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.

Have you ever visited a blog of a successful internet marketer, and just read the first page and went to a different website? Or maybe you read that pages fromt he links on the navigation bar? When I was new to reading blogs I noticed I was doing this myself. Someone would recommend me a blog. I’d read the first page, thought the information was good, and went to a different website.

What you might not know is that this blog could contain posts over a years time. There could be 100-200 pages of useful information and you don’t even know it! They might have archives links on the nagivation, but I know I used to always ignore them what a mistake that was.
One blog I found like this was Jame Brausch’s Blog. It’s incredible how much useful information he provides in his blog. Not only is it useful, but his posts are all different. You won’t hear any repetitiveness.

So head over there, and start reading from post one. You won’t regret it.

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

Affiliate marketing is a great money making machine online. You could either take the approach of setting up your own website with your own domain and hosting. Or you could promote products on your niche blog. These are only two examples. There are tons of other ways to promote affiliate products, but we won’t get into that right now. whichever way you choose you can sell products as an affiliate. If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing it’s when a company wants to expand their sales by letting other people pre-sell their product. If there’s a sale, then they give the affiliate a commission.

Being an affiliate marketer online is great because you don’t have to have any products on hand, or deal with customer service. Affiliate marketing has brought many people to wealth. Especially with information products (also known as ebooks). There are great affiliate managers out there. All you have to do is sign up, and they’ll give you a personalized link to keep track of your visitors and sales. Then all you do is whenever you post on your blog, or write about relevant topics you promote the product with the affiliate link.

Now with affiliate marketing becoming popular, people know that others make money off the links that they click from your site. These people then type in the link without using the affiliate link. I think it’s ridiculous, and have no clue why anyone has a problem with others monetizing off your clicks to a product that they’re going to buy anyways. It’s not like it’s going to cost them anymore money. You provided them with the information, and resources of the product, why not give you some credit. There’s a way around this. It’s a method of hiding your affiliate link. You can only use this method if you are using your own hosting. Here’s how you do it. In your file manager, create a new html page. Name it relevant to your product that you’re promoting. Now in the file use the coding from the following website.

Hiding Your Affiliate Link

After you copied the code into the html file (and edited the link to your own affiliate link), you’ll want to save it like it is, as an html file. All that this code does is when someone types in your personalized address the coding in the html file tells people “Go to this page. We’ll redirect you to this affiliate link.” That’s exactly what it does too. It redirects them to your affiliate link. Whenever someone clicks on the link they won’t know it’s an affiliate link, but when they reach the product page it will most likely change the affiliate link to the original domain. Now of course they could go in their internet files, and delete their cookie files (that’s how affiliate managers keep track of your visitors), but there’s no way of stopping these people. It’s not worth the time worrying about people who are going to take out your affiliate link or cookie from their computer, because these people planned to give you nothing in the first place, and that’s all you’ll get from them. It’s best to be optimistic on the people who are going to use your affiliate link, and bring you a commission.

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

Many of you probably have heard about the popular phrase “Tag and Ping”. It’s when you write a post, and at the bottom o fthe page you put links that have a rel=”tag” coding in the a tag. What that does is tell blog bookmarking sites which categories to categorize your blog in. There are tools out there that will make tags for you, but the problem with that is they usually make the tag using the bookmarking website. An url like http://www.technorati.com/tags/internet+marketing. The problem with that is whenever the person’s done reading your post they’ll usually click these links (not knowing what a tag is).

When this happens they’re directed away from your website. There’s a solution. With free blogging systems such as blogger. You have to use a site like technorati to tag. When you have your own site, you can use that site to tag. Whenever someone clicks on the links then they’ll be directed to your blog.

Here’s how it works. Set up a website with your own domain and hosting. If you’re using a hosting that supports cpanel then you can install a blog software such as Wordpress. Once that’s installed then make a post, and instead of using the tags from technorati you’d use http://www.yourdomain.com/tags/internet+marketing rel=”tag” instead. So when they click on the link it won’t bring them to Technorati, but they’ll stay on your website. There’s also categories that wordpress supports. This is another option that you can use. Good Luck.

Tags: search engines, search engine optimization, seo, internet marketing, business, internet, email, email marketing, email list, make money online, make money, online business, blogs, home based business, marketing, marketing online, computers and internet