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

As I mentioned before using a mini-site (also known as forced opt-ins, and squeeze pages) is one of the best ways to get opt-ins. Why is that? It’s because you aren’t giving them many choices. They have the choice of signing up for your mini-course/newsletter or leaving the page. More than likely they’ll sign up for your mini-course/newsletter if you give them reason to. Notice that I said ‘give them reason to’. No one will sign up for your newsletter if you don’t give them a good enough reason to do so.

So here are some steps for setting up a mini-site:

1. Location - Where will the squeeze page be located on your domain? If you want it to be on your index that’s fine then you’d just make the page on www.yourdomain.com, but you could also make it a subpage on your website such as www.yourdomain.com/squeezepage.html. Of course no one’s going remember the url, that’s why you’ll want to use anchor text in your links.

2. Design - The next part is going to be the design of the page. If you don’t make the page appealing, interesting, and worth while no one’s going to sign up for your mini-course/newsletter. It’s as simple as that. I couldn’t possibly explain what to use to get the best results in this post, but I’ll give you a few tips on how to increase responsiveness and credibility.

First, you need an attractive headline. Most people who visit your website are not going to read the rest of the page if the headline doesn’t grab their attention. You now want to add a picture of yourself. Why? It increases credibility. It shows that you are actually a person. Another great thing to increase credibility is to add a signature. You can do this by writing your signature on a paper and scanning it or using a writing font (it’s best to make it a picture because some computers might not have the particular font you’re using, and won’t get good results).

The next part is to make bullet points outlining what problems they might be facing. What solutions you would provide them in your mini-course/newsletter and so on. Then below that you want to put your opt-in form. This is where they put their name and email. If this is based on selling your own product, and you have sold some copies, then get some testimonials, and put them on your site.

Last, make sure that you put legal information. Such as a Disclaimer, Terms of Service, Earnings Disclaimer, and Privacy Policy.

Just to side note, if you’re going to be using paid advertising such as Google Adwords, then I’d recommend you watch this video before doing so:

Jim and Perry Slap Google

Leisure Time - Leisure time is the time that you spend doing the things you enjoy. Whether it be spending time with your family, reading books, playing videos, going to the beach - all these things are leisure time.

Distractions - Distractions are things that stop you from being productive. Things such as checking your email, checking your website stats, all these things stop you from being productive.

Think about it; everytime you check your website stats that’s 2-3 minutes lost in productive time. Everytime you check your email email that’s another 2-3 minutes lost. Add all these up during the day, and you’ll amount to quite some time lost.

Here’s what you do.

1. Set times for checking email and website stats - Set a time (or two) during the day that is specifically set for checking your website stats and email.

2. Don’t let temptation win - No matter how tempting it may be to check your website stats or email don’t let it win. Continue to focus on what you’re doing, and finish it.

When you let temptation kick in and you do all these distractions you’re most likely to stop what you were doing that was productive, and ‘not even go back to it later’. So think about what you have been doing lately that doesn’t really need to be done, and consider how much productive time you have lost.

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 

Google Toolbar:

You can search google directly from your browser. The greatest feature of the google toolbar is the PageRank. PageRank is a rank out of 10 that google gives you rating how much authority your site has. By this I mean backlinks to your site. The higher the pagerank of the sites that links back to you will determine how high your pagerank will be. Also it includes, a spell checker, backward links (who links to you), and some other cool tools. I would highly recommend installing it on your browser.

You can download it here:

Google Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar:

This toolbar also has the search function, but what you want to highly focus on is the Rank. Every page you visit will display a different rank. What alexa does is tracks how much traffic your site receives and gives you a ranking. The highest traffic site would be 1 (which is Yahoo currently). This is also a great tool that I’d recommend.

You can download it here:

Alexa Toolbar

Now you might be wondering “Great, but how will this help me in research?” Well, if you have a clear indication on which sites receive a lot of traffic then it’d be a great idea to learn from them. If someone claims they get a lot of traffic to their site, and want to sell you a product, but they only have an alexa ranking of 3,000,000 then it’s quite obvious they’re lying. If you go to a site like Brad Callen’s SEOelite and notice that he has an alexa ranking of 1,840. It’s quite obvious that he knows what he’s doing.

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

This is a good point that I want to stress upon. You could instantly lose a reader if you try to sell to them right away. The reason for that is because then you look like someone who’s only going to try to sell them something.

The reason they signed up for your newsletter was because it is free information. They don’t want to hear you telling them to go buy joe’s product today, and buy john’s product tomorrow. They want to hear some stuff for free right now to get them started.

Then you might ask “Well if we’re going to be only giving them free information how do I make money from my list?” The key is to show them that they need the product. You have to give them a mindset of they need investments to make things work.

Going into the internet business field - A great way to incoroprate what I just said would be to show business owners how they can make more money with doing less work. This is the key to selling to internet marketers today. Trying to sell an internet marketer a get rich quick product would be next to impossible. If you can show them how they can reduce their efforts and increase their productivity then you have a sale. A great example of this would be James Brausch’s products.

Now how to incorporate this into an email. When sending an email to your list remember to start off with a question. Bring up some curiosity. Curiosity is what keeps them reading. Without the curiosity there’s no interest. Next you want to tell them a story of a related experience. Then you still want to leave them curious and direct them to the sales page or where ever your goal location is.

With this method you then generate a form of interest to the reader instead of blatently saying “click on this link, and buy this product”. That has no interest towards them. Just remember to be in the mind of the reader and answer the initial question of “what will I get out of this”, or “how will this benefit me?”.

What you say could be the result of your readers staying or unsubscribing.

This is the problem everyone has. They might have a highly optimized site with a great opt in forms, but you can’t get any subscribers without any traffic. Website traffic is the key to getting subscribers. Today I’m going to explain to you the many ways of getting traffic to your website (well the ways you should be spending your time on).

Buy Website Traffic - You can pay for traffic by the click. This is called Pay Per Click advertising (also known as PPC). This is a very effective way to get traffic to your website. It’s the most targeted that you can get. I wrote an article on PPC advertising, and you can read it here:

PPC Advertising Should Be Your First Source Of Traffic

Forums - Forums are another way you can get traffic to your website. All you have to do is put your website link in your signature. Whenever you make a post at the forum, your website will appear at the bottom of each post. Remember not to spam. Posting on forums is a very risky thing to do though, because what you say affects the emotion on people towards you. So, always make a good impression, be helpful, and don’t self promote.

Articles - This one is my favourite. It’s writing good articles, and submitting them to article directories, newsletters, or where ever someone could post your article. This one technique will be one of the most beneficial way to generate traffic to your website. To learn how to get the most out of your articles with Turn Words Into Traffic.

Search Engines - When I say search engines I don’t mean submitting your url to the search engines. I mean using SEO (search engine optimization) techniques on your website so the search engine finds you. This is greatly connected with writing articles. If you know how to benefit from articles then search engines will find you, and start adding your pages to their listings and you will see daily traffic to your website without doing anything! To learn how to optimize your page, download this fr-ee ebook by Brad Callen

Search Engine Optimization Made Easy
(right click then save link as)

The biggest thing is you should be mainly focusing on writing articles and getting your site on google, and getting lots of traffic from google.

If you have some money that you can spend I would recommend joining Google Adwords. The best person to learn Google Adwords from is Perry Marshall

Of course there are other ways to get traffic to your website, but I find these to be the most highly affective.

- 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

Log into Aweber.

Click on the messages tab. Next, you’ll want to click on the link that says ‘create message 1′

I usually turn on click tracking to keep stats of what messages get the most clickthroughs. Also, it’s a great affiliate link hider.

You’ll see that there are many templates you can choose from, but I like to use text only template (no template selected).

Now it’s time to write the email. In the subject you want to first address them by name. To do this first click on the subject box, then click on insert field and select {!firstname_fix}. This will enter their first name that they entered when they signed up for your newsletter/mini course.
It should look something like this:

{!firstname_fix}, welcome to the widgets mini-course

or

{!firstname_fix}, part 1 of your 7 part mini course

You can chose however you want to welcome your new subscriber.

Now let’s get to the message itself.

First you want to address their name. People love being greeted by their name. It makes the email seem more personal, and not like a robot. So start out by saying.

Hi {!firstname_fix}, or Hey {!firstname_fix}:

However you want to greet them. It’s up to you. All you have to remember is to be yourself. Pretend that you’re writing an email to one of your friends.

Now you want to thank them for signing up for your newsletter, or minicourse and explain what it’s all about. After that you’ll want to explain what you are about, what your company is about or if it’s a mini-course the first part of it. There’s so many options to go with this.

It can be confusing and frustrating on what to write. What I discovered is to learn what successful email marketers write, and incorporate it into your writing. You might be asking yourself “How do I know which emails were successful, and which aren’t?” I know that because I was asking the same question.

So I did some research and discovered “Million Dollar Emails“. This ebook is the greatest investment in email marketing I have made. Especially for $19. It answers the fundamental question of “which emails are successful”. It even reveals the subscription rates, and clickthrough rates. So get reading, and soon enough writing emails to your list will be second nature.

I’ve been doing some thinking of this, and thinking of the two types of workaholics. There’s forced workaholics, and voluntary workaholics. The forced ones are people who work overtime to pay the bills. They just get so used to working everyday and overtime to pay the bills. Then there’s a time when they have enough for the bills, but still work the overtime because it became a part of their life. These people might be happy with their life, and some may not. Personally, I would not like to be stuck in this situation.

Then there’s the voluntary workaholic. This is the workaholic that works for something they have goals set for, and doing something they love. I admit that I fall in this category. I fit in this category, because once you get the entrepreneurial drive it’ll never stop. You will just want to keep working, and working until you achieve more and more. You get a great feeling inside of you when your business is growing. Being this type of workaholic I find it lowers stress levels.

When you work at a job or career that you don’t like - doesn’t everyday just get worse and worse? My question is -  why do you you still do it? Some might say “I can’t find another job, and I have bills to pay”. That’s totally understandable, but I would recommend setting something else aside part time.

Let’s say you like cleaning, and would like to do that as a career. You can’t quit your current job because the start up would be slow in the cleaning business, and you wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. You could keep at your current job and set time aside to start your own cleaning business. Start out small. Keep building slowly and you will see yourself progressing. What you do in life depends on your thinking. If you want to learn more about this download ‘Guaranteed Success Thinking’ in the free ebooks section. This ebook is phenominal. I would highly recommend it.