If you’re asking “I really need a list…get me a list…where can I buy a list…” then you’re probably already in totally the wrong place to achieve successful marketing by email.

You don’t want to ’scatter gun’ any list; certainly not one you haven’t built and generated in a targeted, controlled way.

Yes, you can ‘rent’ or ‘buy’ a list.  But it’s a one-hit wonder.  And actually probably a one-hit failure.

But if you develop and nurture your own, valuable list you benefit from generating a customer relationship; a reader relationship; real engagement with those who buy your produce, use your service, read your blog

The 10 key areas:

• Who’s your audience and why should they listen to you?
• When you email them, what, exactly, are you trying to achieve?
• What will your mailings look like – would you read them? Would they make you take action?
• Will you – actually, SHOULD you – do the writing and construct the mailings? Are you really up for it?
• How regularly will you mail and how long will your mailings be?
• Those email addresses won’t just magically appear – how will you collect them?  Always do it ethically, whether via web form or other opt-in method – do it right, do it well, do it consistently.
• The last point bears repetition: ALL recipients must have in advance expressly asked you to mail them.  And if they don’t want to hear your drivel anymore, make it easy for them to switch you off!
• Is your technology scalable to grow your list?  Will the length of the list actually become a problem? How will you store/host your list – internally or will you outsource.
• Whatever you do, you MUST create and maintain TRUST.
• You must add value.

Be honest. Be genuine. Be successful.

CB

Unless you’re writing a blog as a personal journal, there is little point in laboring over your blog posts if you don’t have any readers. The most difficult aspect of blogging when you’re just starting out is learning how to attract readers – and then if you’re hoping to earn income from your efforts the challenges get even bigger!

Since many bloggers are using their blogs to attract internet traffic and hopefully send them on to their website (where products or services are actually sold), this article will give you ideas for leveraging the power of your blog as an inexpensive, but effective marketing medium.

Are You Unintentionally Anonymous?

I can’t even begin to tell you how many bloggers set up their blogs and forget to include a way for readers to contact them. I regularly want to contact blog owners who write great content with questions or comments – and can’t because they haven’t included any method for contacting them! My guess is the majority of the bloggers without contact information don’t even realize they’re inaccessible – so make sure you aren’t unintentionally anonymous!

This is especially important if you are looking to generate income from the blog at some point. Don’t hide behind your blog as some anonymous writer – the blog is meant to develop relationships and trust with your readers and you can’t do that if you don’t include an email address, ability to post comments, or other method of contacting you. You might get requests for joint ventures and invitations to online events that would help you get additional exposure and readers to your blog if people are able to contact you, too.

Make Use of Free Article Marketing Resources

As a blogger, you’re used to putting words to paper. Use that skill to bring new traffic to your blog. You can write additional articles on topics your blog already covers, and submit them to article directories like EzineArticles.com, iSnare.com, or GoArticles.com. These sites publish your articles with your author byline information, which should include a link back to your site.

Other website owners and newsletter publishers regularly visit article directories to pick up articles for their publications. They are allowed to re-print the content you submit to article directories on their own sites and in newsletters, as long as they include your author byline and link. Each time your articles are republished, you’ll have a new link pointing to your blog. You can gain new readers through people who click on your link to learn more; and also through the boost all of these incoming links give you in the search engine listings.

You’ll gain the best results with article marketing if you do it on a consistent basis. Try writing an article once a week and posting to several article directory sites, and monitoring your blog traffic for several months to see if it’s increasing.

Become a Carnival-Goer

There are “blog carnivals” on just about every topic imaginable. Blog carnivals give bloggers another method of receiving quality incoming links to their blog. You submit your own blog posts to the carnivals that are hosted by websites on related topics as your own site; and if they publish your link, you’ll receive readers and additional incoming links for SEO purposes.

If you blog about personal finance topics for example, you would submit a link to your recent article to the host of a personal finance “carnival”. If the host likes your article, he or she would include it in their carnival post, which is basically a compilation of links to many blog posts from several different blogs.

You won’t see big results overnight by participating in blog carnivals, but if done consistently, you’ll probably notice improved positioning in the search engines, and an increase in traffic from the readers of the carnivals. It costs nothing but your time to submit. For a directory of different carnivals, you can visit www.blogcarnival.com.

Write a Guest Post for Another Blog or Newsletter

Writing a guest post is the same as writing an article for your own blog, except that it will be published somewhere else. If there are other blogs that focus on similar topics as your own, consider contacting the blog owner to ask them if they’d publish an article you write for them, along with an author’s byline and a link back to your own blog.

As with the other methods discussed in this article, you’ll gain additional incoming links to your site, and the possibility of new readers who click the link to learn more about you after reading your post.

Marketing does not have to cost an arm and a leg in order to generate results. Most marketing methods will be effective if they are done consistently. Make sure you measure and monitor the results of any marketing methods you attempt, to know whether or not they are worth the time and effort.

Debbie Dragon, guesting for ClubBlogger, is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

Many have asked us to say more about Twitter. We don’t need asking too many times!

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.  People write short updates, often called “tweets”  of 140 characters or fewer.  These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

All you need to use Twitter is an internet connection or a mobile phone. Once you’re in, type your first update into the web box.  To get an idea of what other people are saying or doing on Twitter, check out Twitter search to see what Twitter’s all about.  You can search by keyword or just check out the trending topics to what’s hot on Twitter right now.

When you create an account, you can search for people by name or user name, import friends from other networks, or invite friends via email.  If you don’t want to do that, follow some of the people Twitter suggests. Once you’ve found your friends, follow them to start getting their updates.

Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates.   When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear in your Twitter home page.  New messages are added to your home page as people post them, so you always get the updates in real time.  When you log in, you can see what the latest updates are.  Twitter offers other ways to follow people too: you can get updates from certain people on your phone!

After you click the follow button on someone’s profile, you’re following them.  The follow button will change to a box that says “Following” with a drop down option to remove a person if you want to. If you’ve registered your phone with Twitter, you can set up text preferences for a person as well.  See a list of people you’re following by clicking on the ‘following’ link on your profile or your home page’s sidebar.

Twitter sends you an email when someone new follows you.  Set up your email preferences to notify you when you have a new follower.  The followers link on your profile page or home page’s sidebar will also tell you how many followers you have.

Twitter offers many ways to post updates: from the web in the update box, from your phone,  from your mobile web browser using m.twitter.com, or from any third party application made by the talented folks who’ve utilized Twitter’s API.

Can you put my Twitter updates on your blog?

Yep! Put a Twitter badge on your blog, website, MySpace… anything that accepts Javascript or HTML.  You can even customize your Twitter badge to match!

Thanks to twitter.com – check out their help resources for more information!

Effective, legal, effective email marketing is always permission-based. If not, it is called spam.

If you didn’t sign up for it, you think of it as spam – we’ve all experienced this. So why would anyone feel differently about messages you send them if they didn’t sign up for them?

Communicating, and marketing, via email requires a positive relationship. All messages swapped are opportunities to either strengthen or weaken that relationship.  To enhance the relationship, always make sure the content is relevant, useful, and interesting to the readers. You can hardly achieve this if they didn’t want to receive the messages in the first place!

Having and growing a big list of people who don’t want or read your emails gives you no advantage and is a waste of your time. Even if email is ‘free’, your time is certainly not.

You should appreciate and expect that a proportion of manually added email addresses will subsequently unsubscribe. Interestingly, if they do not, expect few of them to ever open your messages!  Remember this: even when someone deletes a message without opening it, they still see who it’s “From”. They are still exposed to your brand. The only take-home message they get is that you keep emailing them even though they don’t want you to! This is 100% actively detrimental to the reputation you have and to the relationship you’re trying to build.

If you’re not sure your approach is the right one, it’s probably not. Remember this, too!

Relationships built on trust will last, whereas those built on spam are bound to fail. If you think someone might like to be on your email list, always invite them to sign up and let them decide.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

There have been a lot of studies into the correlation between domain registration length and successful Search Engine Optimization – particularly for those that are in Google top 10 for any competitive terms.

It has been theorized that the longer the registration length, the more trusted the domain to Google.

You know why? It shows you are serious about your business. Business owners that registered their domain for a longer time are mostly serious owners and have good long term plan for their domains.

It make sense that throwaway or spammy domains are registered for a short time because the spammers do not have serious funding. It is common sense that any long term plans in attempting to spam search engines will not work because of algorithm continuous improvement. This makes domain registration length of spammy domains very short (generally, at most 2 years).

Despite being aware of this, MOST DO NOT KNOW that the top 10 ranking domains for any competitive terms in Google are registered on the average of 10 years! It has been randomly sampled.

So, if you are seriously into long term ranking, register your domain for around 10 years. Stats say it shows high probability of 1st page ranking.

Of course, bear in mind that the length of registration itself does not mean your domain will rank because of relevance. You still need a lot of SEO work for this. Hand-in-hand with a long registration period, sites must provide compelling services and make themselves helpful to visitors. These are vital ingredients for long term Google ranking success and any good SEO specialist will emphasize this time and time again.

We will be revisiting this topic in more detail. I’d really like to hear your thoughts in the meantime, plus any specific experience of the topic.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is one of the most effective methods for drawing traffic to a website or blog. At the same time, it is potentially one of the most costly methods for marketing. If done correctly, however, the return on investment (ROI) will pay off quite nicely.

A PPC advertising campaign is one that involves paying to have your blog appear among the “Sponsored Links” or the “Sponsor Results” you find on the right hand of the screen when you perform a search with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. You accomplish this by placing a bid on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Then, every time someone enters those keywords into the search engine, your blog will be brought up in the sponsored results. Every time someone clicks on your link, you will have to pay the search engine a certain pre-determined amount.

As you can imagine, paying for a PPC campaign can be quite costly. After all, even if you are paying just five cents per click and you have 1000 clicks per day, that is $50 per day. That comes out to be $350 per week, which can eat away at your marketing budget rather quickly. Now, paying $350 per week may seem worthwhile if it is bringing you 7,000 new visitors. But, if only one or two of those people are people who are actually interested in your blog, the cost certainly isn’t worth it.

So, how exactly do you make your PPC campaign worthwhile? This is where your marketing research comes in handy. Since you now know the needs of your target audience, you can select keywords for your PPC campaign that will draw in visitors who are interested in what your blog has to offer.

Be certain to select keywords that are very specific in order to bring in the right type of traffic. For example, if you are maintaining a blog about dog training, you should not set up a PPC campaign based around the word “dog,” as this can bring in visitors who were looking for information about dog breeds, searching for dog food, trying to find instructions for building a dog house, or any other possible term associated with dogs. Rather, select keyword phrases that are more specific to dog training in order to bring in the right type of web traffic.

When searching through the various keywords you can select for your PPC campaign, you should look for phrases that are popular while still being within your budget. You should also place a bid on phrases that will allow you to be within the top 5 results. That way, they will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results and will be more likely to be seen by your target audience.

If you are looking for a quick way to boost traffic to your site and if there is room in your budget, PPC advertising is a good route to take. Otherwise, you may want to explore other methods of marketing that are not quite so costly.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

Whatever your business is on the web, you’re going to need advertising if you want the big bucks. First though, we must recognize that the meaning of the world ‘advertising’ has changed since the days of the TV, Radio, Magazine and News Paper monopoly. Advertising was simple to define and easy to recognize back before the internet, but web based advertising techniques are a different ball game altogether. Let’s take a look at these new alternative advertising methods in order of their cost to your business.

Word of Mouth: The internet’s impact on ‘word of mouth’ advertising has been huge. The invention of social networks and media sharing facilities has put thousands of likeminded people in touch with each other in ways that were impossible before the web. If you have a great product that a particular group of people will really like, you can be sure that it’ll be talked about on the web.

PPC/PPI Advertising: Pay per Click advertising and Pay Per Impression advertising will both cost you a little bit of cash, but you can build a campaign relatively cheaply and reach many thousands of people for extremely low cost. PPI is best for generating brand recognition on the whole, while PPC is ideal for deployment to key demographics who might want to read more about your product or service.

Affiliate Systems: Affiliate systems are a great way to sell medium to high cost services. Using an affiliate system allows you to put your affiliates in charge of your advertising. They are rewarded only for sales converted from their links, and so the burden of advertising, and the large rewards, rest firmly upon your selected affiliates. Be prepared to give away a significant percentage of your profits though, as good affiliates work hard to promote your product and expect payment in kind.

Mail / Software use: Last but certainly not least is the use of bulk e-mailing and software advertising. These are generally considered to be distasteful and annoying advertising methods but are certainly effective. Consider your business relationship with its customers very carefully before you undertake such a project. While these are ideal for one shot small purchases, they can alienate more picky customers.

Are you considering starting your own blogging business? If so, you aren’t alone! In fact, many people have found a way to create a handsome income through blog writing, so there is no reason why you can’t do it as well. At the same time, if you are currently working and you are thinking about jumping into the world of blogging, there are a few steps you should take in order to make certain you make a smooth transition into the blogging world and that your finances are under control.

Get Your Feet Wet

Before you turn in your resignation and hit the web, it is a good idea to get your feet wet in the world of blogging. Spend some time reading some blogs and interacting with blogging communities so you can get a better idea of how blogs work and how the communities are built. You might also want to guest blog for some of the more popular blogs or even write blog paid blog posts for someone else so you can better determine whether or not writing blogs is something you enjoy. Of course, you can certainly set up a free blog with a site such as blogger and you can get started with your own blog. If you notice that your blog is generating some interest, you may very well have found a way to leave the rat race and start a successful home based career.

Monetizing Your Blog

After you have successfully built up a community with one blog, you might want to start dabbling in different ways to monetize your blog. Allowing pay-per-click advertisements to be placed on your blog is one way to monetize your site. You might also want to get involved with affiliate products and look into selling them through your website. Another option is to sell advertisement space on your blog. In fact, if your blog becomes popular enough, you will find people coming to you and asking to place their ads on your blog.

Spreading Your Wings

If you find that you were able to make one blog a success, you might want to start looking into creating additional blogs. The key is to make certain you don’t overburden yourself by creating more blogs than you can keep up with while still holding down your job. After all, building a successful blog takes time and maintaining a successful blog requires making a commitment to add new blog content on a regular basis. Therefore, you don’t want to have so many blogs going that you cannot keep up with them.

Until you start earning enough income from your blogs, you may have to juggle both your regular 9 to 5 job as well as your blogging business. But, once your blogs take off and you start earning a decent amount of cash from them, it just may be time to spread your wings and jump into blogging full time!

The internet is the most democratic arena available for new business, intellect and service providers to show what they have got. If you’ve got something good to share with the world, the internet is the only place that will do it justice. The challenge is getting that good or service onto the web in the first place. The beauty if the internet is that you hardly need a single penny to get your product in front of millions of people. But you’ve got to know how to do it!

The first rule of making a free business is, open source software: The open source community has been around for as long as closed source development and open source products are comparable, if not better quality in some cases. Name a bit of software your business needs and it’s very likely that an open source version is available, in some cases making a choice to use open source software can save you thousands of dollars in licensing for single programs.

The second rule to free business on the net is: Cheap web hosting! There is simply no need to maintain or buy dedicated or virtual hosting if no one knows your website is there. Open a cheap account with a high quality service provider like godaddy and they will be very glad to quickly and painlessly upgrade your hosting as and when you need additional power, storage and bandwidth. There is simply no need to pay for a vastly overpowered service before it’s needed. A few adverts will bring in enough revenue to pay for your website hosting, making it free!

The final step to free business on the net is: Free promotion! Google the term ‘SEO’ and check our SEO blog category on the left. There is a wealth of free information available on this topic, which will teach you exactly how to configure and write your website to be search engine optimized. Custom SEO services are expensive because they usually come with guaranteed results, but these results are within your reach given enough time and understanding of the topic.

If you follow these three simple rules, you’ll get your business online for almost zero cost. Website builders and promotions agencies might try to sell your expensive packages and hosting services, but remember these basic rules and you’ll be fine.