Why Email Marketing Works

Email marketing has become particularly effective of late because more people than ever are using the Internet as part of their everyday lives. Millions of people get online to read the news, check their email and shop.

Email marketing is also fairly inexpensive. This makes it a marketing tool that is attractive to many start-up businesses who want to save on advertising overhead. It is a quick and effective way to reach customers quickly and encourage them to go to your website.

What You Can Do To Email Market Effectively

If you have a business and you are interested in increasing traffic to your site and thereby increasing your sales, then email marketing is one surefire way to get it done. However, how do you accomplish it in the most effective way that will create the most results? Below are some tips that will help to make your next email campaign a success:

• Know your audience – Knowing your audience is of supreme importance. You do not want to sell anti-aging products to teenagers, for example. Try to figure out what your potential customers may be expecting. Have they signed up to receive newsletters or information about your latest products? If so, your email content should reflect what your would-be customers are looking for. You should also try and find out how the email will be received. Might they be reading it while at work which may block images that are contained inside or will get receive it on their mobile phone. Having this information handy will help you to tailor the email in a way that will make it the most effective and easy to read.
• Figure out what you want from the campaign – You will need to determine what your objectives are for sending out the emails. Once you have a clear understanding then this will help you to create the best type of email marketing campaign. Ask yourself why the reader should be interested in your message and then craft it accordingly. If you know why the reader should care about what you are saying then it will make it easier to target them with the right message.
• Create a definitive message – If your message is wishy-washy then those are the results that will be returned to you. Make sure that your message is strong so your email is not discarded immediately. The last place you want to end up is in someone’s spam folder. If you set it up correctly, the reader will be waiting for your email and you will be able to submit a targeted message to them. This way, they are more likely to read your content than toss it into their Recycle Bin.
• Be consistent – If you only send emails occasionally then you will only reap occasional results. The more consistent you are in your email marketing, the more you will be able to get readers acquainted with your company and message. People generally like routine and if they anticipate a certain schedule, they are more likely to be engaged in the content.

Email marketing has come a long way and when you send relevant material to your customers they are more likely to be interested in learning more about your company. Email marketing done right creates results.

This article was written by William who is the marketing coordinator for a mortgage comparison and application service homeloanfinder.com.au. HomeLoanFinder offers a range of comprehensive guides and mortgage reviews to assist first home buyers, property investors and those looking to refinance.

The social media marketing model has been well used by corporations and established retailers, but it can also be useful for smaller sellers and entrepreneurs.  If you have an eBay or Etsy store, for example, you may find that social media is a great way to keep your customers informed of new arrivals, listings that will be ending soon, and special prices and sales.

Here are a few suggestions for how you can use social media to help you market your eBay or Etsy store.

• Set up pages for your store on all the major social media networks.  Don’t limit yourself by only setting up a page on one or two of the networks.  Some people may be on Facebook but not Twitter or MySpace, while others may prefer tweeting over the others.  There are services that will allow you to post to all of your accounts at once, so don’t worry about having too many.
• Use your page to communicate special dates, offers, and company news with customers and potential customers.  When people “like” your store on Facebook or follow you on Twitter, they will see your recent messages in their news feed.  This allows you to communicate with short, engaging messages.  You can also share links, making it easy to announce new arrivals in your store, post reminders about limited time offers and sales, and make other announcements such as gift suggestions.
• Come up with a list of evergreen statuses or tweets.  Not only should these be timeless, they should also be great conversation starters, to better engage your customers and keep them interested.  For instance, not long ago Barnes & Noble asked in their status on Facebook what books people like to reread.  That question generated more than a thousand responses, but it could have just as easily been asked six months from now.  You don’t want to be silent for too many days in a row, so if you don’t have any new arrivals or sales to announce, you can use one of these conversation starters.
• Don’t forget to use visual media such as pictures and video!  All the social media sites allow you to post pictures and videos on your business’s page.  Be creative with these important marketing tools!  Take photographs of your physical store if you have one, your merchandise, and special events such as local shows and sales.  Upload promotional videos and podcasts as another way to communicate with your customers and get them excited about the products you offer.

Social media offers a great way to market your business, no matter how small it is.  In fact, social media is grassroots marketing, which means it is designed to highlight the importance of the relationship between the business and the customer — making it perfect for entrepreneurs and smaller ecommerce businesses.  Large corporations use social media to fake this kind of relationship, but you won’t be faking anything, which means that your messages will have the added advantage of being genuine.

About the Author:

Vera is a blogger and eCommerce expert. You’ll find her writing often about B2B and B2C marketing, small business eCommerce web design, and even eBay design.

Our thanks to Vera for this useful guest post.

Track Online Business Activity – Install Google Analytics

Knowing how many people are visiting your website, how they’re finding you and which keywords are bringing people to your site is possibly the most valuable information an online business owner or blogger can have. If you haven’t taken the crucial step of installing Google Analytics, trek over and sign up for it now.

By placing the Google supplied code on your website Google can analyse your visitors and display a wealth of information in your Analytics Dashboard. You can log in every day to see if any changes you’re making are bringing additional visitors to your online business. This is highly advantageous for a blogger and absolutely crucial for an online business – second only to having a site that works and plenty of good quality website content.

Once you’ve signed up you’ll need to install the code on your website. This is where it gets a bit tricky if you’re a bit of a technophobe, but it’s not that hard – evidenced by the fact that I’ve managed to add it to our three websites and I’m a huge technophobe.

Exactly where on your site you add the code will depend on the type of site you have. If you can’t match the Google instructions with your site, do a search on “how to install Google Analytics to (add your CMS e.g. WordPress, Joomla)” and you’ll no doubt find several sets of instructions and probably a few interesting forum discussions along the way.

The next two things are much easier, I promise!

Sign Up for a Twitter Account and Tweet Something

Oh go on, you know you want to! This is possibly one of the easiest things you’ll ever do. Go to Twitter and sign up now. You’ll have to choose a Twitter address so think carefully about this and choose one that gives some indication of what you do if you’re an online business. If it’s a personal blog you’re setting up, think of something clever!

Once you’ve signed up, complete your profile and don’t forget to add your website or blog URL – a lot of twits (sorry, very cliché but I couldn’t help it) won’t ‘follow’ you if you don’t have a website or blog they can click through to and check out before ‘following’ you. Once you’ve done that, ‘tweeting’ is simply a matter of typing a short message into the box, adding the URL you want people to visit and keeping it all within the required character count. If you have a long URL you want to use (like the address of a particular blog post) you can shrink it, but we’ll save that for another day. Off you go then and join the rest of us twits on Twitter.

Why use Twitter? To promote your blog posts if you’re a blogger and your products or services if you’re an online business – and in both cases, to interact in the social media environment with people of interest be they potential customers or like minded or interesting individuals.

Sign Up to Linked In, Find Someone You Know and Connect

The business networking site LinkedIn was tremendously popular a few years back. Many people I know lost interest as many more social media sites entered the scene but it’s now very much back in vogue. The chances that someone, if not several, people you know have a LinkedIn account and a few connections.

Once you sign up you can set up a profile, add a link to your online business or blog and information about what you do. People who know you can find you on LinkedIn and send a connection request. The idea is to build up a network of contacts. It’s quite interesting to see who is connected to whom and it can be a good way of gaining referrals as not only can LinkedIn members ‘recommend’ you, but people can see who you have done business with and seek you out on that basis.

Task: sign up to LinkedIn, prepare you profile and find someone you know to connect with.

If you’ve accomplished all of those things then you’ve done three things today towards growing your online business. Once your business or blog is established and you get a little busy it’s easy to forget that there’s always more to learn and do. I’ve discovered that setting aside a little time each week to learn new things is highly beneficial to my online business – and it will give you a break from your everyday business chores.

Here are a few content writing tips to help you avoid the common mistakes business owners make when they write their own website content. 

• Don’t write the type of BS you’d find on a big corporate or government website. (I’m sorry but BS is BS isn’t it?) You have to think about who your prospective customers are likely to be – if most of them are other small business owners or average homeowners they get more than enough BS. They want good clear information about who you are, what you do, and how you can help them. Plain English and a conversational style works well for the majority of small business websites.
• Understand the impatient nature of people looking for goods and services on the Internet. They’ll have questions about your products or services and you need to answer as many of them as you can with your website content lest they go looking elsewhere for the information they need.
• Don’t write volumes. About 300-500 words per page is considered to be a good amount – enough to get the information across and not enough to make visitors’ eyes glaze over before they get to the end.
• When it comes to the ‘About Us’ page don’t be shy! People read this page to find out if you sound like a legitimate, sound, trustworthy, and professional business they would like to use. The content on that page needs to give them enough information to form an opinion on that subject. Show off your credentials but always keep in mind that prospective customers are more interested in how your experience and professionalism will benefit them, than in you personally, or your business.
• Learn about keywords and how important it is to have relevant keywords in your website content. In brief, keywords are the search terms people use on the Internet to find what they’re looking for. If people were looking for the services you offer, what phrases would they use?
• Understand how the Internet works – search engines ‘crawl’ the web daily looking for new content. When they find it they index it according to what it seems to be about. They establish this by ‘reading’ the website and looking for phrases that appear to be significant. If the relevant keyword phrases aren’t contained in your website content, the search engines can’t index your site properly – and that means that when somebody types in the popular keyword phrases for your industry (for example, “plumbers Sydney” or “corporate video production”) your site may not come up at all.
• Learn where to include keywords in your website content. Search engines quickly scan web pages to see what they’re about, particularly looking at titles, headings and opening sentences as these tend to be indicative of what a page is about.

The written content on your website is only one part of the equation when it comes to establishing a successful website. You’ve probably heard the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) and this refers to the practice of optimising websites so that search engines index as many pages as possible and position them as high up as possible in the organic search results for the right keywords.

While your written website content plays a large role in SEO, it’s only one of several important factors. As with the content writing, if you aren’t in a position to hire a professional to do the SEO on your website, you’ll need to learn as much about SEO as you can – including how to get backlinks to your website how to link your internal site pages.

Writing your own content and learning about SEO can be time consuming and frustrating but at the end of the day, even if you decide to outsource your content writing, understanding what is involved can only benefit your website and your business.

After refreshing my own mind on the subject this morning I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various strategies you can employ to generate more traffic to your website. Hopefully it will inspire me to pay a bit more attention to traffic generation too! I found some very worthwhile tip lists along the way, so see the post on tips to generate more traffic for links to those lists.

One item of interest I came across can benefit business site owners and writers alike so it deserves a post of its own! It’s called Review Me and it’s a service that could certainly generate more traffic to your site. 

Review Me is a review brokering site. It’s free to join, for advertisers and writers, so I did just that to see what it was all about. Essentially, the site allows advertisers to purchase reviews on websites that are related to their product or service. The cost ranges from a low $40 up into the hundreds for sites that have huge amount of traffic. But even at the higher rates it could be a worthwhile spend – choose a high traffic site that’s closely related to your product or service and you’re likely to get a lot of well targeted attention because their visitors are likely to be genuinely interested in your business. There are plenty of popular sites to choose from so you’re bound to find one related to your niche. 

Of course, a bit more research revealed that there are dozens of paid review sites out there (which has somehow escaped my attention to date!) but Review Me and Sponsored Reviews seem to be two of the most popular and most established.

Naturally, I signed up for their affiliate programs (!) so if you’d like to check out these paid review services, the links are just below. They’re both free to join so why not check them out and see if using paid reviews is likely to generate more traffic for your site?

The biggest list was found on a post at Super Blogging Tips. 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic is a good read and it’s worth keeping that information somewhere you can see it every day!

Darren Rowse at Problogger has some excellent advice in 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less. Again, they’re everyday things we should be doing, but probably aren’t! Whether you’re a blogger or a business site owner the Problogger site is so packed full of quality information that it’s worthwhile grabbing the blog feed. It’s also a perfect example of how a strong focus on quality content that’s useful to site visitors really pays off in the long term.

One of the tips relates to using paid reviews to generate traffic so see the post on that topic for more information and links to two paid review sites.

While browsing on the Problogger site I clicked through and downloaded a free eBook by Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger. How to Create Compelling Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines contains a lot of great information on how search engines work, off page SEO elements, keyword research, link building strategies and article directories. It’s a handy eBook to have whether you’re a new site owner trying to put the SEO jigsaw puzzle together, or you just need something to remind you about all the things you know you should be doing to generate more traffic.

Sometimes finding the inspiration to work harder and generate more traffic can be the hardest thing of all but these great tips from guys who make traffic generation look easy might help.

With a distribution of 10,000 the magazine offers low cost business to business advertising in an attractive format thanks to the inclusion of interesting articles highly relevant to business owners, in addition to traditional advertisements. Many businesses opt for an article and a traditional advertisement for maximum branding, exposure and response.

Aren’t the articles just advertorials? No! Contributors prepare their own articles for inclusion and while GWP allows some advertorial style articles, they prefer good quality articles that educate and inform the readers about a topic they may not understand. That, and the fact that the publication is free, makes the magazine one that small business owners love to read. And that’s good for advertisers!

GWP is on the hunt for more article contributing advertisers to make the popular magazine even more interesting – but while numerous business people would love to see their business featured in the magazine, many don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and write an article. Now that problem has been resolved – Article Writers Australia has partnered with GWP as an agent for the publication allowing business owners who wish to become contributing authors to purchase space through Article Writers Australia and have their articles professionally written by our ghost writing service absolutely free of charge.

Should your business be featured in Business Resources & Lifestyle? If you’d like to take advantage of this fabulous marketing opportunity and gain recognition in your field but you don’t have the time to write an article, contact me to find out more.

A free eBook filled with information your site visitors can benefit from is a great way of encouraging visitors to register with you. That can help you build a database of potential clients who may be interested in new products or special offers you have from time to time – don’t forget to choose an opt in system that allows them to agree (or not) to receiving other communications from you.

Of course, there doesn’t have to be a ‘catch’. You can simply give your eBook away and let other people give it away, and reap the benefit of your name and expertise spreading far and wide across the Internet – just remember to include your website details in your eBook!

No doubt you’ve seen plenty of websites that use these strategies but what you may not realise is that many of the eBooks you see being given away are simply a compilation of articles the site owner has written or purchased from article writers. Waste not, want not!

Are you thinking it all sounds too hard? It isn’t, really. These days, there are plenty of free eBook templates available online. Images can be purchased at low cost. And you don’t need expensive software to create a PDF.  All you need is the content and a little bit of time to put it together nicely.

Here’s how:

• Decide what your eBook will be about and which articles you could include as chapters in your eBook. Arrange them into a logical sequence.
• Fill in any gaps with fresh content. Write an introduction, contents page and a conclusion (or have one of our article writers to do it for you).
• Jazz it up with images and diagrams or boxes containing special offers. Find a great image for the cover.
• Create interesting chapter headings if your article titles aren’t already catchy enough!
• Brainstorm book titles until you come up with a good one that makes people want the knowledge that’s in your book.
• Turn your document into a PDF.
• Upload it to your website.

If you don’t have any suitable articles but you’re keen to publish an eBook, our article writers can help you out. All you need to do is compile a list of the chapter headings (article titles) you envision, make a few notes about the content you’d like to include, and order your articles. If you have existing articles of your own that don’t quite measure up, our article writers can rewrite or tidy them up for you.

Find out more about our article and content writing services.

My Blog Guest is an online community of guest blog writers and site owners who are looking for guest bloggers. The benefits for site owners who make use of guest writers include: 

• Free content: you can obtain quality articles for free and post them on your site. In exchange, you must credit the blog writer and offer a link from the post to the blog writer’s site.
• More visitors: you already know that relevant content can result in relevant visitors, and that more content tends to result in more visitors, but there’s more! Guest blog writers often place links from their sites to samples of their work. Some are happy to do a little social media linking to showcase their work, which can mean more visitors for you.
• More links: blog writers linking to their work on your site and announcing it on social media platforms equals more links to your website and you know that’s good!
• Less work: if you find a guest blog writer with expertise or a particular interest in what you do or sell there’s every chance they’ll write a fabulous guest post you’ll be proud to have on your blog. Even if you like to write your own blog posts, having a guest blog writer on standby can be a relief when you are simply too busy to write.

Wondering why guest bloggers don’t work for blog writing services? No doubt some of them do, but many are busy establishing themselves as quality blog writers by building up a list of published articles that give them credibility. Many blog writing services pay writers a very low rate which means that writers can sometimes be better off establishing their own clientele in niche topic areas. Writing guest posts is a great way of advertising their work and it can lead to paid work. If they’re successful, they’ll eventually earn more per post than they could earn working for a blog writing service.

3 Ways to Make the Most of Guest Blog Writers

How you use guest blog writers will depend on the amount of content you need and your attitude towards linking out and crediting someone else for posts on your site. 

• If you’re a small niche business and prefer to write most of your own content, an occasional high quality guest post won’t hurt and it will give you a break!
• If your site is extensive and you order volumes of content from a blog writing service, regular guest posts from a variety of guest blog writers can help reduce your content costs or simply give you additional content for your site.
• If you can’t afford to pay a blog writing service for content and aren’t great at writing your own, guest blog writers can help you build quality site content for free.  

If you’d like to find guest blog writers for your site, make your way to the My Blog Guest website, sign up and put the word out! It’s absolutely free.

A guest blog post is one that has been supplied to a website owner to post on their website, usually in exchange for a link to the post writer’s website. Naturally, website owners that seek out or accept guest posts want the articles to strongly relate to the subject matter of their website. Why do they do it? It’s free content, and if they can get someone else to write an article for their website, it’s one less they have to write themselves! Instead of (or as well as) paying article writers to prepare content, some sites use guest bloggers as a way of getting some excellent content for free.

Guest blogging can help you build back links to your website, network with like minded website owners and bring more of the right visitors to your website. Write enough good quality and relevant guest blog posts and it can boost your presence on the Internet and give you added credibility, on top of those added site visitors.

Now if you want to get out and about guest blogging but you don’t have the time to write, or your writing skills are a bit ordinary, our article writers can write guest posts for you and because we’re ghost writers, you get the credit for the articles we write.

Are you ready to guest blog? Just let us know which site you’ll be submitting your article to and what you’d like the article to be about and our article writers will do the rest!