WordPress Howto Spotter » Money Making

How to Choose Words That Have Some Traffic

Alex Sysoef — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:46:29 +0000

If you are looking for pay per click (PPC) terms that are less competitive and less expensive, choose words that have some traffic, according to this keyword tool, but fewer advertisers. If your keywords for AdWords have too little traffic, Google will penalize your campaign by raising the price per click and lowering the position of your ads.

Google’s main interest with all advertisers is that you get as many clicks as possible. This is good for them, but may not be good for you. That is why when doing PPC, you must target your keywords very carefully to get the results you want at the lowest possible cost.

You need to achieve a certain number of click-throughs in order to maintain your account in good standing. Of course, you can always start a new campaign, but it is best to try to maximize your results from the beginning.

Another important thing about PPC with AdWords is that you need your long-tail keywords to appear in your ad, as well as on the landing page that links from your ad. One additional point of note is that Google is penalizing ebook marketers who use the “search network” as opposed to the “content network.”

If you are lucky enough to get one of your articles high on the list, you will get a fair amount to a very large amount of traffic, depending on the keywords you used.

What is page rank and how does it relate to your keyword research?

Google measures the quality of websites and web pages with a measurement device they call page rank. Every website you visit has a page rank that can be seen with the Google Toolbar (refer to the SEO module for details). Page ranks go from 0-10, with 10 being the highest (and extremely rare). The higher your page rank, the more Google values your Web page/site relative to other pages/sites. Sometimes you may see a blank in the rectangle. That means the site is not ranked, which can indicate that the site has been banned or penalized by Google.

Some article publication sites have high page ranks (such as ezinearticles.com PR 6), which gives your articles a chance of getting more highly ranked by Google. If you are lucky enough to get one of your articles high on the list, you will get a fair amount to a very large amount of traffic, depending on the keywords you used.

It is often easy to tell if keywords are competitive by looking at the page rank of the top ranked pages under a Google search on a given keyword phrase. If the page rank of the top results is 2 or less, you have a reasonable chance of getting your article high on that keyword.

About The Author

Bill Achola is the Owner of SEOArticleWriteService.com. If you’d like to learn how to drive quality traffic to your blog site, check out his Blog SEO Guide

Do You Have 4 Minutes? Than Allow me to give you Secure, Web 2.0 Enabled, Search Engine Optimized, Cash Sucking WordPress Blog! Create a Blog in 4 Minutes (Video Proof).

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How to Plan Your Website for Next Year’s Holiday Discounts This Year

Alex Sysoef — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:14:05 +0000

You’re running your website and you’re seeing growth. And then comes the glorious time right around October to December where there is a sudden and great influx in the amount of people visiting your website and giving you business. This holiday season, as reported by numerous news agencies, was one of the best ones for profit online. In other words, companies that sell online are seeing more business than ever before.

However, if you’re a small to medium size online retailer rather than one of the big giants like 6PM and Finish Line, it might be more difficult to get people running to your website to make purchases rather than going to the big giants who also probably sell the same product as you do and, perhaps, at a slight discount. How can you be prepared for the holiday season next year by starting now?

What I’d advise doing is starting your email list. In other words, starting today, you want to start collecting people’s email addresses. You can do it anyway you want, but one of the more successful ways it to trade a coupon for the address. The person signs up and once they confirm their email account, they then get an email that includes a coupon for whatever percent you want. This is great for two reasons.

First, you’re getting their email which means you’ll be able to communicate with them whenever you want to. Second is that you’ve now given a coupon away which might result in some business. Sure, it’s less revenue than you normally would get, but it’s still a sale and you’ve now got that email.

Now that you’ve got the email account, the next twelve months needs to be strategizing and beginning to get into the hearts and minds of these potential customers. Don’t just start spamming them your latest coupons because they’re more likely to unsubscribe. Bide your time and wait for the real big time when they are really looking to purchase: the holidays.

However, throughout the year, do what you can to increase engagement with your subscribers. If you aren’t already doing so, try and get them to follow you on Twitter and Facebook. The best way to do that is to say that you sometimes post coupons on Twitter and/or Facebook that you don’t email.

You might be asking, “why should I try and get them on Twitter and Facebook when I’ve already got their email?” That’s a good question and let me explain. If you mention your coupon once in email, they might come check it out, but they might not. But, if they see the exact same coupon in their email, on Twitter and on Facebook, they’re more inclined to use it. It’s like advertising: sometimes the person needs to see the same ad five times before it clicks in their minds. If they see the coupon often, they’re more likely to get it.

Throughout the year, send emails out about new products that might be coming out. For example, if you’re an online retailer of designer shirts, talk about the new line that Ralph Lauren is releasing. You can link to it on your website, but don’t make it about the sale. Just reveal the information about it. If the person is interested, they’ll buy it. But, even if they’re not, it’ll intrigue someone who has subscribed to the email.

Finally, when October and November come, the time is now for you to begin marketing. Send an email out to your subscribers a few weeks before Black Friday/Cyber Monday telling them about the big sale that you’re going to have. Tweet about it and post it on Facebook so that those subscribers see it a couple of times.

Then, a few hours before the actual event, send another email out to them. In this email, maybe include an even better coupon. Basically, this will work on their psychology that says “the deal is in a couple hours and you’re going to save even more!” Even if this was the percentage you were going to offer to begin with, by starting a bit lower and rising to it, they’re psyche will be on your side.

Finally, rinse and repeat. Even after the sale is over, don’t forget to continue engaging with your followers. This is how you can continuously get them to buy from you year in and year out. And that’s how you grow your business. The holidays are great; however, it takes a bit of creativity to get business from the big companies.

Guest Post By: Jay is an Internet marketer who helps companies earn revenue online. By researching companies such as 6PM and Finish Line, he’s able to help smaller retailers earn online. He runs a small coupon and discount website that offers info about the finish line promotion and the 6pm discount code for free shipping.

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How to Find and Train Employees Online

Alex Sysoef — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:53:57 +0000

Online businesses have a decisive advantage over offline ones, provided they have the skills, knowledge, and patience to leverage them. One fairly obvious advantage is the likely absence of a lot of normal expenses that an offline business must pay – such as rent for an office or storefront, and the associated utilities. You will likely need to find and train employees online, however. And this brings with it a whole new set of problems. How do you find reliable, hard-working employees online? Furthermore, how do you train them without having them physically present at a training seminar or session?

There are a lot of misconceptions about finding employees online, and a great deal of tactics that, from personal experience, simply don’t work. If you want to find the employees you need to make your business successful, start with the place where these employees learn the skills necessary to be successful.

Finding Employees Online

Some of my favorite targets for finding employees online, and the ones with which I’ve had the most success, are college job boards. For the most part, you can avoid the scams and spams that plague sites like Craigslist and Elance, and target college students that are likely hungry to find work. Considering my alma mater as an example, check out Northern Michigan University’s off-campus job board for an idea on how these postings work. As a side note, for all you link-hungry web developers out there that started foaming at the mouth when you saw a potential opportunity to get an easy link from an .edu domain, it’s not worth the effort:

These pages rarely get indexed
The links are temporary

But if your goal is to hire employees, I’d recommend college job boards as a primary, if not sole strategy. Better yet, post on college job boards in your area so you have the chance to attract some local employees. You might decide to shift to brick and mortar offices in the future, and having a local online employee gives you the option of having the occasional live meeting. When I was involved in one start-up, we not only posted on all of the community college and university job boards in the area, but also made a point to attend the schools’ job fairs and post fliers in the English and Computer Science departments. Don’t be afraid to advertise online jobs in offline places.

There are some larger directories that connect you to college students around the country, but most sites that do so are designed similar to CLEAR wireless’ coverage finder, which means that you might have to sift through each state and city to find employees. Additionally, the national resources usually charge a fee to list a job, while college job boards are often free.

If you decide not to target college job boards, you should still stay away from large job directories like Craigslist. Instead, try targeting industry-specific job websites that have less spammy advertisements, and have more potential for having the people you need. If you need a content writer, for example, you might consider posting on sites like FreelanceWritingGigs.com or TheWriteJobs.com.

Whichever job boards or methods you choose to advertise employment opportunities, keep these things in mind when writing the posts:

Be as specific and clear as possible. What specific skills should the employee posses?
Avoid mentioning compensation – you can discuss this during the interview (but mention it early).
Explain exactly what the employee will be expected to do (don’t say “blog writer” – say “finance and credit blog writer.”)
Be honest about the time commitment – just how “part-time” is the job?

Most importantly, get samples of their work. A resume is easy to beef up. If you plan to hire a writer, pay them a reasonable wage to write a short sample for you. Don’t accept pre-made samples – you have no idea how long it took them to prepare that sample, if they actually created it at all. This is a small investment to avoid a big headache later.

Training Online Employees

One quick note about training online employees – tread very carefully with compensation and training. If you are hiring a person on contract, meaning they will be paid a set rate per delivery (popular with online writing, programming, and design jobs), you cannot require the employee to be available during a specific time period. You can offer a payment to cover training time if you plan to do it through a set time-frame or meeting. But, it’s often best to set up a training package or dedicate a private portion of your website to training new employees.

One of the best ways to train new employees is to start small. You can’t expect an online employee to learn 50 new things in their first week. Instead, choose one area where their skills will be the most valuable and train a new employee in that area first. Put together a small training package that can be transmitted through email – usually consisting of some .PDFs, video files, articles, and checklists. Don’t forget to train new employees to use your systems and processes as well. For example, if you use a project management system like Central Desktop, BaseCamp or Smartsheet, make sure the employee understands how those systems work first.

As part of the training, be sure to include some instructions on how the employee will handle the daily problems that can arise. Once again using content writing as an example, your training might include:

What problems will result in a rewrite/rejection of an article. How to handle a rewrite request. Whether rejected articles will still be paid.
How deadlines work. While you can’t ask a contract employee to work 9-5, you can request that any assignment be completed in a certain timeframe.
What ownership they retain over their content, if any. When dealing with ghost writers, write a contract that each new employee must sign where they surrender all rights to the content they write for you upon payment for the content, including their right to claim it as their own work.

Remember to use the mastery system, where new employees master one task at a time before moving on to another. For content writers, this might be creating small blurbs of content like meta descriptions and article summaries before moving on to writing full articles. This gives the employee a chance to read what other writers are doing. For programmers, it might be as simple as having them handle content HTML codes like header tags and simple organizational tasks. If they excel immediately at these small tasks, give them more responsibility/more difficult work to test and develop their skills.

About the Author: Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.

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Why Might a Struggling Business Want to Try Free Email Marketing to Improve Sales?

Alex Sysoef — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:10:31 +0000

Many businesses in many different industries are struggling due to the current state of the unforgiving economy. A number of franchise chains have downsized by eliminating their number of locations, while several smaller companies have been forced out of business entirely. Whether the financial woes are because of the economy or other reasons, increasing sales is often the solution to solving them. If your business is struggling to generate sales, free email marketing could be the answer.

Made to Improve

Even some of the most successful businesses hit a rough spot every now and then. When the chips are down, you must be able to investigate the matter and find out exactly where you are struggling. A free email marketing solution can allow you to do just that. For example, if your reports show that your open rate is below your personal benchmark, this would indicate that recipients are not even seeing your message and adjustments are needed. In this case, you may need to scale back on frequency or tweak your subject lines. Free email marketing can provide the reporting tools that highlight your strengths, but more importantly, uncover the areas that need improving.

Everything to Make it Happen

Email marketing can be a perfect vehicle for any business of any size. Why? Because it is diverse and flexible enough to accommodate just about any need. An advertising agency could use it to stay in touch with their clients through a monthly newsletter. An online retailer might use it to keep customers spending with weekly deals. If you host a lot of events, you can use it to promote all the shows you have on the schedule. Even with free email marketing, you can accomplish some of your most important marketing goals thanks to features such as ready-made templates, autoresponders, and social sharing buttons.

Free Means No Fee

Marketing is vital for the growth and survival of any business, but these days, it can be a burden of an expense. Take direct mail marketing, for example. Though it similar to email in terms of approach and delivery, it is much more expensive to conduct. The cost of printing and postage alone makes this traditional method cost prohibitive for many businesses. Email marketing is generally affordable, but if you are having a tough time converting, it can be a costly burden just the same. It just doesn’t get any better than free, so by spending less overall, a free service will enable you to not only boost sales, but actually see an increase in revenue, which is most important.

Snagging the Best Free Email Marketing

The offering of free email marketing is becoming a very popular trend among service providers. It is getting much easier to find, but be warned that not all offerings are created equal. The free option that isn’t worth the space it takes up on the screen could be just as bad as the one you had to blow money on when factoring in your time and effort. Outline your needs, devote a little time, and set out to uncover the best free email marketing you can find.

Guest Post By: Francis Santos is based in the LA area and an up and coming writer for Benchmark Email, an email marketing company with a free email marketing option. In addition, Francis is an editor for other popular news blogs.

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Copyrighting Myths for Beginner and Advanced Bloggers

Alex Sysoef — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:53:46 +0000

The beauty and downfall of blogging is that anyone can do it. But if you don’t blog correctly and use professional copywriting tactics, then your blog content is only going to turn out so-so. This means that you will be missing out on the steady traffic that you could have gained if your posts were sharp, compelling, and intriguing to your reader.

Blogging the right way can improve your search engine rankings and even build your back links. When you write content that is exceptional and attractive, readers will be likely to pass along to their friends and link to it in social media. If your content is flat and poorly written, then no one will want to read it, bottom line.

The truth is that excellent blogging is achieved by going back to copywriting basics. Starting with the obvious…

Don’t write only for the search engines!

Yes, it is important that your blog content contains keywords to appeal to the search engines, but you do have to draw the line somewhere. It is much more important that you are writing on relevant hot topics that readers will actually be interested in. Here is a challenge for you. Set up a Google News alert based on your specific keywords and stay up-to-date on the most relevant content. You can also check out your keywords in social media and on social bookmarking websites like Digg.

Make it your priority to blog on hot news content related to your industry as it happens. Then, and only then, can you sprinkle in your keywords where they make sense. If you focus heavily on SEO copywriting, it will sound mechanical and forced. A reader can spot SEO copywriting from a mile away.

Instead, write for both your readers and the search engines. When your blog content is compelling, interesting, and full of valuable information, it will be linked to again and again. This will improve your search engine rankings much more effectively than attempting to stuff your blog posts full of keywords.

Keep your sentences short and sweet.

As an online reader yourself, you may have noticed that you are likely to scan a blog post before reading it in its entirety. You are probably doing it right now as we speak! That is the nature of online readership. Readers will skim through a post to check out relevant subheadings and bullet points before committing to reading a post completely.

To make this work to your advantage, focus on riveting headlines, subheadings, and bullet points. Use shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences. This will make your content easier to read. When in doubt, break up a longer sentence that is connected by “and” or “but” to give it better readability.

Write to your target audience.

If you already have a social media presence, then you should know exactly who you are targeting in your blog posts. If not, then you need to take the time to do some important research before forging ahead as a blogger.

Understanding your target audience will make it easier for you to select the tone and topic of each blog post. You can also observe conversations in social media to see what language your customers are using when they discuss products related to your industry.

Then, use the same language when you write your blog posts. This is an excellent marketing tactic that will help readers naturally identify with your blog since you are using the same language that they use. It creates a sense of familiarity and will facilitate loyal readership for your blog.

You can use the tips listed above to transform your blogging style and keep your readers coming back for more!

Guest Post By: Bethany Ramos is a full-time freelance writer through Elance.com. For more information on top registry cleaners to speed up you PC, you can visit her Registry Repair website.

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Bad Habits That Sabotage Your Productivity At Your Workplace

Alex Sysoef — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:07:04 +0000

When you get to the office in the morning, you may grab a cup of coffee and head straight to your inbox.

From there you move over to Twitter and then drop some messages on Facebook. What comes to mind next, the latest Justin Bieber’s video on YouTube. Before you can realize what you are doing the day will be long gone. The funny thing is that when somebody calls, you go like: “Dude, I am so busy I can’t even talk”

There are many other habits that many of us have formed that do nothing but sabotage our productivity. Among these habits are:

Constant Checking Of Email Messages

The very first activity that most of us do in a day is to check email messages as soon as we reach the office. If the message requires a reply, we will obviously leave whatever we are doing and start writing a reply. It is best to check your email messages once or twice a day; say before lunch period or in the morning and just before you close for the day.

Meetings

Depending on the kind of meeting and how many hours it took, meetings can be a time suck as well. Why sit around and discuss things that can just be talked over the IM or email?

There are many databases online designed to facilitate productivity by reducing the usage of time wasting factors like weekly or daily meeting conversations. You can use Central Desktop, Basecamp or any other system that proves effective in providing you with a good alternative to these.

With most of these facilities, you can create and have access to detailed project milestones and deadlines.

Late Work

Many people work late with the idea of being ahead of their schedules. While this may be a good idea, after the days hard work chances are that forcing yourself to work further is imposing excessive stress on you.

This might get you sick and make you lose more productive hours. Instead of hanging around on people’s blog posts in the evening or forcing yourself to do more work, why not take the time and rest to get yourself charged for tomorrow’s deals.

Inadequate Management Of Your To-Do-List

From the experience I got by launching and running my coupon site, where I talked about iContact, VMWare coupon and Acronis software, I noticed that I would start my day with the easiest tasks and tackle the hard ones when my energy was already depleted.

Of course this was not a productive strategy. While you are prioritizing your tasks, don’t forget that starting from the hard tasks in the morning will help encourage you towards tackling the easy ones later in the day.

Too Much Coffee

The working routine of most people can be described with the phrase “half coffee, half work”. Instead of moving over for the next cup of coffee, put a soft music and try to focus on the work at hand.

Even if you are a coffee geek, keeping in mind that you will get a cup of coffee once you finish the task at hand will help to improve your productivity.

Taking Lunch Right At Your Desk

A lot of people try to impress their boss or force themselves towards being more productive by eating on their desk. Have you thought that you can mistakenly spill the food over important documents, or on your computer?

If this happens, you will lose the time you thing you have gained and even take more of your product hours to deal with the mess.

Social Site Madness

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all marvelous places to hang out and run business campaign. However, these sites have also proved to be time suckers. The key is to know what you are going there to do and get out once done. Any more second you stay can take you hours to realize the damage you have done to yourself.

Pleasing Everybody

There is no way you can please everybody around you. When you know that it is time to work and somebody around is either asking for help or for some conversation, tell the person that you are working.

Let him or her know when you will be free in case they are still interested. And most importantly, learn to say NO!

Guest Post By: Chimikolo Mike who is Freelance Writer and often writes about discount deals at coupon blogs that share acronis Coupon, icontact code discounts. Check out his coupon site that offers a free icontact coupon and acronis coupons.

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Making Money Selling Other People’s Products

Alex Sysoef — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:23:09 +0000

A lot of people are now getting into online businesses and online marketing either to supplement their “real world” income or for it to become their primary source of income. Why? Because online marketing just provides them a lot of benefits!

First, you can reach just about anybody in the world who has Internet access if you market your products online. That means a wider market for you, which can translate to larger profits. Second, setting up an online business requires only a fraction of the cost required to set up an actual business establishment, which means a lot of savings for the business owner.

Another aspect that has attracted a lot of people towards online marketing is the fact that one doesn’t have to have his own products to get started. In online marketing, one can start making a lot of money just by selling, or even by just trying to sell, other people’s products. And getting started with this kind of marketing strategy is actually quite easy. All that one needs to do is to set up an agreement with an online retailer or merchant, and after everything is settled, one can immediately start making money by selling the merchant’s or the retailer’s products.

Incidentally, the most popular and the fastest growing method of selling other people’s products online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, in its simplest definition, is a relationship between an online merchant or retailer, who has products to sell, and his affiliates, who are willing to promote the merchant’s product on their website.

In a typical affiliate marketing set up, the merchant provides his affiliates with banners and text ads that link to his site. The affiliates will then get these ads posted on their website and they get paid whenever traffic or sales is directed to the merchant’s website. Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other online merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee for the affiliate’s compensation.

Starting to make money online with affiliate marketing is relatively quick and easy. All that one has to do is to sign up as an affiliate for an online company that offers affiliate programs. An alternative method, and usually an easier one, is to sign up as a member of an affiliate network—a network that hosts a variety of affiliate programs for different online merchants or retailers. Signing up is usually free, although other companies and networks may require you to pay a particular fee. Such fees, however, are made as payment for additional services that the company may render, like providing you with tools and assistance to jump start your online business.

When you sign up with an affiliate marketing program, you are usually required to fill out a form containing information about yourself. Some affiliate programs may also require you to present the URL of your website and describe its contents. This will allow the retailers to verify that you actually have a website with contents that are relevant to their products. Some affiliate programs, however, won’t require you to have a website. After filling out the form and all, you are then allowed to choose the affiliate programs you want to promote.

After signing up with an affiliate program and being an actual affiliate, you are now ready to start making a lot of money by selling other people’s product online. How do you make money? There are actually a number of ways for you to earn money as an affiliate, and most of these ways depends on the type of affiliate marketing program you’ve gotten into.

Many affiliate marketing programs compensate their affiliates in either of three ways: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-sale (PPS), or pay-per-lead (PPL). In pay-per-click affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever he directs traffic to the merchant’s site. PPS and PPL affiliate marketing programs work rather differently. In PPS, the affiliate only gets paid when his referral converts into an actual sale. In typical PPS affiliate programs, the affiliate would usually get 15% to 20% commission for each conversion. PPL affiliate programs work the same way, although affiliates are paid a fixed fee whenever his referral converts into a lead for the company.

Some affiliate marketing programs are two-tier programs, wherein the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In such affiliate programs, the affiliate would not only be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant’s site but also for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation.

Yet another way of earning more profits with affiliate marketing is through residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs are affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid a number of times for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant’s site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.

With a lot of options available and a lot of ways to earn money, affiliate marketing is undoubtedly the most popular and the easiest way to make money by selling other people’s products online. As to how much money one can get from affiliate marketing actually depends on the affiliate. A dedicated and hardworking affiliate would certainly get more from the program compared to those affiliates who would simply sign up and forget about the program later.

So decide which type of affiliate you are going to be, go out there and find the programs that work for you. Then take the steps needed to be successful.

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The What, Why and How of List Segmentation

Alex Sysoef — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:03:49 +0000

So your subscriber page is up and running and you’ve gotten a decent collection of visitors’ email addresses. The next step was taking that list and actively marketing your products to them via email. To start off, you sent a couple of email messages to your list but found that your open and click rates are pretty weak.

What could be wrong? If you haven’t been practicing list segmentation, you haven’t been marketing your email messages correctly. Sound complicated? Just read on…

List Segmentation, Who?

When you have a list of subscribers, the last thing you want to do is annoy them by sending them a bunch of messages that aren’t tailored to their needs. The principles of marketing teach that understanding who your potential customers are and where they come from are important details for closing the deal. So let’s say you have a company that specializes in designing business cards, and you already have 50 email subscribers. Now you need to find out your subscribers’ key characteristics so you can market to them appropriately.

The purpose of list segmentation is to:

Prioritize specific groups of people within your subscriber base
Identify those who have characteristics in common
Target those groups based on their behavior patterns
Tailor your message to fit those targeted groups’ specific needs

In other words, you want to divide your email list up into distinct groups of buyers and then send different messages to different people in order to maximize conversions. For example, if you know that a portion of your business card customers are middle class, sending that group emails about your priciest stationery products isn’t such a smart idea. It would make more sense to target them with more budget-conscious products and special offers that they can afford and would be interested in.

Understanding the income level of your customers (among other factors) and then segmenting your list and message accordingly, will cause those particular subscribers to not only open your emails but click on your products and, hopefully, fulfill the sale.

So How Do I Do It?

Before segmenting and optimizing your list, there are some considerations you should think about:

Potential Customers or Current Customers: For obvious reasons, you don’t want to send the same message that you would send to current customers to potential customers. By segmenting your list into these two groups, you can make sure you hit the right tone by being more aggressive with your current customers and being more persuasive and informative with your potential customers.
New Subscribers: Segmenting your list by identifying who your new customers are can mean the difference between making them repeat lovers or one-night stands. Since these customers are new, you want to take extra care in communicating with them. Segment your list so that any new subscribers receive “Welcome” correspondences as well as coupons or discounts that celebrate and encourage their membership.
Buying Habits: You are going to want to segment your list by those who have bought heavily and those who have bought only a few items. For example, drafting a message to those who are already familiar with your brand and products can be more direct and personal. When writing to those who have purchased sporadically, you may want to take more time explaining what your brand represents and how you plan on fulfilling his or her needs.
Demographic: Where are the bulk of your subscribers coming from? What is their age group? What is their sex? What is their education level? These details will allow you to customize your marketing message in an effective way. Dividing your groups according to their demographic is an easy way to segment your list.

While brainstorming, you could start thinking of categories, or segments, to place customers in. These could include “New,” “Potential,” “Returning,” “From the South,” – anything that would have an impact on the emails they should receive from your business. Once you’ve thought of the best segments in which to place your email recipients, you can use Aweber to help you actually segment. You can do this by:

Clicking on the “Subscriber” category at the top of the page
Clicking “Search” on the drop-down menu
Selecting the subscribers to place in a certain category
Clicking “Search”
Giving your subscriber results a name (this will be your new segment)
Clicking “Save Segment”

You have just segmented a portion of your list of subscribers, which you can always find when you go to Aweber’s “View Segment” dropdown.

List segmentation can do wonders for your email open and click rates. Still not convinced? Check out the stats that MailChimp, another email tracking and design service, uncovered when they tracked the success of their clients’ email efforts: those who used list segmentation for their email campaigns saw a 14.4 percent increase in their open rates and a 14.9 percent increase in their click rate. So, get out there and try list segmentation for yourself.

Guest Post By: Sara Pierpoint is an internet marketer who likes to build websites and write content. When she isn’t busy she likes to hang out on the lake and have BBQs with her family.

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Publish Blog To Kindle For Extra Income And Recognition

Alex Sysoef — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:33:35 +0000

In today’s post I want to discuss a very simple and logical step for any regularly updated blog – publish blog to Kindle and get the extra income and recognition you deserve. Kindle marketplace experiencing tremendous growth and people constantly search for relevant content and information they can access with their devices, which makes it only logical to offer quality content you create to this market.

Best part of all – it doesn’t cost you anything! See my blog as an example:

But it does have a potential to generate you recurring income on a complete autopilot, once you complete the steps outlined in this guide.

How To Publish Your Blog To Kindle

Process is actually an extremely simple but it does require that you have a valid Amazon account or create one.

Step 1 – Signup for Kindle Blog Publishing or Sign In With Existing Account

Once you login into your Blog Publishing dashboard you will see a list of already published blogs, if any, and you should see a Link to Add Blog.

Step 2 – Click Add Blog Link to Begin Process

On next page you simply need to fill details that properly describe your blog content, provide a link to RSS feed, for WordPress blogs it would be http://yourdomain.com/feed, and fill all required fields.

I’m not going to go into all the details on what need to go into which filed, as Amazon provides very good explanations and I don’t see the need to duplicate efforts.

I do recommend creating a good screenshot of your blog, as visual presentation is important decision factor when people choose to subscribe to your blog or not.

Once you completed simply Save, Generate Blog Preview and then Publish Your Blog To Kindle.

This is it! Nothing else need to be done on your part, except going into your account details and specifying how you would like to get paid I personally prefer direct deposit to my checking account but you do have an option to receive checks.

How Much Can You Earn From Blog Kindle Publishing?

This one is hard to predict and obviously it will depend on your niche, number of people willing to pay $0.99 per month to access your blog and multitude of other factors but this is not the point here….

What is though – You Are already spending time to do research, create quality content and publish it on regular bases. There is a whole marketplace searching for that info and willing to pay – why not benefit from it?

You make the choices appropriate for your situation but I can tell you that since adding my blog a while back – I get direct deposits to my account on regular bases and recommend you do same!

Let me know what you think and if you are a regular reader and have amazon account – I would appreciate an honest review of my blog on Amazon Kindle Page

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How To Focus Your Marketing To Attract Buyers

Alex Sysoef — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:55:15 +0000

Today there are dozens of really great tactics you can use to bring traffic to your website. The problem is that most marketers are getting caught up in “tactic overload” and not really making the money they want from their efforts.

We never had this problem in the old days before social media. Before there were all these new places for us to market, we were desperate for new channels. We only had search engines, forums, and subscriber lists at one point.

Now we have Twitter, Facebook, social communities, groups, fan pages, CPA networks, Facebook Ads, Adsense, media buying, guest posting, RSS feeds… it is a seemingly endless buffet of choices.

And marketers are trying them all!

The danger is that we get caught up in the tactics to the point where we have several social accounts and pages we have to manage all over the web. What we actually get, if we’re not properly focused on the quality of traffic we are generating, is a lot of work and a lot of confusion.

You know you are supposed to keep content flowing on all your social profiles, as well as on your site, but you start to question whether you are doing it right when your sales stats don’t reflect the work you are putting in. If you aren’t targeting your marketing in the right way to attract the exact kind of traffic you need, your sales never take off no matter how much traffic you get.

Here are some tips to get your marketing on the right track

Go back to the core principle in marketing: Have an offer that a sizeable target market really wants to buy.

Make sure of that before you do anything else with your online business.

Then, figure out how many sales you really need to hit a realistic goal for monthly revenue. This isn’t the time to think about the big house or your first Ferrari. You want to set a goal for monthly income that will support you the way you live now.

This will help you to know just how many highly-targeted buyers you need to bring to your site each month. You might only need a few thousand really targeted visitors each month to hit your goal for monthly sales. You might even need far less than that depending on how good your offer is and the margin you net per sale.

After you know you have a product people want to buy, and how many sales of that product it will take to hit your monthly income goal, you can now be much more effective in your marketing.

Why? Because your metrics will tell you where to spend your time getting traffic. If you have a Twitter account that sends your site 1000 visitors per month but no buyers, you have to do one of two things:

choose whether you spend any more time on Twitter, or,
get better at Twitter marketing by attracting more buyers to you rather than just “followers.”

The same applies for all the things you are doing to attract traffic. Now your traffic has to be a certain quality in order to generate enough sales each month. You now know what those numbers are and you can be more picky about how and where you spend your time generating traffic.

Rather than have a dozen marketing tactics in play because you have a generic traffic goal of 100,000 visits per month, you can know that you need just 3000 visits from highly targeted prospects/buyers to cover your nut.

This drastically changes how you view traffic generation and the tactics you’ve been using to get it. Social media is just a group of tactics. It makes no distinction between quality and tire-kicker traffic.

If you know your numbers, they will guide you to the exact places you need to focus your traffic generation efforts. Your tracking will tell you where to continue to spend your time and what’s not working so you can be as effective with your marketing and time as possible.

If Twitter and Facebook are turning out to be good branding for you, but not good sources of buyer traffic, you have to adjust. But first you have to know for sure whether they are working or not and why.

You also have to have discipline to stick to solid marketing principles rather than getting bogged down in trying a new traffic tactic every time you hear about one.

You don’t want just any traffic. You want buyers targeted perfectly for your product, service, or recommended affiliate offers.

Guest Post By:

Jack Humphrey is a leading internet marketing consultant with 13 years experience in SEO, branding, product development, affiliate marketing, and membership sites. Learn more from Jack at JackHumphrey.com.

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