Giving Potential Customers A Sneak Peak With Auto-responders

Creating customer interest and exhilaration may be the very first action to successfully marketing many products.Autoresponders play a vital role in creating this interest and excitement. For example, if you had been
building an ebook, you may want to start tellingyour website visitors and opt-in subscribers about it.Start building interest; inform them what this product will do for them, and how soon it will be available.

Do more than build interest by telling them about it. Use an autoresponder to allow them preview yourproduct! Even though you will probably be selling the product,you can permit your potential customers to preview
the information. Have you ever observed previews for films that will be playing intheaters quickly? It’s thesame concept.

Load 1 chapter from the ebook into an autoresponder, and place a form in your website exactly where your visitors can enter their name and email address to receive the preview chapter totally free of charge. This gets their name on your list of potential customer. Every week, send a reminder email, letting them know how close the release date is, and what they can anticipate
from your product – keep building interest and excitement.

Lastly, a couple of days before you’re ready to launch your item provide those that received the preview the choice to buy a pre-release copy. You canopt to offer a discounted price, or leave the costas it will be on launch day – the selection is yours.

Take a look in the list of people who signed up to receive the preview. How many of them are still ‘subscribed’ to that list? They’ve had the option to stop receiving notices about your product, but they chose to maintain getting the info you had been sending. They are extremely targeted potential customers for the product. They’ve currently shown you that they have an interest in your product, along with a big number of those people are merely waiting on the autoresponder broadcast message that will allow them realize that it’s time to pick up their copy of one’s product!

Isn’t automation a wonderful thing? Using anautoresponder, you are able to see how much of the marketplace there is for the product, and develop a great offer of interest in it prior to it’s ever released. This is the crucial to producing product sales on launch day. Use autoresponders to develop the interest. Get your prospects excited about what’s going to arrive – and on launch day, give them what they are waiting for andwatch the product sales pour in!

These tactics work great in online network marketing as a method for generating network marketing leads. An accomplished mlm coach is an invaluable resource when you are trying this for the first time. Do not buy leads for your internet business. Learn how to generate online mlm leads of your own.Use the ideas from this article to get started.

A Simple Marketing Plan

1. Great ideas start with frustrations. What frustrations have you got? What frustrations do your delegates have? What frustrations do your managers have? Somewhere in there is a good idea and the potential for a great product solution.

.2 Build great support documentation. Help guides, FAQs etc are invaluable and if you use screen capture tools like Jing! then it’s easy. Remember some like to read, some watch, some listen – so make a mix of materials.

3. Create a marketing calendar. By each month, ask what promotion you can create for each month – a reason for buying each month. Some people just need a reminder and a monthly marketing piece may nudge them. People who are on selling your programs love this because they have something to say as well! Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, sports events, other events eg Sydney Festival in January.

4. Have fun! The more you enjoy what you do the more others will want to be a part of what you have to offer.

Domain Name Scams

The internet is a wonderful place and at the same time there are unscrupulous people trying to catch the unwary.

In the mail I have received at various times a notification of my domain names due for renewal. The document looks authentic and appears to be a regular business invoice. I’m confident some of these end up in unsuspecting accounts departments and get paid. The only thing is that what these documents authorise is that you transfer your domain to them as your new registrar and you get to pay 100 times the going cost of renewing a domain!

Another one I got today by email is reproduced here for all to be aware:

From Tom Zu [tom.zu@pubip.org]

Letter to the president or brand owner, thanks)

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in china.I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on may 7, 2012 that a company which self-styled “WLDC Int’l Co. Ltd ” were applying to register ” mydomainname” as their Net Brand and some asia domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “WLDC Int’l Co. Ltd”.Looking forward to your prompt reply and have a nice day.

Best Regards

Tom Zu

Registration Dept.

Tel:+86-5515184482 || Fax:+86-551-5123308

Address:No.1889 ShouChun Road,luyang District,Hefei,Anhui,China

Firstly, this is not a new tactic. It’s been doing the rounds for a few years from what I can tell.

And it is quite convincing – hey they even include a phone and fax number as well as an address. If you do your due diligence and look up the pubip.org website, it seems to be legit. A deeper search shows their domain whois details do not match those in the email and further in, one finds the domain is listed as a scam site. They seem to have a number of websites which are cloned as legit web businesses.

BEWARE

What will happen if you respond? They will attempt to sell you a bundle of associated domain names at highly inflated prices.

Steer clear.

If you really really want a bunch of hk,cn, or other domain names then go get them from a reputable domain name provider.

We recommend Namecheap. They’ve been around a long time, are easy to deal with, and … are cheap. Namecheap.

Email Marketing Systems

I’ve been testing out email marketing systems for ages. And as I test there are even more new ones coming on to the market.

My focus was on having a robust reliable system with no advertising, easy to use (I want to delegate the task eventually to someone else), and above all low cost – it may be my Scottish heritage coming out but I love to get the best deal I can!

Here’s what I’ve tried:

GroupMail – probably my first attempt outside of using Outlook. It has a free version but it’s limited to 100 and its free version limitations annoyed me after a while. I wasn’t persuaded to buy their upgrades because of the nuisance value but I know people who use it and love it.
Campaign Monitor – I love the work these guys produce and it is a great standard pricing model but I found it was too techie for me to be able to delegate the email marketing to a novice later. A lot of people use CM (links are ‘createandsend’) without realising it because they are using a reseller version through a web developer or similar. It works well if someone else does the back end for you. I just didn’t devote enough time to setting up templates for myself etc.
Interspire – again, these guys do great stuff and they have both an online and a self-install system. I shied away from the self-install job again because I want to simplify and automate things as much as possible and the online version wasn’t as competitively priced
Mailchimp – I was an early adopter of MailChimp and they were fast and streamlined. For me now though they seem to have become less easy and flexible. I couldn’t find a way to just send plain-text autoresponders for example. I’m still using MailChimp because they have a good free version – I’m just not sure I’ll go with them for my volume mailings
Constant Contact – a great reliable system and one of the early email marketing companies. Just not price competitive enough for me
YourMailingListProvider seems promising but I didn’t really give them a red hot go. Since I first looked at them thought they have become more professional
VerticalResponse I liked them, I really did but I had trouble getting access to my account and couldn’t resolve it. I don’t think I’m even on their mailing list anymore!
iContact – I signed up with these guys recently for a 12-month package at a really good price. What I like about them is the simple interface I can train a monkey (sorry, MailChimp) how to use their system and I can do either text or html for broadcasts or autoresponders. I’d like an easier way to access support but following their tutorials pointed out a couple of things that made life easier. Not as intuitive as you think (like a lot of them) but works when you know how!
PHPList – I avoided self-install packages as I said even though this was a free and respected one (feel free to go this route if you’ve got a techie bent and time). Today I just noted that they have a beta-test version of a hosted solution. Best part is there is a free version and their upgrade plans are very competitive. One to watch as it rolls out.

Where to get content for your blog

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/13-ideas-to-inspire-your-blog-content/

Beware: You May Get Slammed

The Internet is a funny place. People think they have license to do anything. Egos run rife. And ethical behaviour is often lacking.

Take a recent example.

I was surfing the web the other week and found a useful article. From reading that article I did a Google search and found the original article on a a great blog site. There were two articles that were great teaching tools so, rather than not attributing them as the original article failed to do, I included the article pretty much intact and quoted the source of the article with the link back to the original blog and article.

Compared to all the advice I receive (which is just steal the article and rewrite it a bit to make it your own) I believed it more ethical to attribute it.

So the owner of the original blog article leaves a terse comment on the 2 articles I attributed demanding the copyrighted articles be removed immediately.

No problem. I removed the posts, and asked how we could use their articles more appropriately.

The response? He referred me to a post supposedly about blogging protocols. Great – a responsive colleague. But no, he pointed me to a post he wrote slamming me for “stealing” his work and then flaming my editorial capabilities.

Now if you asked me if I’d be happy to find some of my work on someone else’s site then heck no. But if they were responsive and requested how to do business better then I think I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.

But then, I don’t have the ego some others do.

So here’s the deal.

If you want to use someone else’s article, ask them first. Even though most IM types will say just steal it and rewrite it as your own, I don’t agree with that. There’s too much shonky stuff being done on the web already – ever notice those sites that are full of badly written articles you see on many other sites or comments that are so canned they bear no relationship to the post they are commenting!

Me? I don’t believe in trashing other people. I’m all for assuming people are trying to do the right thing and I’m happy to help those who are prepared to learn.

Where to Use Keywords

Use keywords effectively enhance your search engine ranking and get better organic search results.

Here’s where you can use the words to best effect:

Your title page – plug them into your title tag
On the first and last line of articles, or as phrases in articles. Google doesn’t read punctuation so if your keyword phrase is marathon training, you can end one sentence with marathon then start the next sentence with Training. Perfectly acceptable.
In your anchor text such as links to other pages and in your photo or image tags, use your keyword phrases – they get good attention from search engines.
In the title of an embedded video, in the filename of the video or in the alt tags

Don’t overdo it and stuff your content with your critical keywords or you may just do the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Go easy but be intelligent about how and where you use your keywords.

Creating Content Google Loves

http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-create-cornerstone-content-that-google-loves/

How To Be More Successful in Business

Here are my notes from a recent presentation …

People want to know why your product is better – show it to them

People want to know 5 reasons why they should buy your product – tell them the essentials

Be seen and get featured in a magazine – write an article and include your pic – it builds cred

it helps if people see your name and news in the papers – send press releases

Share your knowledge on the internet – share your expertise – give away tips and tricks

People need to know how to reach you – publish an ezine weekly

How Much Should I Pay For IM Products?

I’m often asked by people who are new to internet marketing or marketing online about how they can get information to learn about the field. It’s a big space and there sure is a lot to learn. Unfortunately most people think of IM as the business rather than IM being a vehicle for building the business. It’s a bit like saying, how much should I spend on a car to drive around and sell my widgets to potential buyers? They focus on the car rather than the widgets.

I digress.

I’m surprised by how many people want to ‘get into internet marketing’ and simultaneously don’t want to spend any money. Now it’s perfectly possible to spend absolutely no money and make money online. Difficult but not impossible. For instance you don’t need an internet connection – you could use the pc at your local library. You don’t need a hosting account, a domain name or a website – you can use free solutions like wordpress, blogger or squidoo.. You don’t need to buy products, you can sell other people’s or make your own. You don’t need a merchant account – you can use PayPal. So it IS possible to run an internet business for free. Continue reading →

Red Hot Internet Marketing

… online business for the rest of us