I don’t know if you have ever done this, but it’s very important when sending out emails to your opt-in list. You have to make sure that you are writing to them specifically, and not to all your subscribers. Why? When you write an emails in a friendly, and personal way it gets rid of the pitchy type emails.

When emails are sent out to an audience such as something like “Greetings all Entrepreneurs” there’s no personalization. It also seems like they’re trying to sell you something. When you add the word “you” when you write then it has the little touch of personalization. Now the reader in tuned into what you’re saying, because that person feels that you’re actually talking to ‘them’.

Not only should you be personal in the email message itself, you should also pay close attention to the subject line of the email. This is important because if people don’t open your email, then it won’t get read. People now get dozens of emails per day, and with those emails half of them are spam. Now, how will you draw the readers attention to your email, and make them open it?

One quick thing I’d like to mention is that Jimmy D. Brown is one of the greatest email marketers that I know. I have personally read, listened, and watched hours and hours of material that is always something new. Some things that I have never even would have thought about in email marketing. I would like you to take a look, and see what he has to offer:

Jimmy D. Brown’s List and Traffic

Tags: Make Money, Make Money Online, affiliate, affiliate marketing, Online Business, business, blog, blogging, blogs, Computers and Internet, internet, SEO, Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization, Website Traffic, Email, Email Marketing

Some of you may have been wondering where I have been for the past few days, and why I haven’t been writing posts. Well I have been devouring Jimmy D. Browns membership site List and Traffic

There’s just so much information that I’ve had no time to do anything else. Not that I didn’t have time, but I was so involved in the articles, video, and audio presentations that I just wanted to learn more, and trust me there’s a lot more I have to learn about list building so I’ll get back to that.

In the mean time here’s a special video to check out by Jimmy:

How To Get Everything You Want In Your Busines and Life in 2006 

It can be tough as an email marketer. What you write will be the determinate if the subscriber will stay or leave. So you have to do a few things. You have to try to achieve a few things with your subscriber.

- First you want to build a relationship with the subscriber. You want them to know who you are, and why they should read what you have to write. Remember, they signed up to your newsletter because it will benefit them.

- Don’t sell or tell your subscribers too much too fast. They think of you as a friend, and you want it to stay like that.

- When promoting a product give your own thoughts or full review of it.

- Write your emails with passion. You have to believe in what you’re writing. People are not stupid.

- Write to your subscriber, and not to an audience. Readers like to hear about themselves, not a whole group of people.

- Value is everything. If you give your readers value, you will see more sales.

- Solve your readers problems. If you can solve a problem that they have will little effort then you will build a much better relationship with them.

Follow these guidelines, and you will see much more sales, and positive feedback from your list.

Tags: Make Money, Make Money Online, affiliate, affiliate marketing, Online Business, business, blog, blogging, blogs, Computers and Internet, internet, SEO, Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization, Website Traffic, Email, Email Marketing

Sounds great doesn’t it? Free autoresponder service. Why pay for autoresponder service when you can get it for free? Because they put ‘their’ own ads in your emails. They advertise ‘their’ ads. They keep their sales, and you get ‘zero’ commission. You took all the effort into building a list, and they take it away with their ads. Of course you can still put your ads on there, but there will still be their ads on there. With too many ads in your newsletter it will just seem like one big advertisement.
Trust me, you’ll be better off with using a paid service. It’s more reliable, and you put your own ads on it, and you get your own sales and commissions from those ads.

Let’s take a look at this. If you’re using a free service and 1000 people read your newsletter. 500 of them click the advertisement and 5 buy. What do you get from it? $0. What does the reader get from it? Your newsletter and a product from your free autoresponder.

Now with paid service where you put your own ads, and that’s all that appears you get all the sales from it. Let’s say you have 1000 readers, 500 click and 5 buy. That’s 5 sales for you. Say you get $20 from each sale, that’s $100 for you.

Also, when you have paid service and it only displays your content then it will give a more professional feel to it. It gives the picture of your own unique newsletter.

If you’re looking for a good, reliable, paid autoresponder service, as always I’d recommend Aweber.

Jim Edwards has discussed how to get the best results with opt in lists.

You have to make sure you have 2 opt in lists for

1. Buyers

2. Prospects

The first way deals with buyers. You want to turn the buyer back into a prospect for another one of your products so they can become a buyer for that product. You do this by putting an opt in form to another one of your lists on the purchase page. If trust you, and buy your product then they’ll be interested in whatever else you have so the opt in rate will be much higher.

The next way is to make a forced opt-in. Some people don’t like doing this, but it has the best results. All you do is on your salesletter, don’t provide all the information. What you do is write something that will get the reader to want to read more. A good example of this would be Jim Edwards Mini Site Creator.

The third way is for prospects. When the reader reaches the bottom of the page (if they do) then you can make them have a choice, or you don’t and they close the website. This choice is to put the opt in form at the bottom of the page. So give them a choice.

Clickbank is a great affiliate community. Always has been. The only thing is they don’t show you stats. You don’t know who’s clicking on your links. This is what makes it a guessing game. If you know that 1 out of 100 people who click your links buys the product then you need to know who’s clicking on those links.

I showed you how to do this a few posts back. Here it is if you missed it

Hiding Your Affiliate Link

Now that you’re using your own domain you can now track the clickthroughs. If you don’t know how to do that. I’ll show you - if you’re using cpanel (which is what Hostgator uses.) then you have good stats for this (If you don’t have cpanel then try to find the stats of clickthroughs on links).
Log into Cpanel, and click on the icon that says Web/FTP Stats.  Click on the first link that says “Awstats”. Now click on the link at the top middle of the page that says ‘Update Now’.

Scroll down until you see the section that says ‘Pages-URL (Top 25)’. Click on the link to the right that says ‘Full List’. Now this is the page that displays stats of how many clickthroughs there has been on all your links. Find the redirect links, and that will tell you the clickthroughs.

Now obviously you still won’t have a clear picture of which page lead to a sale, and your conversions, but you’ll get a good idea of what links are getting the most clicks.

When is the point that you go overboard with sending emails to your list? That’s a really tough question because every person on the receiving end has different feelings about this. Some people think that they’re not receiving enough email, and then there’s others who think that they’re getting way too much email, and unsubscribe from the list.

It all depends what your emails are about. If you’re sending your list an email everyday promoting affiliate products, then people are going to unsubscribe from your list because then all you’re doing is advertising and not providing useful and unique content.

If you don’t send your list an email in a whole month then send them an email. They most likely will forget who you are, and why they signed up for that list and unsubscribe. If you’re sending your list emails with content that’s useful and unique then your subscribers will want more. You have to think as the reader “What’s in it for me?”. You have to send your list emails that will benefit them. People usually sign up to your list because you offered something to them that in their mind was a benefit.

People don’t request information that they’re not interest in or feel that won’t benefit them. Online people join opt in email lists because they offer them useful information that’s not provided on the website. That’s what you have to do is offer them useful information. If you just start sticking out advertisements then you’re not fulfilling their request.

So think about it when you send out emails. Will it be the email that makes 80% of your opt in list unsubscribe, or will it be the email that makes them want more.

It’s as simple as that. If you want to become successful, look at what successful people are doing, and do that. I know you’re probably thinking “what so should I just copy them?” Not exactly. Let’s look at internet marketing. If you find that one of your favourite internet marketing guru’s made a site on internet dating, added adsense to it, and affiliate links don’t go and build a dating site doing the same thing. They probably made that site a long time ago before there was any competition, and got ahead of the game.

What you have to do is find a niche that’s profitable. One that is in demand with low competition. That’s when you build a site and use the techniques that the internet marketing guru used to build that dating site.

Now you’re thinking “Great. I’ll do what they are doing….um wait….what are they doing?”. Some internet marketers are willing to share useful information for free, and some others are willing to give it away at a price. Usually the information witha  price is more useful then the free content. Just like i’ve mentioned before good information doesn’t come for free.

If you want real business income from your site, then you’ll have to treat it as a business. Businesses require investments. Online the major investments should be focused on education material. You could do intensive research by yourself and figure everything out in the long run or you could invest some money now, use that information, and make back that initial investment and then some.

Where To Put Your Opt In Forms

Now you might be confused on what pages to put your opt in forms on, and where to put them on the page.

You should put your opt in form on every page of your website (besides your privacy statement page, contact, or any other page that doesn’t have useful content). Every page of your website is a possible landing page for a potential sign up. Why do I say that? Because when the search engine crawls your site, it’s not going to only index your homepage. It’s going to index the pages inside of your site (assuming you have a index,follow in your meta tag). So when someone searches for a keyword, and your page about that keyword pops up it’s going to take them to that page, and not your homepage.

There are many spots that you can put your opt in form. The first is in the main body at the bottom of the page. When someone’s done reading the page you give them an option where to go. There’s also the visitors that visit your page, but don’t make it much further then the top of your page. So another good spot would be directly below your header at the top of the page (making sure it’s visible without any scrolling). Rosalind Gardner uses this method on her forum

One other spot that you can put it, that a lot of guru internet marketers suggest is to use a pop up after leaving the page. Some people are against pop ups, but I think this method works great if you’re writing a one page sales copy.

Now that you know where to put them, start adding them to your webpages.

If you’re an internet marketer online. You’ll know there’s times when you sit there and think “What should I do now? What can I do to help increase traffic to my website. I have so many websites to work on, but I don’t know which one I should work on first”. I know a lot of people hate the word organized, but it will determine your success. If you’re not organized, you may become successful, but it will take a lot more time as if you were organized.

This is what I like to do to when writing a schedule out for the day. I first think of things that I need to do, or things I need to improve on. Let’s say I want to work on website 1, website 2, and website 3, write 2 blog posts, and read 3 different blogs.

I’ll take out my notepad (pen and paper) and write the following (depending what time I get up):

8:30-9 - Take a shower, eat breakfast, make coffee.

9-10 - Work on website 1 (add articles, and finish product pages)

10-11 - Work on website 2 (keep building product pages)

11:30-11:45 - Lunch

11:45-12:15 - Write blog post

12:15-1 - read blogs

1-2 - work on Website 3

2-2:30 - Write blog post

and so on..

Now there will be times when you finish something that you thought would take an hour, but ends up only being 30 minutes. So what do you do? Sit there? No. Always find extra material that you can read. Whether it be a website, blog, whatever. Don’t just sit there.

Now sometimes you will be doing something as you timed, but you just can’t think. You can’t think of anything to write. Things aren’t going the way you want to. That’s when you stop, and move on to something different. Why? Because doing other things may bring you new fresh ideas that will help you. Say you want to write a post for your blog, but you can’t think of anything to write. Stop writing, go read some other websites and blogs and you will be amazed at all the ideas that will pop into your head.

If you’re doing something, and you go over the time limit don’t just drop what you’re doing. If you’re half way through writing a post, finish writing it. It’s always easier to finish something then it is to start something.

Start making your time productive, and you will soon see the results.

Cheers.

Tags: Make Money, Make Money Online, affiliate, affiliate marketing, Online Business, business, blog, blogging, blogs, Computers and Internet, internet, SEO, Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization, Website Traffic, Email, Email Marketing