Opt-In Lists Defined

What exactly is a targeted opt-in list? Marketers throw this term around quite a bit, so I thought we could take a moment to review.

An opt-in list is a list developed through a sign up form. Users have to enter information about themselves and submit a form, confirming their request for information or membership. A targeted opt-in list is simply an opt-in list where you are segmenting or targeting a certain group or subject area with your list. If you have a website on boating you would want a list of avid boaters not people who are afraid of the water.

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What does double opt-in mean? With double opt-in, users must opt-in twice. First, a user is opting in when they place their name and e-mail address in the subscribe box. Second, when the user clicks to confirm your subscription in the link that has been sent to their e-mail that was provided in the subscription.

What is the difference between an opt-in list and an ezine?

An ezine is a more formal mailing that contains tips, advice and information on a specific topic. Essentially, it is an email magazine that is sent either daily, weekly, or monthly. An opt-in list is less formal, offering tips and advice, but is usually shorter and more time sensitive. This list is usually mailed to announce a new product or program.

Why is having an opt-in list so important?

Most marketers agree that it takes between 9 - 12 follow up emails to get most conversions for your product. Most marketers also agree that one of the best ways to earn an income online is through your own opt-in or email contact list also referred to as a house-list.

Keep this in mind when trying to make a living online... there's power in the list!

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Posted in: list building

Focus Your Marketing In 2009: Top 10 Tips

1. Focus on Building Your List. Don't leave your list to chance. House lists out perform rented or acquired lists 3 to 1. Put some of your budget towards capturing information about prospects who have shown an interest in your product or service.

2. Continue the Dialog. Focus on a two way communication with your customers and prospects. This can be in the form of a newsletter, email, or event.

3. Bundling. Everyone is looking for a bargain. Bundle products or services to generate a higher price point and value for customers. The higher price point may afford some discounts, but don't go too far.

4. Low Cost Options. Give your customers the option to purchase low cost products and alternatives. Develop programs to up-sell customers or offer payment plans and options.

5. Utilize No Cost Marketing. Put a referral program in place. Whether you have your customers offer referrals or ask your sales team to never leave a sale without at least two other opportunities, referrals can go a long way.

6. Focus on Customers. With new business hard to come by and current customers cutting back, providing more value to those customer who you already have will keep them loyal.

7. Measure ROI Effectively. If you're using ppc advertising or other forms on Internet marketing, trim those programs that are marginally profitable. Use those funds to fuel more profitable campaigns.

8. Focus on Green. Consumers gravitate towards companies that are helping the environment, especially during these difficult times. Focus on green and watch the green flow to you.

9. Test. Test. Test. Don't stop testing your products, offers, or markets. As prices rise and available cash diminishes, you'll need to continually focus on improving the performance of even your most traditional marketing.

10. Survey. Work with your customers and prospects to determine what they want and what's most valuable to them. Getting through these tough times will require data and collaboration.

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Posted in: top 10 marketing

Marketing Tip: Succeed Online In These Touch Times

Thinking about a surefire way to improve your online marketing results this year? With a tough economy and smaller marketing budget, succeeding online today is more important than ever. Here are some good marketing tips to help you improve your success.

1. Focus on Keywords

This is the single most important factor for my own online success. You have to make keywords and ranking high for them in all the search engines your main objective if you're marketing online. Might sound obvious, but many beginning marketers don't truly understand how important getting top rankings for your chosen keywords will be in your online success.

Target less competitive long tail keywords to get started and slowly work your way up to more popular keywords. Center your marketing around getting those first page listings for your keywords. Achieve this goal, (especially in Google) and it will be almost impossible for you not to succeed and make a profit with your online marketing even in bad times.

2. Utilize Auto responders and Build Your List

Keeping in contact with potential buyers is mission critical. You must use auto-responders to send follow-up messages to build trustful relationships with your potential customers.

So building a large contact list is essential. That's why the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace can be very effective marketing tools for building this online contact and trust. Truth be told, all these social networks are, more or less, just glorified auto-responders and list builders!

3. Discover Your Unique Selling Position

You must give potential customers some very good reasons for them to buy from you or your links. Offering special bonuses and discounts works wonders for your sales. Some of my most successful pages simply consists of coupons and discounts offered by different companies. If buyers can save money or receive a bonus buying through your links, they most certainly will.

Keep these tips in mind as you focus on getting more from your online marketing. The techniques are simple and affordable. At the same time, they can have a tremendous benefit on your results.

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Posted in: online marketing

Email Marketing Tips For Success

Emailing marketing presents many unique technical, creative and analytical challenges to marketers. Overcoming these challenges becomes essential as marketing budgets tighten and email is required to support sluggish sales. These challenges include:

• Designing effective creative materials when most email clients strip out CSS and turn off the images by default.

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• Managing inbox deliverability, SPAM complaints, white listing, black listing and opt-outs.

• Tracking subscriber opens, clicks, actions and conversions.

That is why it is important to follow a well-designed set of best practices and stay up-to-date on technologies. Partnering with an experienced company is perhaps the best way to accomplish this.

Finding an expert to help you ensure that your email campaigns deliver the highest possible ROI, maximize conversions, and achieve above-average results is essential. In addition, an experienced partner will work with you to ensure your email program excels despite these unique challenges.

Email recipients expect relevant and fresh content. If you decide to send them something else, email subscribers will use their unique ability to unsubscribe. This type of damage can take a long time to fix.

When searching for the perfect email marketing partner, make sure the company has an extensive best practices document that is up to date with the latest trends and technology. Be sure their system provides segmentation capabilities and comprehensive tracking. Finally, ask to see results of previous campaigns and how they helped their other clients achieve above-average results.

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Posted in: email marketing

SEO Elite V4

Improving your search engine rankings is one of the most powerful tools you can use for succeeding online. In the last few years, there have been a significant number of ebooks and software products developed to help you evaluate your niche, your website, and give direction on improving your search engine rankings.

One of the most popular pieces of software is SEO Elite V4, a proven piece of software among the search engine optimization market and used by thousands of website owners.
A common question is whether or not SEO software can truly give you number one rankings.

From my experience, I must say that SEO Elite or other SEO software in and of itself, cannot guarantee top search engine placements. It takes more than an automated program to create that kind of result. Rather, it takes a strong knowledge of basic search engine principles and applying them on a regular basis.

That said, SEO Elite software helps in one very important facet of achieving high search engine rankings: that of building link popularity. Link popularity is a key component of off page SEO that you should focus on.

Building your site’s link popularity involves increasing the number and quality of websites that will link back to yours. This, of course is easier said than done.

SEO Elite helps immensely in this respect. It analyzes backlinks in all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and AllTheWeb. This saves you a great deal of time.
Another plus point of SEO Elite is that you can check out your competition’s linking strategy.

This is another invaluable feature. In a matter of minutes, you can find out a competing website’s complete linking strategy as well as any kind of SEO optimization tricks they may be implementing. You can find out:
1. All the different kinds of anchor text they are using in their incoming links
2. What is their website’s keyword density
3. What is the Page Rank of the websites linking to them

As you can see, this is valuable information that you can use right away.

You can find out whether they are using H1, H2 tags and whether they are using meta tags if any. Basically what SEO Elite provides you is a blueprint you can use to start ranking high on any of the popular search engines.

If all that isn’t enough you can also use SEO Elite to find high Page Rank sites and directories to submit your site to. The software will even automatically do your submissions for you. Again, you save time!

There are far too many benefits and features to list here. SEO Elite is really the combination of many software. Each feature is really a piece of software on its own. I highly recommend SEO Elite.

Michael Fleischner is an Internet marketing expert and blogger. Read his Marketing Blog for helpful online marketing information. For a complete SEO Elite Review and special offer, visit Read a full detailed SEO Elite review at my blog and also download a free copy of "The Webmasters Book of Secrets" worth $47.

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Posted in: SEO Elite V4

Unique Article Wizard Review

What is the easiest, most reliable, and cheapest way to get traffic to your website?

Want the quick answer? Unique Article Wizard

Getting high quality traffic is probably the biggest question asked by both new and established online businesses. You've heard me talk about marketing time and again on this blog. The reality is that, it makes no difference if you are selling a product, promoting affiliate links, or displaying adsense - you need traffic. And loads of it. So how do you do it?

Well, you could buy advertising. Hmm. Expensive. It is easy to spend several thousands of dollars A MONTH through Google.

You could buy text links. Also expensive - and rapidly losing effectiveness in the search engines. Just 100 links can set you back upwards of $2,000. But you need THOUSANDS of links for most niches.

You could buy the "Latest and Greatest" black-hat technique - whether that be "blog and ping", "tag and ping", log-file spamming, blog-comment spamming, or whatever else some clever whiz-kid has come up with. The problem is, by the time the whiz-kid releases it to you, it is already past its sell-by date. Too bad, you missed the boat. And maybe you got your site banned too.

But did you know that there is one, rock-solid, technique that has been quietly working since the very beginning of the internet, is completely immune to changes in search engine algorithms, is 100% legitimate and ethical, takes very little time, and costs almost nothing?

Need your new site listed by the search engines in days rather than weeks or months? This will do it. Need top placings for organic traffic, even in highly competitive markets? This will do it.

What is more, it can even help you with the offline promotion too!

But it gets even better. Over the past year, my good friend Dr. Noel Swanson has put this method onto steroids. He has been quietly using it to build his adsense empire, AND to promote his own products, snagging the Number 1 position in Google from 270 million competing websites as he did so!

And now, having decided that it won't hurt his own business by doing so, he is releasing this system to other smart marketers. People like you, in fact.

Unique Article Wizard

Not only that, but if you act quickly, you can lock in your membership at a ridiculously low price - and promote as many websites as you want at no extra cost!

Please be clear on this. This is NOT the "latest and greatest" fad. It will not be "worn out" in the next month or two. This is an already well-established method that is being quietly used by all the smartest marketers - but that has now been brought to a whole new level of simplicity and power.

If you are paying money for Google adwords and/or any other form of online advertising or traffic generation and NOT using Noel’s system then, quite frankly, you need your head examined!

Go take a good look at it now:

Unique Article Wizard

Your friend,

Michael

P.S. He also has some incredible bonuses - again, they won’t be there for long so don’t put this off.

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Posted in: unique article wizard

Today's Marketing Tip: Do What You Do Best

A solid marketing plan is necessary to increase sales. However, what I have learned is that many people stop doing what they do well specific to marketing when it has and continues to increase sales.

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Several years ago, when Ford had the number one selling car, the Ford Taurus in 1992-1996, and had established thousands of loyal customers, someone in management decided to change the name while changing the overall look of the car. The Ford 500 was born.

Loyal Ford Taurus customers were left out in the cold. Instead of building upon the existing loyal client base, a marketing and sales decision was made to shift the loyal customers into an unknown product. In 2007, the new CEO of Ford saw that the name change was detrimental to the bottom line. recognized how Ford had turned loyal customers away and returned the name of Taurus to the Ford Family for the 2008 model year.

How many times do you as a small business owner, executive or sales professional scrap what you are doing well to try another marketing strategy to increase sales? Possibly, you spoke to a marketing agency that said what you were doing was not effective or too traditional or old-fashioned? For example, you have been doing direct mail campaigns and getting a 2% to 3% response rate. Now you switch to advertising in a radio, television, Internet or print vehicle. You have been sold a bill of goods based upon the impressions, but you now have no way to determine your conversions.

Another example is speaking at local civic organizations to professional associations. You discover that you get one client per delivered speech. Now you decide to abandon that marketing strategy and construct an Internet pay for click marketing campaign or direct mail campaign. The pay for click may take several months before you can determine how many conversions you receive.

When you have an effective marketing campaign that is delivering interested prospects and that you can easily track conversions, then your first action should be to continue that marketing campaign until it is no longer effective. Why in the world would you attempt to switch loyal and established customers in an effort to hope to increase sales? The more logical solution would be to attract more customers using the current product or service. Remember the old adage that success breeds success.

Do you want to increase your sales? Then, you might be interested "Simply Speaking, Increase Sales by..." a truly quality e-book combination workbook that focuses on helping you within the 3 key areas of Marketing, Selling and Planning. Learn more at http://www.processspecialist.com/sales-training-book.htm

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Posted in: marketing

Don't Sound Cliche In Your Marketing

No one should be using these words on their landing page: greatest, hottest, best, fantastic, amazing. These clichés have been used so much over the last 50 years that they have lost the ability to ping a reader's emotions. The average American hears or sees about 12,000 advertisements each week. They have become experts at picking up on weasel words and sensing when they are the target of a snow job. Your sales pitch should come off as being authentic and personal, not like what a carnival hustler yells at everyone walking by his stand.

You want to avoid sounding like a hustler. For example, the worst headline you can use is, “Best Deal on the Most Amazing Book on Earth!” When your prospect sees this kind of headline, it is a huge red flag that signals that what they are reading is nothing more than hype, and certainly not a solution to their problem or need. As soon as your reader feels like she might be the target of a hype job, within four seconds she will hit the back button and take her business to one of your competitors.

Not only can you spot an amaeture marketer by the clichés that he uses in his headlines, but how often he uses an exclamation point. The idea is that using an exclamation point pings the emotion of excitement in his reader. This is simply not true. A business that came to me for help with their sales copy had the headline, "Buy! Buy! Buy!" As if yelling at someone is going to make them buy your product or service.

A property management company asked me to write an ad that would increase call volume on an apartment complex. The units were priced competitively to other similar units in the area, and the location of the apartments were in the middle of town. Defining the unique selling proposition (USP) for the apartments was a challenge, but it seemed to be location. Being that the apartment complex was located in the center of Fresno, it was not really far from anything.

When I looked at the current ad, the headline read, “Best Deal.” Using Claude Hopkins’ reasoning, I dropped the cliché “Best Deal” and used specificity to create a new headline: “Last Chance At The Cheapest Close To Everything Homes In Fresno.” To strengthen the “last chance” claim, I had the price removed from the ad and added a starburst bubble below the headline that read, “Rent So Low We Won’t Publish It Here—Call Now.” To bolster the “Close To Everything” claim, I used specificity in the text of the ad to make a personal connection with readers (pinging the emotion of anger which is a subset of fear): “Angry At Rising Gas Prices? Near Freeways 41, 168, and Over 100 Businesses.”

The ad was a great success, causing an increase in call volume of 250% and resulting in the manager renting all the vacant apartments.

Here is what the father of marketing, Claude Hopkins, wrote about using clichés in your Internet marketing:

Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. They leave no impression whatever. To say, “Best in the world,” “Lowest price in existence,” etc. are at best simply claiming the expected. But superlatives of that sort are usually damaging. They suggest looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make.

By Lance Jepsen author of Profits That Lie Hidden In Your Website

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Posted in: copywriting

Today's Marketing Tip: Instant Article Wizard Pro

As someone doing business online, you know that your marketing is only good if it's seen by others. I've been doing business online since 1995 and I can tell you one thing for certain. Nothing improve your marketing like quality content.

Whether you use original article to improve your search engine optimization or drive tons of information seeking browsers to your website, generating articles is the most important strategy for succeeding online.

If you're like me, you know that quality content is essential, but you might have trouble thinking of and creating unique quality content for your websites. Do you need more content but you are sick and tired of spending countless hours and hours researching each and every article?

Then STOP that manual process of article research and creation!

There's a new tool in town that will blow your mind! Just watch the video below and see for yourself.

Two of the BIGGEST issues are "Good Research Data" and "Writers Block." This tool takes care of both. For those of you who read my blog on a regular basis know that I'm not a big fan of pitching other people's products. That said, I use Instant Article Wizard Pro 2 and recommend it for anyone interested in improve search engine rankings or improving the quality of their website content.

Read more my complete Instant Article Wizard Pro Review or get immediate access and begin creating Instant Articles Now!

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Posted in: instant article wizard pro 2

Today's Marketing Tip: The Power of Affiliate Programs

Have you ever heard of using affiliate programs to get a boost in targeted visitors to your web site? This can be an excellent web site traffic promotion to put visitors in touch with the products or services you have available on your site.

Let’s say you have a product you have created and are selling on your website for $67 (In this example the product will be an e-Book).

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Visitors arriving on your site, pay $67, and can then download the e-Book. Your profit is $67 less any payment processing fees (credit card, etc). With an affiliate program, you pay a commission for every sale of your product or service that is made by a referral of your affiliate. You pay for results only, no sales means no payment.

This means you are getting someone else to market and promote your web site for free!
What does this mean? More targeted visitors of course as more visitors are sent to you by the affiliate.

It's highly likely that a large portion of the visitors may never have found your web site, so in many ways these sales could be thought of as bonus sales, above and beyond those you would ordinarily have made.

The downside is you need to share a percentage of the sale with the affiliate but you should also remember that it is quite possible the customer will buy more from you in the future.

This is the power of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing in general. Not having an affiliate program is an area where lots of marketers fall down.

Assuming you have an opt-in in place, then not only have you made a sale, but you now have a customer you can promote more products to in the future! One of Marketing 101’s golden rule is that it’s far, far easier to sell to an existing customer than to a brand new one. After all they loved your product enough to buy it, right? You have established a relationship with them at this point, and provided that your product has great relevant content they will be hooked!

The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s likely that you will have a higher percentage of sales from your affiliates visitors because (hopefully) the affiliate has already pre-sold his customers on your fantastic product. More than likely the affiliate has built up a solid reputation with his customers (who more than likely have purchased from him in the past) and because he has recommended your product, they come to your website already pre-sold that your product is a decent and worthy one, and at this point you have a visitor who already trusts and believes in your product because of the relationship they have with the affiliate recommending your products.

You need to think beyond the commission you are paying the affiliate and look instead at the long term relationship you have the potential to build with your new customer.

Make sure you look at using affiliate programs to maximize web site traffic. Payment
is only required if the visitor purchases an item, so you have no upfront costs.

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Posted in: affiliate programs