It has been said that your opt in list is worth its weight in gold. In fact Bath and Body works estimates their list of ten million names to be worth $18 per name. That’s 180 million dollars – certainly worth its weight in gold.
Here’s how to build your subscriber list:
Coupons and discounts. Often times a person will go into business, develop a clientele or customer base and not really have a list. Later they may begin to build a list however the early customers are left off of it. Bath and Body Works built their list by offering in-store customers a coupon for a free lip gloss. The coupon had to be emailed to the customer which of course required them to provide an email address and subscribe to receive information from Bath and Body Works.
An internet based business can use this concept of giving away a coupon or a discount in much the same manner. Current clients, those not on your list, can receive a separate offer via mail and a form can be posted on your website to attract new customers.
Free Content. Reports, newsletters, e-courses, downloads, and seminars are often offered as an incentive to build a subscriber list. The key to this strategy is to promote the free content in your marketing and advertising strategies rather than promoting your business. It’s a much different strategy however a compelling headline and the promise of free information is a much stronger draw than a pitch for your services.
When offering free content, consider taking these three steps:
Create the content.
Create the signup form on your website.
Create a marketing strategy to draw subscribers in.
A marketing strategy can include a direct mail campaign where you rent a list and contact those targeted prospects. It can include a very specific AdWords campaign, banner advertising and joint venture list exchanges.
Consider using the same report to get current customers to subscribe. Send them a letter via email or mail offering the report. A month later, send a similar letter with some variations to those who didn’t subscribe, and then a month later send another letter still different from the first two to the remaining folks who haven’t subscribed. This strategy is subtle enough to get the majority of your customers to subscribe without seeming too aggressive, which could turn off some current customers.
Subscriber lists are a valuable way of connecting with prospects. The email address gives you the ability to communicate beneficial information, valuable products and services, special promotions and any interesting news. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your customers and prospects and yes, it is worth its weight in gold.
Building a website is the first step to developing an online presence. The next step is to get the word out. However telling people about your website and new business is only the start. Using the internet, and mass communication technologies associated with the internet, you can reach thousands of potential customers every day.
Social networking.
Social networking is an amplified version of what goes on at a local business association meeting. Social networking occurs on forums, membership sites, chat rooms, social networking sites like Linked In, and even on blogs and it offers many unique benefits.
Social networking gives you the opportunity to network on your down time. Rather than, or in addition to, attending local networking events, social networking can occur from your couch. Social networking also offers the added benefit of connecting with people more frequently than a monthly business meeting.
The benefits of social networking include not only spreading the word about your business, it also offers business owners a valuable way to connect with other like minded individuals to form partnerships, mentorships, and of course customer relationships.
To get started in social networking there are two basic approaches:
Network where your prospects and customers hang out online. For example, if you’re in the health and fitness industry then you might want to join a fitness forum.
Network where your industry hangs out online. For example, if you’re in the health and fitness industry you might join a membership site for fitness trainers.
Find a few sites that have a fair amount of members and register. Create your profile and be sure to include your website address in your signature. That’s how you’re going to promote it. Spend a little bit of time each week participating in the community. Offer valuable insight and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Article marketing.
Article marketing is an easy way to begin to generate traffic. The concept is pretty straight forward, you write articles (or hire someone to write them) submit them to an article directory like ezinearticles.com. Within the body of your article you may sometimes embed text links that lead to your website or sales page and you may include a link in your bio. The article directory publishes your article on their site.
People search for information on your topic, their search brings them to the directory, they read your article and then visit your site
OR
They publish your article on their website, keeping all of the content, links, and your bio 100% in tact. People visit their website, read your article and then click through to visit your website.
Article marketing is free. The only cost is your time and if you outsource your content. Additionally, it is a superior way to promote your business and related website.
Advertising is another method to drive traffic to your website and Google’s AdWords is by far and away one of the most commonly used advertising methods. It has reached such widespread appeal and popularity because businesses only pay for results. When you advertise in a magazine for example, you pay a flat fee for the ad. Perhaps the magazine has a subscription base of 100,000 so you can assume that 100,000 people see your ad but you don’t know for sure and there really isn’t a good way to test it.
With Google AdWords, you basically set a budget and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Clicking on your ad takes them directly to your website – where your sales copy will work its magic. So for example, you only want to spend $50/month on advertising once you’ve tallied enough click throughs and your $50 is spent, your ad will stop running. It is important to note that all keywords are not the same. Some words are more popular than others and therefore ads placed for those keyword searches will cost more than less popular words. For example say someone searches for “cardstock paper” and ad targeted to prospects searching for ‘Cardstock paper” may cost $.25 per click, however someone searching for “laptop computer” may cost $5.00 per click.
The beauty is that the budge is yours to establish and it directly relates to your traffic. As your campaign progresses you can fine tune your ads for the most effective click-through and conversion rates.
What is worse than not marketing your website? It is getting bad backlash from doing the wrong thing. At least if you aren’t marketing you still have the opportunity to do so. When you are getting a bad rap, people may avoid you like the plague. Here are some marketing do's and don’ts to keep in mind as you go forward from this point.
DO’S
1. Keep the name of your website short and to the point. When it comes to reading something on the Internet, shorter is better. People lose interest quickly and a long name will not be catchy enough to stay on their minds for very long. This is a business that you want to keep going for a long time. Choose your words carefully.
2. Use your signature line in forums and on emails. The signature line is not just for your name anymore. Include the name of your business, a brief description of what it is about, and the website link to find your main business page. Be sure to check with the forum administrators to find out what you can and can’t do as far as trying to get free advertising.
3. Do advertise offline to the local community. The local community is another sphere of influence that will help the word spread about your business. If money is an issue, advertise in church directories, newsletters, advertising books for special events, and the word of mouth method. Talking to people in the beauty shop, barber shop, church, and the Rotary Club meeting can earn you hundreds more visitors to the site.
4. Learn all that you can about search engine optimization. The idea is to be ranked somewhere on the first page of search results for as many search engines as you can. Most people only look on the first page because they assume correctly that they are the best places to find the information needed.
DON’TS
1. If you ignore the rules of posting information about your business on forums, they will boot you out. This type of blatant solicitation is prohibited on most forums. They let you use your signature line but adhere to the rules of what you can say.
2. Adding a lot of extra frills to your website page will not make it more attractive to the search engines. People who visit may like the bells and whistles but they won’t find you to admire them if you are consistently placed low in the page rankings.
3.Take a long time to respond to customer service issues. When customers send you email about a broken product or have a question, answer promptly. If you do not they will tell everyone that they know about your rotten service. That type of word of mouth marketing you can do without.
Marketing strategies will either help or hurt you. It takes time to see what works best so try as many as you can. Remember that the object is to attract customers, not anger them.
How many hours a day do you work? If you’re like many self-employed business owners, the answer may lie somewhere in the realm of 40-80 and that is often while taking care of children, pets, a spouse, and other family members. It can be a lot of stress to own a business and handle every single task and responsibility. That is just one reason to consider outsourcing – save your sanity and spend more time focusing on you and your family.
Another reason is that your time may be better spent focused on particular tasks while letting other specialists handle tasks that are time consuming or perhaps beyond your list of skills. “But I don’t have enough income to outsource,” you say. You might be surprised. Here’s how to outsource on a budget:
Step 1. Calculate your net profits. Net profits are your total or gross profits less your expenses. You can use your net profits for the past month or the past year, which ever makes more sense.
Step 2. Determine how many hours a week you work. Do you really work 80 hours a week? Track your time for a week or two, be diligent, and see how many hours you spend working.
Step 3. Divide your net profits for a month or year by the number of hours you worked. If you’re using a year of net profits, multiply the number of hours you work in a week by the number of weeks you worked last year. If you worked 40 hours a week all year long it would be 40-52 or 2080. Assuming you made 40,000 and worked 2080 hours your hourly value would be about $19.00/hour.
Step 4.
Determine what your more profitable tasks are and what your least profitable tasks are. Look at the tasks that take you the longest to complete. Perhaps updating and posting content to your website takes you three hours a week and while it certainly helps your business and your SEO, it doesn’t directly generate profits like consulting with clients does. In this scenario it would make sense for you to fill those hours you normally spend updating your website with consulting time and hire or outsource the website tasks.
Step 5. Find and interview candidates for the task. A great place to start is right in your own backyard. Do any clients or associates know someone who might be interested in the job? You’re outsourcing so you’re not responsible for taxes or benefits. Compare rates, experience, and references.
Step 6. Once you have a candidate in mind, you may want to hire on a trial basis just to make sure the set up is working for the both of you.
Step 7. Create outsourcing goals. If your goal is to make more money, then spend your newly found free time toward that goal. If your goal is to find more time in the day to spend with your family, then hire toward that goal and spend your newly found free time with your family.
The key to outsourcing on a budget is to start small, it’s fine to outsource one task at a time. Pay attention to your outsourcing goals and the tasks you outsource. If it takes you 10 hours to design a webpage but it only takes an expert 1 hour, depending on your hourly value chances are your money is better spent outsourcing that job.
Go Ahead and Pat Yourself on the Back- You Deserve It
Goal setting is a vital part of business planning. It helps to keep us on track and measure our progress. Meeting goals makes us feel good and keeps us motivated. But it is still important to reward ourselves when we achieve the things we have set our minds to.
That's not to say that you have to buy yourself a new car for every goal you achieve. That could get rather expensive. But the reward should be appropriate considering how lofty the goal was and how much achieving it impacted your business.
Small Rewards for Small Goals
Every goal doesn't have to be a huge accomplishment. Smaller goals keep us motivated until we can reach more significant milestones. This is especially important when getting started. It may take a while to build the momentum necessary to attain loftier goals, and we need to reward ourselves for the smaller things in order to remain focused on achieving the larger ones.
Smaller goals can be the steps necessary to achieve a larger goal. For example, your big goal may be to have a certain number of clients in 6 months. Breaking this up into gaining 1/6 of that number each month could give you a monthly goal to work for.
Deciding ahead of time what your reward will be can give you an extra incentive. For small goals, you could pick out a purse or a pair of shoes you've had your eye on. Putting a picture of the reward up on your office wall will serve to remind you what you can look forward to if you meet your goal.
Big Rewards for Big Goals
When you reach your larger goals, you will have even more to celebrate, so your reward should be a big deal. Think of a big-ticket item that you have wanted for a long time, or perhaps a trip for yourself and your spouse or family.
The larger reward will require some advance planning. It's important to be sure you'll be able to afford it once you've achieved the goal in question. If you reach the goal and are not able to get the reward you had your heart set on, that will lead to disappointment. And disappointment does nothing to motivate or boost morale.
Once you've determined that the reward is feasible, you could put up pictures to remind yourself of it just as you do with the smaller rewards. This gives you incentive to work harder to achieve your goals in both the short term and the long term.
Setting goals is important to a business, but rewarding ourselves for attaining them is equally important. By giving ourselves something to look forward to, we can motivate ourselves to reach for the stars. Once we get there, we will be ready to aim even higher so that we can continue to reward ourselves.
Running a business requires us to perform a variety of tasks. Some of these we enjoy and excel at. Others we do just because they are necessary to the operation of our business. When you don't have employees, it comes with the territory.
Outsourcing can help us get the things that we're not good at, don't have time for, or simply don't enjoy done. But when we're getting started in business, it's sometimes hard to come up with the money to hire help, even if it's not a full-time employee. So how can we outsource with little or no money?
Barter
Small business owners and freelancers who are in the same boat as you may be interested in bartering. Not only does bartering get you what you need with no cash spent, it also opens the door for referrals. If you do a good job for the person you're bartering with, he just might recommend you to someone else who could use your services.
Online classified ads and networking forums are two good places to seek bartering partners. Offline networking groups may also offer some bartering opportunities. No matter where you find someone to barter with, make sure that an agreement is put into writing regarding the exchange of services. This will protect both parties in case of a dispute.
Think Small
If you like the idea of outsourcing but have a limited budget, you could start small. You may not be able to outsource everything you would like to at first, but when you're overloaded with work, every little bit helps.
Instead of trying to outsource an entire project, perhaps you could outsource a portion of it and do the rest yourself. For example, maybe you need a website designed. If you can use a website builder, you might consider designing the site yourself and hiring someone to do the graphics only. Or if you hate accounting but can find your way around computerized accounting software, you could keep the books yourself and just hire an accountant to handle your taxes.
Another way you could start small is to outsource small tasks to a virtual assistant. VAs can often handle a wide variety of tasks, and many of them will work as independent contractors. So you could hire one to help you catch up on correspondence, bookkeeping, or other work that takes up a lot of your time.
Outsourcing is not just for companies with million-dollar budgets. Small business owners can hire outside parties to do work that they don't have the time or inclination to do as well. Even if you're only able to outsource on a limited basis, it could save you a surprising amount of time and money.
How to Set Up a Daily To Do List for your business
A to-do list is one thing no business owner should start their day without. Planning is crucial to your business success and the better prepared you are for each day, the more you'll accomplish.
How many times have you started a to do list only to leave it laying around incomplete and never to look at it again, at least not until you find it buried under the 30 other to-do lists you never finished?
To do lists are a business owner's best friend and here are a few tips for making the most of your own.
1.Create your list before your day gets started. You can do this at the end of the previous day or first thing each day, but don't start on anything until you've created your list.
2. Prioritize items on your list. Sometimes putting tasks in order of importance isn't an easy task, so first just jot down everything you know you need to do and then go back over and number each item, starting with 1, in order of priority.
3. Follow your list in order. Once you have your list prioritized don't devate from that list by jumping around to things further down the list until the tasks above are complete.
4. Allow for changes. Don't get down on yourself if something pops up in your day that you have to incorporate into your list. Simply, add it, do it and then keep moving down your original list.
5.Mark items complete. By checking off items on your list as you complete them you will see yourself making progress and at the end of the day you will feel a sense of accomplishment. Even if you don't complete everything on your list, it's ok you can still look back and say "I DID get this done today!"
6. Be reasonable. You know there are only so many hours in a day, so don't overload your list with tasks that you know good and well will take more time than you have available.
7. Be as detailed as possible. Don't overload your list, but also don't forget the smaller tasks throughout the day that will take time away from other bigger duties.
8. Keep your to-list in sight at all times. By keeping your list out from under papers, books, etc. it will be a reminder that you have a plan and that plan is going to help you move forward with your business.
9. Throw it away at the end of the day. At the end of each day, transfer any unfinished tasks to the next day's to-do list and throw the current day's list in the garbage can. Seeing multiple incomplete to-do lists lying around all the time is not good on your self-esteem, so say sayonara at the end of everyday.
You'll also give yourself a well deserved boost each time you can cross off something on your to-do list and feel much more organized.
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There are many different ways to make money on the Internet but we will focus on one particular idea, creating the best online business. There are as many ways to make money on the Internet as possible but there are not a great deal of tried and true methods that can work for different people.
A method that we will focus on today is creating a website in a small but profitable niche. What all businesses come down to is finding and maintaining a strong and solid customer base that can make them money on a regular basis. This is true no matter what type of business this is, Internet or retail. The only way that a company makes money is by attracting an capturing a solid base of customers and then building off of that. If you are able to build such a solid base of highly responsive customers, you will have the opportunity to print your own cash on demand.
The key to creating the best online business is to help you identify a niche that you can work in. This can be a bit difficult at times but you must make sure that it has a few characteristics. First, you will want the subject to be something that you are interested in hopefully. To really create a website that people will want to keep visiting, you will have to have a great deal of information and different ways to keep them interested. You will probably need to be researching these topics quite a bit so a strong interest within the field will help you.
You will also want your website to be built around those keywords so that Internet searches bring up your website among the first page of search results. Once this is done, you should start gaining to your website. By constantly writing articles, you can develop a repeat client base which you can begin selling to. When you are done developing the website, you will probably need some sort of product to sell. This is not necessarily something that you have to come up with. If you go to CbMall.com, you will find many different products that you can probably sell within your particular niche. You will get a share of the profits and the system is automated so that you just have to guide your clients over to that particular website and everything else is taken care of for you.
If you decide and look into developing a newsletter then you can promote a product at the end of the newsletter, which could bring you in a great deal of money. This is where you can make a lot of money. If you want to succeed, give it a try, but keep testing an testing as it takes a lot of time and effort to create a strong and profitable website.
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Zoobie The Internet Marketing Newbie (Episode 1)
Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earned $436,797+ in 2002 and now earns MUCH MORE than that ... just by selling other people's stuff online!
In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the 'Net.
Frequently revised and updated to reflect industry changes, the Super Affiliate Handbook now consists of 236 pages and 124 screenshots that will show you step-by-step how to become a Super Affiliate. You'll learn how to pick the best affiliate programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.
. Net profits are your total or gross profits less your expenses. You can use your net profits for the past month or the past year, which ever makes more sense. 
