoted on your website.

All affiliate programs that have a low conversion rate should be dropped. While this may seem like a lot of work to go through to track your site's performance, it really is a worthwhile endeavor. Once your tracking mechanism is set, and you've done the inputs a few times, you'll be surprised at how simple it becomes. In fact, you may find that eventually you look forward to 'adding things up' at the end of the month to get a clear picture of where your affiliate business stands.

5.4 Managing and tracking your affiliate programs

The key to any business is to promote your products and services to people who need them. Your affiliate business is no different. In order to earn commissions you must put your products in front of the people who need them. The beauty of marketing affiliate programs is that it is anybody’s ball game. This is the one place you can burrow deep into your own niche and stick it to the so-called 'big wigs'.

You may create your own affiliate program or you may promote other popular affiliate programs that are related to your product or service. The best way to manage and track affiliate programs is by creating your own affiliate program website. This is where you can list all your affiliate programs.

Staying Organized

There are many affiliate networks that provide multiple affiliate programs and merchants. Keeping a track of all affiliate programs in a single network is easy. You would generally be given one username and password as well as a single interface that controls all the programs. However, if you have many of your own affiliate programs or you promote several stand-alone affiliate programs from your website, the task of staying organized becomes a bit more complex.

There are many software programs available on the Internet that organize and keep track of all data associated with affiliate programs. Some of these are My Affiliate Program 2000 and Affiliate Assistant 1.0. These programs maintain databases pertaining to information about all your affiliate programs. A typical database would consist of the following fields:

• Program Name
• Date joined or created
• Contact Name
• URL
• Email Address
• ID
• Password
• 1st Tier Percent
• 1st Tier Sale
• 2nd Tier Percent
• 2nd Tier Sale
• Total Income
• Additional comments

Once the program information has been entered, you can add information about individual sales made and checks received. The program then keeps track of sales to date, amount collected and receivables. Besides, some of the advanced software programs also provide analysis and comparison tools for all affiliate programs. If you take the time to input collected data about clicks, sales, and page views, impressions, emails sent etc. from your various campaigns and enter all of it into the program, it will show you:

• Click to Sale Ratios
• Impression to Sale Ratios
• Amount Earned Per Impression
• Amount Earned Per Click

Apart from these are a few other tips that might help you manage your affiliate programs.

• Always ensure that your website is up and running. On a Daily basis type your URL into your browser's address bar, refresh the page and find out. The danger in not knowing that your site is down comes when you are running a pay per click advertising campaign. The click costs add up whether your site is functional or not. If your site is down, you are paying for advertising, but no one is buying.

• Check your statistics daily, maybe even twice a day. This will give you a better idea of your income trends and also highlight affiliate programs that bring your business. Visit the statistics interface for each network and individual affiliate partner and input your total revenues into any accounting software. Using such software frequently will also keep you informed as to whether certain checks have become overdue.

• Be prompt in answering any queries from affiliate partners or customers, especially when these are about your products or services. This probably means that the customer trusts your site and is thinking of buying your product.

• One of the main aspects of any affiliate program is residual income. You've got to make the most of each and every customer you receive. The best way to do this is by promoting affiliate programs that offer residual commission.

• This allows you to repeatedly get paid for work you do once. For example, if a visitor arrives at your site and purchases auto responder services, newsletter subscriptions, ISP/hosting services, you will collect a portion of the monthly fees for as long as they remain a paying customer. Membership sites are a good way to collect residual commissions and are steadily growing in popularity. There are many affiliate programs that offer residual commission.

• A well placed recommendation placed at the end of an outgoing email can bring in extra sales. Target your audience, what are their specific needs? If you can offer them a product they need/want, often times the end result will be a sale.

• Finally, track all your affiliate links. The best way to accomplish this is by setting up tracking software for your affiliate links. There are a number of scripts that will do the job. Most tracking programs typically allow you to setup tracking links for any product you promote, telling you how many hits each product has received, and where the hits are coming from. A more detailed view of tracking and analysis is given in the section below.

• It is not enough to have a few banners and classified ads. You must provide as much help as possible for your associates if you want them to be successful. You should have tested and proven endorsements, testimonials, sig files, ezine ads, and other unique tools and techniques. You must also make yourself available, either through email or the phone, to help your affiliates implement these tools and to answer any questions they may have.

• Whether you run your own or participate in an affiliate program, you must be able to determine what methods work best in a particular medium. For instance, which ezine ads work best and in what ezine; which banner ads produce the greatest clickthroughs and from which sites or banner exchanges; and where on your website is the most effective spot to include a testimonial.

• Some affiliate programs, have implemented unique payment procedures to get affiliates their commission checks on a timely basis. Some of these procedures include: online electronic payment services, direct bank deposits and checks by fax. If you can solidify your payment procedures from the start, you will save yourself an administrative headache and more importantly, keep your affiliates happy and working to promote your program.

5.3 Cooking off the Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action - otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably not spam - the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

5.2 Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up.

What would that bring you? The same as you’re bringing your affiliate partners: deals. Every time someone sends you a user who gives you money, you give a portion of that money to your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate traffic and earn cash.

And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up an affiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies out there that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf.

Ultimate Affiliate lets you run a fully featured affiliate program from your website. It integrates with virtually every payment method, awards down-line commissions, and can handle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up form to match the "look and feel” of your site as well as delete some of the optional fields. The administration area allows you to edit affiliates and commissions, create printable reports of money due, export the data to a text file, view the traffic through your affiliate program, and much more. Your affiliates can log in at any time and see their traffic and commission statistics as well as change their information and get links and banner code.

Once the program is set up you'll only need to log in once a month to print out a list of the affiliates, their addresses, and the money owed. You can do this quarterly if you wish. You can export the payments owed to a text file in PayPal's "mass pay" format and then just upload it to your PayPal account to pay everyone automatically. Or, you can simply write your own checks. If you have to pay a lot of commissions, there is a check printing service called qchex.com. Upload the file and they’ll print and mail your checks for a fee of about 80 cents each.

Alternatively, Locked Area Pro is an advanced member's area management system offering very good security that’s easy to maintain. The system provides a huge list of useful features including automated sign-up, user account validation, optional random password generation and an administration approve/decline account feature. It also comes with an extremely powerful control panel with an online administration of users, backup, and full customization facilities from the browser. A statistics system is also in built in. What more could you want?

5.1 Joining An Affiliate Program

As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your users. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re tossing money away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning.

Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your users won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users you buy, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy users for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges.

That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash.

For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and selling them your users. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can join them—and earn money.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a ‘competitor’, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product—membership subscriptions—you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people, and increasing the sources of your income.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you:

• Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field.
• Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month.
• Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text links, banners and graphics.
• Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some programs pay monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?
• Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results.
• Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them.

5. Getting Rich from Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up a percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit from the commission and the site benefits from sales it wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.

Affiliate ads work two ways: you can join them to make money, or you can run one to attract users.

4.6 Advanced Ad Tracking

The need for an Ad Tracking program

There are two main factors that make an Ad effective – Content of the Ad and the sites where it is advertised. Most experts would agree that constant testing and experimenting is the only way to ensure that you get the right combination. However, the question arises – How do you test your Ads? An integral part of any advertising campaign is knowing which ads bring you the most visitors. After all, you may have banner ads, newsgroups ads, ads in newsletters and articles, ads in autoresponders, or a simple classified ad on a website.

Every marketer can only benefit by knowing:

• which of the ads received the best response
• whether free classified sites are worth the effort
• which newsletters are the most profitable
• how a sponsored newsletter ad compares to the standard one
• whether animated banners are better than static ones
• how effective are your email ads
• does the ad at the start of an newsletter or article outperform the one at the end

Ad Tracking programs would answer all of these questions. They can help you analyze the effectiveness of every single ad and hence they should be an integral part of every marketing campaign. At the basic level an ad tracking program records when your URL has been clicked. It can detect where your visitor came from (the referring URL), the browser and operating system and the exact time. It can record total hits and unique hits (i.e. where one visitor may click several times). This data is kept in the system so you can then pull off reports on any ad campaign over any period e.g. by month, day or even by hour.

Types of Ad Tracking tools

There are two types of Ad Tracking programs. However, the operation of both these types is the same.

CGI Script

You purchase these programs outright and it is installed on your site. If you have some technical knowledge you should be able to install it yourself otherwise the supplier will charge an installation fee. There are certain minimum software requirements for programs which run on your site, including access to the cgi-bin. Hence, most free sites

would not be able to install CGI scripts. However, with CGI scripts your tracking URLs carry your own domain name.

Online Services

These programs operate completely independently from your site - no software installation or use of your system resources (such as disk space) is required. However, such programs run at the supplier site. You pay a rental (monthly or yearly) for the program. Thus, you are dependent on the supplier’s website for your ad tracking. Besides, your tracking URLs carry the supplier domain name.

The main difference between these types of ad tracking tools is the installation. For some businesses, running CGI scripts may be more advantageous, whereas for some online services would be more useful.

There are many Ad Tracking tools available at reasonable rates. Some of the most popular tools are discussed here.

Adminder (http://www.adminder.com)

This is an online service tool. AdMinder provides an ad tracking service that can be used with multiple websites. It provides the capability to track clicks, actions and sales.

AdMinder provides reporting as well as the ability to export your data in CSV format, which you can use in MS Excel for additional analysis.

Some of its key features are:

• Browser based service, so no installation required
• Works with all major web browsers
• Provides key financial stats
• Allow for Grouped Reports
• Unlimited Campaigns

ProAnalyzer (http://www.proanalyzer.com)

ProAnalyzer Ad Tracking System is a CGI program that installs on your website's cgi-bin directory and tracks your ad click-throughs and sales without paying a monthly fee. When a visitor enters your website from an ad URL, a cookie is placed on his web browser and a click-through is recorded. If the visitor purchases a product, that cookie is read on the Thank You page with the purchase total, and the sale is recorded for the ad that generated it.

You can track sales or results either by the campaign name, the revenue generated by a sale, or the action accomplished (lead generated, etc.). The Administration Area allows

you to monitor each of your campaigns showing hits, sales, and the conversion rate for each. You can configure how the program calculates the conversion rate (by raw hits or unique hits) and how results are sorted.

There are lots of different ways to bring customers to your site. So far we’ve talked about search engines, banners, text links and even reminded you of some of the old-fashioned, offline methods you can use.

As you learn these methods and begin to put them in practice, it’s important to remember that no one method has all the answers. The best marketing campaigns are a combination of them all.

In the next chapter, we’re going to look at another exclusively online method of building a customer base—and making money: affiliate programs.

4.5 Creating effective Ads

Online advertising on the Internet leaves a lot to be desired. We have ads that emulate Windows-warning boxes. We have pop-ups and pop-unders. All of these are developed with the intent to make people notice them. However, most of them only end up irritating them. Advertisers, especially those with small budgets, can't afford to waste money on ineffective buys. In order to optimize your advertising buys, you need to concentrate on improving your creative.

Here are some tips that might help:

Step 1: Define clear goals of your advertising campaign

The most important aspect of any advertising campaign is to have a clear objective in mind. You may be targeting a specific group of people, your initial aim may be to target at least 1000 internet surfers and so on and so forth. Have a well defined, clear purpose.

Step 2: Identify the most effective sites for achieving your goals

Sites that are most relevant to your product or service will, more than likely, be your best bet; but also consider larger sites or networks that can target the audience you're trying to reach. They can be very cost-effective. If you have multiple products or services that appeal to various target markets, you'll have to consider sites that reach all those various segments.

Step 3: Craft your message to fit the needs of the audience you're targeting

This comes down to understanding the audience of the sites you're advertising on. The message you use on a technology site to appeal to technologically savvy customers won't have the same appeal for visitors on a small-business site. Focus your campaign.

Step 4: Content of your Ad

Pay particular attention to the content of the Ad. The content should be such that it clearly distinguishes your product or service from your competitors’. Have a catchy headline. The headline is probably the most important part of the Ad – It is the customer puller.

Step 5: Formulate the specific promotional messages that correspond to your goals

The promotional messages should concentrate on the major selling points of your product or service and have a strong call-to-action.

Step 6: Make the desired action clearly visible

This certainly doesn't mean the desired action should necessarily blink, bounce or do flips, but it should be visible within an accepted format for the media you're using. In the case of the Internet, underlined text links, "click here" text entry boxes, and pull-down menus are all ways you can make the desired action clearly visible.

Step 7: Design the ad so it looks like it belongs on the sites where you're advertising

For instance, you may want to use the site's font faces in your text, color schemes in your background, font color choices overall, and emulate images where appropriate. Try to conform to the environment so potential customers visiting the site don't gasp in shock when they see your ad.

Step 8: Produce multiple versions of each ad

Create three or four versions of each ad, changing the promotional message, call-to-action, font faces and color schemes. This is especially important if you're doing price testing or gauging reaction to specific promotions. By splitting your advertising buy

among the various versions of your creative, you can then start to optimize your buy based on the message that works best.

4.4 Cultivating New Customers

Text links, banners and search engines are all ways to attract clients and build a customer base. It’s our buyers that’s we’re really talking about here. But the Web isn’t the only

place to look for customers even for Web-based businesses. Some of the old traditional methods like word-of-mouth referrals still work just as well, and still bring me a fair bit of cash each month. Here are some tips to help you grab as many customers as you can while you’re setting up your business and getting your online marketing programs in place.

Know Your Market

Whatever your line of business, you’ve got to know your market. You have to know who your clients are, what they want and what makes them buy. Do the market research, check out your competitors, create a formal marketing plan - but take the effort to put yourself in the shoes of your buyers. Otherwise you won’t get any!

Bring Out Your Benefits

You might think you know what your product’s sales points are - you might even be dead proud of them - but the fact is, your buyers don’t give a toss about all the wonderful gizmos you’ve packed into your product. They just want you to answer one question: what’s it going to do for me?

That’s what all your marketing has to be about: explaining to your buyers how you’re going to improve their life.

Make Your Site Sing

It can take a fair bit of effort and not a small amount of time to create a website that works. But you can’t stop there. You’re going to have to keep updating it, checking it and making sure all the links and addresses work. It’s the first place to look when you notice your sales starting to drop, and it’s crucial to keep them coming in.

Be Alert for New Marketing Opportunities

You must always be alert for opportunities to make new business contacts and not allow yourself to be caught off guard when opportunities arise. It doesn’t matter if you’re out shopping or at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, make sure that you have professional business cards, brochures, etc. on hand - and don’t be afraid to use them.

Don’t Keep Your Business a Secret

Tell everyone about your business and your product. You might even consider sending out a mass mailing to everyone you know, telling them what you’re doing. Chances are, someone knows someone who wants what you’ve got, and friendly referrals usually bring the best business!

Find Repeat Customers

When it comes to building customers, there are clients who buy once - and clients who buy lots of times. It’s the latter that you want to pack into your customer list; they’re worth their weight in gold. Big companies are good places to prospect for repeat business (they have big demands and budgets) but always treat your repeat customers well. That might mean the odd discount or the occasional freebie, but the extra business should make up for it.

4.3 Classified Ads

Offline, classified ads are cheap little adverts that appear at the back of newspapers or magazines. They work well if you’re trying to sell your old Ford Escort or you’re looking for a new home for your tatty sofa, but they’re not too profitable for businesses aiming to keep repeat sales coming in.

That’s offline. Online, things are a little different. But not hugely different.

I post adverts on classified columns, but I don’t expect to make a lot of money from them. What I do expect though is an opportunity to test my headlines and ad copy before I start spending hard cash on AdWords, text links and sales letters.

That’s why I don’t bother with the dollar ads. If I’m going to spend marketing money, I’d rather give it to a search engine than a classified ads column. The return on sales just doesn’t justify it.

But there are places where you can place free ads, and you can actually do this on some of the really big sites like AOL and Yahoo. Even if I don’t make many sales, the fact that I’m getting my product in front of so many people certainly won’t do me any harm.

Occasionally, I’ll post an ad on one of these and monitor how many replies I get.

4.2 Text Links

Text links are much simpler than banner ads. They’re also less eye-catching and less sexy. There’s no funky animation, no neat Flash, just a few well chosen words often stuck at the side of a Web page. But that doesn’t mean they’re not effective.

In fact, to some extent, text links are the unsung heroes of online marketing. They don’t get half the attention they deserve, but they can do a pretty neat job of bringing users to a site. And you can’t ask for more than that.

The first point to bear in mind about text links is that they’re tough to write. You might have all of 50 characters to make your sales pitch. That’s about the length of that sentence, so you’re going to have to be pretty creative in what you say. That’s the downer. On the plus side though, text links are amongst the most popular form of promotion amongst users. They don’t get in the way like pop-ups, and they’re often mistaken for content - so unlike banners, they’re actually read. And because they’re written into the site’s HTML, you know that each page view means a real exposure.

They’re also cheap. You might have to pay a flat-fee or a cost-per-click, but there’s much less risk there than with banner ads. If you know how much traffic the site’s getting, you can figure out in advance if it’s worth your while.

Best of all though, you can sometimes arrange for free links with partners in return for a similar placement on your own site. That doesn’t just give you free advertising - it also helps your search engine placements.

I use a lot of text links to promote my sites, but I wouldn’t just use them. They aren’t prominent enough to really keep traffic moving in droves, but in terms of effectiveness and cost, they’re way up there.

4.1.2 Banner Economics

Business online, like business offline, always boils down to math: the difference between cost and revenue. If your banner campaign is costing more than it’s earning, you won’t be in business for very long. To figure out how your campaign is doing, you’re going to

need to know your Cost Per Mille, your Click Through Rate and your Conversion Rate. These are your basic tools. If you don’t know them, find out!

Let’s say your CPM is $20, your CTR is 1%, and your Conversion Rate is 4%. (So you’re paying $20 every 1,000 times your banner is shown, it brings you 10 new users, and you make one sale for every 25 users the ad brings). The question you need to ask yourself is how much are you wasting on the 24 users who don’t buy.

Cost per visitor = $20 / 10 = $2 So each visitor costs you $2, but you need 25 visitors to make one sale, so...

Cost per sale = $2 * 25 = $50 ...if your product is worth less than $50, you’re making a loss.

That’s pretty simple, and as you can see, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver here. Margins are tight on banner advertising and that applies to both the site selling the advertising space and the webmaster buying it.

Of course, hard cash isn’t the only way to measure the success of a banner ad, and one reason they’re still popular is that they’re a pretty effective branding tool. After all, advertisers spend millions on billboards without expecting motorists to drive straight through them and make a purchase! On the Web, those advertisers can even be reasonably sure that the people who see their ads will be interested in them. But branding

costs money - lots of it - with no guarantee of results. It’s usually best left to the big boys.

The banner ads on my sites usually send users to my affiliate partners, and the banner ads I place on other people’s sites usually come from my affiliate programs. They don’t cost me anything and as long I’m making the sales to pay my affiliate partners, everybody’s happy.

If you do decide to purchase banner advertisements though, and if you have a very specific market in mind, make sure they are strategically placed - on sites where the traffic will most definitely be interested in your product or service. Find a site that suits exactly your specific product and you’re going to be appealing directly to your target market.

4.1.1 Banner Glossary

• Banner Ad - A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s website. These usually run across the top of the page but can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are usually limited by size.

• Banner Views - The number of times a banner is seen by users. This is usually the same as "page views," but counts the number of times the banner is actually downloaded rather than the number of times the page is downloaded. Some users click away before the banner finishes loading.

• Clicks/ Click Throughs - Banners are operated by clicking the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses are called “clicks” or “click throughs.”

• Click Through Rate (CTR) - The percentage of users who see the banner and click on it.

• Conversion Rate —The percentage of people who visit your site and actually give you money. The higher the better!

• Cookies - Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites. Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s site, and even which adverts they’ve seen recently.

• CPM - "Cost Per Mille." The amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is shown—the usual way of charging for banners.

• Hits - The number of times a server receives a request for a Web page or an image. Not a great way to measure interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say "hits" when they really mean "page views" or "impressions."

• Page Impressions or Page Views - The number of times a Web page has been requested by the server. Much more accurate than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site. But not necessarily a different customer...

• Unique Users - The people who download a Web page, counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to your site so that you can create a broad customer base. The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could cost you money without increasing your sales. Most reputable sites will check the IP address of the person clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with them.

4.1 Banners

When the Web first started, banners were all the rage. Today, they’re pretty much passé. They’re no longer a novelty and unless they’re super-clever, users pretty much ignore them. Conversion rates have dropped through the floor and many advertisers have found other ways to push their products.

And yet, every website still contains a whopping great banner ad splashed along the top or running up the side. In part, that’s because they’ve become more sophisticated with better targeting and improved graphics. But in practice, banner ads tend to be used for one of two reasons: as a method of gaining/ giving users through an affiliate program; or as a way of generating revenue—or traffic—through paid advertising.

Both these methods work to some extent, but the key is always to make sure the economics make sense. We’ll look closely at the math in this chapter, but before we go

on to talk about the math of banner ads—and how to tell whether your banner campaign is worthwhile—let’s just take a look at the terms involved. You’re going to see these words whenever you join an affiliate program or take part in any other kind of online marketing scheme. You should definitely be familiar with them.

4. Buying Advertising and Keeping Customers!

In my experience, search engines and directories are the easiest and probably the most effective methods to bring users to a site. But it’s never a good idea to use one tactic exclusively. In this chapter we’re going to look at three other methods: banners, text links and classified ads.

3.12 Finally, a word about Spam

Don’t.

You can spam search engines by stuffing your site with keywords, submitting them numerous times or filling your pages with links. And they’ll just get you blacklisted.

Don’t do it. It’s just not worth it.

It used be accepted practice to create doorway pages—duplicates of a home page filled with different keywords—but search engines won’t accept even these any more.

They will accept smart pages though. If you want to use more keywords than you can fit on your site, create a second page that is totally different from your homepage but which is still based upon your product or service. Here, you can expand upon a topic you merely touched on in your homepage. A great example of a smart page is to write articles on the benefits of your services using a different set of keywords to those on your home page. You can do that.

To sum up, this chapter gave a detailed view of many of the proven and effective Search Engine optimization techniques. SEO is probably the most important and the most successful traffic generating mechanism, and when done carefully it can do wonders for your website and your products.

In the next chapter, we discuss Internet marketing through ads and banners.

3.11 Monitoring Your Progress

Okay, so you’ve decided on your keywords, inserted your links and submitted your sites. Now all you have to do is open your offshore account and wait for the cash to pour in, right?

Well, not quite. You might get lucky with your first shot, but it never happened to me. Once you’ve submitted all your links, you need to keep a close eye on them, and see which need improving and which can be dropped.

The crucial factor here is to keep track of your Search Engine Statistics. These will tell you how many people have come from the various search engines and how many of those became customers.

But it’s not enough to know how much traffic you’re receiving, you also want to know how you’re doing in the rankings. There are two ways to do that:

Manual Searches

Dead easy, simply log on and look. First enter your URL to make sure your site has been approved and listed. That can take a little while. Once you can see that you’re online though, you want to see how you’re ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. Works, but takes a while.

Computerized Searches

I’ll be honest with you: it’s been a long time since I did a manual search. If you’ve got just ten sites and you want to check ten keywords for each once a week, you’re going to lose at least a day’s work a month. That’s too much for me. I use WebPosition Gold. I tell it which keywords to check where and it gives me an automated report. Simple.

When you look at your statistics, pay particularly attention to which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. In general, the higher you are, the more traffic you receive and the more sales you make. But that isn’t always true. It might pay more to be fifteenth on a keyword that gets a million searches a month than first on a keyword that gets just a thousand. And if you’re fifteenth, you’ve still got room for improvement.

And it’s the improvement that’s the key. If you see that your link is stuck at the bottom of a list somewhere, try adding more links, putting that keyword in more pages or adding keyword-rich content. If you can see where you stand, you can figure to where to go.

3.10 Optimizing your Website

To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site that you want listed needs to be optimized to the best of your ability. Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process choosing the right keywords is essential. If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines. If you are not found in the search engines how will anyone find your site? Since the keywords you choose to optimize your pages with are so important we have put together

some tips to help you make sure that you make the right choices. You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you plan to submit to the search engines.

Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too.

You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to the page you are optimizing. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours. Check out your competition for ideas. Do a search using keywords that you already know you want to target and click through on the top sites that come up. Once on the site view the source HTML code and view the keywords they have in their Meta tags - this should give you many more ideas.

Make sure to only use keywords that relate to YOUR site or page. To view the HTML code, simply click the 'View' at the top of your web browser then select 'Source', or 'Page Source'. You should develop a list of keyword phrases, following the tips on this page, for each page that you optimize for the search engines.

Apart from these, there are certain aspects that should be avoided. These are:

Dead Links - As search engines index your entire site by crawling through hypertext links, you must make sure you check for dead links before submitting.

Graphics and Image Maps - Search engines cannot read images, be sure to include Alternative Text tags.

Frames - Many Search engines aren't frames compatible. Meta tags and the <no frames> tags are important in this instance.

Spamming - Avoid resubmitting your pages repeatedly to search engines if your site does not get listed in the first few weeks. Allow at least 6 weeks before resubmission. Continual resubmission (such as those caused by automatic submission software) can cause your site to be penalized.

3.9.3 Inward link analysis

Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website.

There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success. The most proven technique for inward linking is through Ebooks. You can offer interesting and educative Ebooks for free to other websites and they could install the icons or the Ebooks on their sites. The icon or the Ebook you create would have a link to your website. This will allow a spider to crawl through that link and visit you website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have a link to your website that would increase the probability of your website being listed with a crawler based Search Engine.

Other techniques include posting newsletters, white papers, news stories and press releases at other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. The newsletters and press releases would contain a link pointing to your website, thus, promoting your website.

3.9.2 Picking your partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online. For example, if you’re trying to shift your book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners. Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters.

You can also identify your competitors and see where they trade links.

Tips for talking to webmasters

• Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a quality link.
• Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it—you don’t want them to think you’re spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will open it, thinking you’re a potential customer.)
• Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you.
• Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage.
• Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them in a couple of days, you will consider that to a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site.

3.9.1 Reciprocal Links and Partner Sites

Keywords and AdWords aren’t the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them.

It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway. If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can make the higher relevancy score - and the increase in traffic - worth your while.

Alternatively, you can link to your own site by creating a sub-directory. This is like building another Web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you were selling stuffed toys, the new URL would be www.yourdomain.com/stuffed_toys/stuffed_toys.html. You could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. Big relevancy points!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their Web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return.

When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don’t reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don’t want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy first. One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Webmasters Resource Page” and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn’t take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.

In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.