Alle Beiträge von Steve Blalock

Publishing Your eZine “ the Pros

There are several advantages publishing your own eZine can offer to you. If these appeal to you, starting a paperless newsletter can be ideal for you.

The most obvious reason publishing an eZine can be the most ideal business to you is that it is so easy to start. There is no need to invest in starting a brick and mortar business or even staff and heavy machines for that matter.

In fact, you can do this from the comfort of your home as the most important thing you will need is an auto responder equipped with broadcast feature. Auto responders such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com are highly suggested when it comes to publishing your own eZine.

In spite of the low start up cost and monthly fees, you can make money from several profit centers within the spaces of your eZine issues. You can make money from selling advertising space, just to name one.

Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your marketing influence, making you more valuable to product and service owners, so do not be surprised if you receive Joint Venture proposals every so often.

Given some of the in Internet Marketing, publishing your own periodical eZine can be one of the best money vehicles you will ever acquire or even build.

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Use File Sharing for Viral Marketing

You will probably find ten million people online, looking for downloads at any given time. Of course, a lot of them could be looking for pornography or free software but still, reaching a minimum on a million people on any given day does offer some rather intriguing possibilities.

People like using file services to download music for two simple reasons, theyre free, and there is an incredible selection. The fact is Pandoras Box has been opened. In Napsters wake, other quasi-legal services quickly emerged a lot of them. Even if they are closed, others will succeed them.

Major record companies would like to think otherwise but they are probably never going to stop file sharing. Net users are file sharersplain and simple. Long before the Internet came into being, people made cassette tapes of their favorite music for their friendscd burners are so much easier and faster.

How can you use this to help your viral marketing campaign along? Think about this. Once someone downloads your MP3 files and those files are available on that listeners hard drive, viral marketing begins. After two users start sharing your files, suddenly, your music is on the hard drive of a second computerthen a third and on and on. When users are searching and they find your music on a lot of different computers, they are more likely to download the files. Its just a matter of time before youll find your files showing up in more and more places.

No matter what genre music you playRock and Roll, Country, Tejano, Mozart sonatas, Heavy Metal, of Brazilian Jazz, there is an audience for it somewhere.

In this new paradigm, you arent hawking a product, you are offering free music via a medium that lets you be directly connected with your audience.

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Getting a „Buzz“

Viral marketing has matured a bit over the years. There seems to have been a shift to the web not just being seen by agencies and brands as another tick box for any ad campaign, which is significant enough, but now being the medium where a campaign is launched to create a buzz before it hits TV and print. Even before a movie is released which used to be seen as the pre-launch buzz-generation activity. Big business gets it.

Buzz works! It also works for small and start-up businesses, as well. The planning stage of a viral campaign will set out objectives and develop the viral theme for a buzz. There are three core components to any viral campaign and businesses of any size can use them. They are:

1. The creative material: the viral agent that embodies the message you want to spread in a digital format (image, video, text, etc). The trick is to put together material that people will be eager to share with their family and friends…. and these people are much more eager to share advertainment than advertisement.

2. Seeding: distributing and placing the agent online in places that provide the greatest potential spread. Have the viral material downloads or links on specialist viral third-party web sites in order to create awareness and spread before users get to the campaign destination site.

3. Tracking: Measuring the spread of the campaign to provide accountability and prove success. It is absolutely vital that you know what is working. The only way to get that information is to track the results of your seeding.

Lessons have been learned, trends have been developed and there is definitely some science involved in creating a buzz successfully. The buzz technique is here to stay and, if used strategically, it can make a difference to the success of your e-business.

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How to Find Your Niche

Niche marketing is one of the best ways to sell a product or service. By focusing on a niche market you are able to find your target group of customers easily and you can focus in on selling to them. You are able to avoid the hassles of marketing efforts that never pay off.

Finding a niche market, however, may not be as simple as sounds. Sometimes narrowing down your target group of customers to a single niche market can be hard. Here are five tips for finding your niche market:

1. Make a list of people who could buy your product or service. By making a list you can begin to see a pattern in the types of people who would be likely to buy your product and thus you may discover your niche market.

2. Research where the demand is for your product or service. Find out who needs your product and why. This will point you directly towards your niche market.

3. Look at your competition. See who they are advertising to. This is one of the best ways to find your niche market.

4. Go online and do keyword research. Try to think of some main keywords that a person would use to search for the service or product you are selling. Enter these in a search engine and see what types of businesses or websites come up. You should see some type of pattern that will point towards a good niche market.

5. Go with what feels right. Above all else if you see a specific niche market that your service or product will serve then go with it. Do not try to complicate things. If you have an obvious niche market, then use it.

These five tips should help you find a niche market where your product or service will fit right in. Your niche market will make targeted advertising easier which will in turn help you get buying customers attracted to your business.

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Monetizing Your Website With Adsense Is Profitable!

How do you maximize your site?

By earning some money on each click from displaying Adsense ads on it. Many are now realizing that good money can be made from this source of revenue. Try the simple mathematical computation of multiplying those clicks for every page on your website and you get a summation of earnings equivalent to a monthly residual income with little effort made.

Google Adsense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant and text-based Google ads on their websites content pages and earn money in the process. The ads displayed are related to what your users are looking for on your site. This is the main reason why you can monetize and enhance your content pages using Adsense.

How much you will be earning depends on what the advertisers are willing to pay. It will also depend on the keywords required. If the keywords the advertiser has chosen are in high demand, you could receive more dollars per click. On the other hand, low demand keywords will earn you just a few cents per click.

How can you start making profits using Adsense?

1. Sign up for an Adsense account. It will only take a few minutes of your time.

2. When the site is accepted, you will be receiving a clip code to include in your web pages. You can insert this code on as many pages or web sites that you want. The AdWords will start appearing immediately after.

3. You will be earning a few cents or some dollars per click when someone starts clicking on the AdWords displayed on any of your web pages. Trying to earn false revenues by repetitively clicking on your own ads is a no-no. This will result in a penalty or the possibility of your site being eliminated. The money you have already earned may be lost because of this.

4. View your statistics. Adsense earnings can be checked anytime by logging into your web site account.

Once you got your account working, you may still want to pattern it to the many sites that are earning more money than you are. It is important to note that there are factors affecting how your website will perform and the amount of money it will give you.

It is very common that when a site is earning money, the owner wants to make more out of what they are getting already. It usually takes some time combined with trial and error to attain what you want for your Adsense sites.

Time and some important factors that you can practice and use.

How do you increase your Adsense earnings?

1. Choose one topic per page. It is best to write a content for your page with just a few targeted phrases. The search engine will then serve ads that are more relevant which will then result in higher clickthoughs.

2. Using white space around your ad. This can make your ad stand out from the rest of your page so visitors can spot them easily. There are also other choices of colors you can use, provided by search engines, which can harmonize the color of your ad with the web page color.

3. Test your ad placement. It is recommended to use the vertical format that runs down the side of the web page to get more positive results. You can also try both horizontal and vertical formats for a certain period of time to see which one will give you better results. 4. More content-based pages. Widen the theme of your website by creating pages that focus more on your keyword phrases. This will optimize the pages for the search engines. It can not only attract traffic but also make them more relevant for the AdWords to be displayed. 5. Site Build It. This is the perfect tool to be used for creating lots of Adsense revenues. Site Build It has all the tools necessary to quickly achieve a keyword-rich site that can rank high in the search engines. This will also produce a flow of traffic to your site of highly targeted visitors.

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Houston Museum goes Viral

The Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) was chosen to showcase the world-famous Exhibition for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. HMNS quickly realized that while the exhibit was expected to generate a great deal of interest, it didnt have a lot of appeal for their core audience. The success of the exhibition, therefore, would rest in how it was marketed.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science quickly called in Spur Digital to help reach the targeted demographic audience and generate interest in the Exhibit. HMNS was, also, hoping to acquire new members to further their future revenue.

Spur digital worked with HMNS to identify the target market for the campaign and developed an integrated online media plan. The campaign featured an online contest that was marketed through targeted online media outlets including relevant Web sites, Search Engines and third party E-mail lists. Viral marketing was an important component of the campaign, so Spur developed an innovative strategy to get people to refer their friends.

Spur identified the target audience as males 18 to 34 years old who were fans of action and fantasy films, frequent video game players and movie renters, tech-savvy who generally didnt hang out at museums. Based on this information, Spur chose search engine advertisements that would accompany specific search words, dedicated e-mail advertisements, sponsored e-mail advertisements, banner ads on web sites targeted toward the desired audience, and e-mails to the HMNS list.

Did it work? You bet! The results were excellent. The impact of the viral marketing effort was astounding – over 23% of registrants came originated from the Tell-A-Friend feature. The direct marketing efforts yielded impressive results as well. In total, the 12 week, locally-targeted online campaign yielded more than 2 million targeted impressions, 40,000 unique visits, almost 12,000 and 6,000 invitations sent by friends at a cost per action of less than $3.00. These contributed to the record attendance of almost 100,000 over 3 months.

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Decide the Nature of Your eZine

When choosing a topic to publish your eZine on, you must consider some important success factors that can determine the flow and goal of your eZine.

We suggest you to write non-time sensitive contents such as short tips, mini stories and interviews. Doing so enables you to create content in advance so that you can conveniently dispense to your subscribers at a later schedule.

Topic-wise, you will do well to cater to a market that will always be on demand for the kind of content you offer. And by this, I mean that you should zero in onto a demand that has been, is and will always be there.

Relationships and dating are niches that have been on Earth long before the World Wide Web came up, for example. The food niche will always be there as long as there are chefs cooking for anyone with a stomach to fill.

Having said that, you also want to have products and services of your own or an affiliate for you to endorse to your mailing list and make even more money.

This is also the reason why the Internet Marketing niche is one of the hottest niches around, as products and services are created almost around the clock. As long as there are Internet Businesses cropping out, there will always be needs to be fulfilled.

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Write a Landing Page that Converts

Most people have no idea how to write a landing page that converts. Instead, they throw together elements that they have seen used in other landing pages “ but usually do not put them together in the same way the owner of the successful landing page did.

One major problem is copy… and that’s fine. Not everyone is going to be an excellent writer “ nevermind a copywriter. But as someone selling a product or trying to build a list, it is important that you know your strengths and weaknesses “ and that you either spend the time to overcome them or hire someone else to do it for you.

With copywriting, for instance, it is important to use a mix of compelling sales points with powerful psychological triggers. Most people who create a salespage miss these elements.

For instance, they might concentrate so much on building hype that they don’t actually explain what solution they are providing “ and for whom they are providing it. If I don’t have a specific problem that your product solves, why would I buy it?

Now, if they fail to insert in psychological triggers, such as scientifically proven, guaranteed, and shocking, no one will feel compelled to continue reading, as the benefits will have a low or average perceived value.

In addition to these problems, some salespages lack coherency and direction. The copy looks amateurish and it doesn’t slowly grind forward, breaking down the visitor’s resistance to the sale “ and compelling him or her to buy more and more at each sales point.

Additionally, if there aren’t multiple calls to action “ another form of psychological trigger “ then a potential visitor might never feel compelled enough to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

In addition to careful copywriting, there are other important things you must take into consideration when writing a landing page that converts. It is extremely important to build a compelling case for a time-bound offer.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to invent fake deadlines and constantly revise them each week. This is a good way to guarantee your complete loss of credibility in the shortest amount of time possible.

However, when planning your copy, you will want to make sure that you constantly urge the reader to act immediately by inserting a number of calls to action, as I’ve mentioned previously.

You could consider using fly-ins or pop-ups to create more urgency “ or to make a time-bound offer. Perhaps you can use a countdown to build urgency (i.e., when someone arrives at your landing page, they have five minutes to purchase the product at the lowest price).

When you’re creating a squeeze page, you might want to employ slightly different tactics. Rather than building a compelling case with multiple triggers and calls to action over the course of 1000 words, you may want to simply condense all that into a compelling headline and one paragraph of benefits.

For a completely free-to-join squeeze page, you more than likely won’t have a considerable amount of resistance to joining, unless the visitor a) doesn’t see any benefits; and b) suspects that you will sell their email address to spammers.

Both of these problems are relatively easy to overcome. In your headline, simply state the exact benefits they will receive for joining “ as always, mixing in psychological triggers. In your first paragraph of copy, give them a compelling reason to join now (i.e., the price might go up, the list might become private, you’ll get this amazing report).

Now, to overcome the second problem, simply include a short line under your opt-in form that explains that you will not “ under any circumstances “ spam them or sell or give away their email address and name.

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The Magic of Ad Swap

Here is a technique you can implement to build your mailing list for no additional cost. I call it using subscribers to make subscribers like much in the context of using money to make money.

This simple list building formula can be summed up in two words: ad swap.

Generally, you trade advertisements with other eZine publishers, preferably of the same mailing list size or bigger. You broadcast the eZine publishers advertisement to your mailing list while the eZine publisher endorses your ad to his list. Yes, you are actually cross endorsing or cross promoting each others offer to each of your mailing list.

Your advertisements goal should be to get as many subscribers possible from the other eZine publishers mailing list to sign up for yours.

The result: you grow your mailing list. This method does not require money, which means it can be done for free. And the return of subscribers? Infinite!

You only have to do this with one eZine publisher at least once, because his subscribers who are also your subscribers can now be followed up within your mailing list.

Perform ad swaps with as many eZine publishers as possible and soon, you will have a huge mailing list of your own “ built free.

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E-books and Affiliate Programs

Some E-books combine very well with an affiliate program. This situation could be when the affiliate receives some extra benefit from promoting the viral message, like being able to brand your E-book with his affiliate links. You benefit from increased traffic on your website because the affiliate is willing to promote the E-books for you.

Be absolutely certain that your message includes a clear call to action. There shouldnt be any doubt whatsoever about what you want the recipients to do. Make sure that the instructions are perfectly clear so that recipients know HOW to act. The action that you require should be simple and obvious as well. Dont make things complicated or it will confuse the reader, such as by adding numerous links.

Remember the K.I.S.S. principle…. Keep It Simple Stupid! The incentive should be clear to those you want to take an action. Readers will look at your offering for about seven seconds before they move on. If it takes longer than that for them to figure out what it is you want them to do, they will move on. Dont make your message difficult to comprehend. If you do, chances are you will lose them. You must respect your readers enough to express your message clearly.

Once you are sure you have an E-book that will be of value to an affiliate program, approach them with your idea and be able to show that it will be mutually beneficial.

Viral Marketing using E-books is one of many techniques that attract customers to you and subscribers to your website. This also allows you to reach highly targeted people. You will very soon find out that this is an excellent way of increasing sales, subscribers and referrals.

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