SEO Friendly Pages

There's no point in establishing a website unless there are visitors going there. A major reservoir of traffic for most web sites on the net is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so forth. Thus, by planning and producing a search engine friendly web site, you will be able to rank well easily in search engines and receive more site visitors. 

 

Major search engines utilize computer programs known as crawlers or robots to index sites to place on their search result pages. They travel along links to a page, read the material on the page and place it in their own database, pulling out the listing as individuals search for different things.

 

If you would like to make your website get indexed easily, you ought to avoid utilizing frames on your site. Frames will only discombobulate search engine robots and they may even abandon your web site because of that. Furthermore, frames make it hard for users to bookmark a particular page on your web site without utilizing long, elaborate scripts. 

 

Do not introduce crucial info in Flash movies or in pictures. Search engine robots may simply read text on your source code so if you introduce crucial words in Flash movies and pictures instead of text form, your search engine ranking will be touched on dramatically. 

 

Utilize meta tags accordingly on every and each page of your web site so that search engine robots recognize at first sight what that certain page is about and whether or not to index it. By utilizing meta tags, you're making the search engine robot's task easier so they will crawl and index your web site more often. 

 

Quit utilizing incorrect HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Utilize CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as an alternative as they are more efficient and effective. By utilizing CSS, you are able to do away with redundant HTML tags and make your pages much cleaner and faster to load.

When It Pays To Pay For Traffic

So far, we’ve talked a lot about getting free traffic by tapping into existing sources, upping our social media game, and investing some time and effort into SEO. All of this requires time and often it’s time well spent. There is a second way to get highly targeted traffic. Paying for it. While there are many different ways to do this, I want to discuss two strategies with you. Paid advertising and recruiting affiliates to send new leads your way. Let’s take a quick look at each. 

 

I’m sure you’re familiar with some forms of advertising. The idea is to pay for targeted traffic. There are various different forms of advertising from space on websites or mentions in newsletters or pay per click advertising. Facebook and Google ads are good examples of the latter. 

 

Start by choosing one advertising strategy you want to try. Work on one at a time. This way you can monitor results reliably and you can master one strategy before moving on to the next. Start small and up your budget when you see it’s becoming profitable. Once you’re there, you can continually work on improving your ads to result in lower costs and bigger profits. Don’t turn on the tab too fast. Even with this slow, conservative strategy you’ll get traffic faster than if you build it organically. 

 

The biggest problem with advertising, especially when you are getting started, is the risk. Chances are you will lose some money before you figure out what you’re doing. Yes, you can mitigate this risk by starting small and upping your budget as profits allow, but it’s a risk, nevertheless. If that doesn’t sit well with you, or if you simply want an additional strategy to grow faster, consider setting up an affiliate program. 

 

With an affiliate program you agree to track traffic, leads, and customers that your affiliates sent you and to then pay them an agreed-upon commission for any sales these visitors generate. For digital products, the commission is usually 50%. In some cases, it makes sense to offer something higher, especially on a front-end product if you have a large funnel in place. For physical products, because of additional cost and overhead involved, lower commissions anywhere from two to ten percent are more customary. 

 

The big benefit of an affiliate program is that if you recruit the right people, you can instantly get your products and services in front of their large audiences. There is also no up-front risk. You don’t have to pay your affiliates unless they make sales, thus guaranteeing profitability for you. 

 

Give both methods a try and see how much traffic you can generate with ads and affiliates. 

Create A High-Ticket Item You Can Sell Again & Again

One of the quickest and easiest ways to double your income is to come up with a high-ticket item that you can sell to your customers. One of the most popular models to do this is to offer one-on-one coaching or small in-person workshops at your house. While that’s certainly an option and a great way to justify asking for several thousand dollars per ticket, this model has one big problem. It isn’t scalable because you’re limited in how many you can sell by how much time you’re willing to spend on these meetings in any given week or month. 

 

Let’s look at some options that allow you to create one of these high-end products, without this limiting factor involved. In short, we’re going to look at some high-value products you can create that you set up once and then sell over and over again. First though, why is creating a high-end product such a good idea? After all, the majority of your subscribers and customers won’t buy them. The reason is because you don’t need to sell a lot to be profitable. Let’s look at an example. 

 

Let’s say your average product costs $27. To make $5,000 per month, you need to sell an average of 185 of them. That’s a lot of new customers you need to find each month to reach your income goal. Now let’s say you have a $97 product. You only need to sell 51 of them. Last but not least, let’s go crazy and say you come up with something you can sell for $497. You only need to sell about 10 of those per month. 

 

Now let’s circle back around to the idea of doubling your income. Sure you could come up with another $27 product, but you’d have to do double of what you’re doing now to generate an extra 185 sales. But what about that $497 product? It could become the last piece in your product funnel. Not every single one of your customers will buy it. Only the ones that need the extra help and are serious enough about reaching their big goals will pick it up. But that’s ok. You don’t need a lot of them to buy it each month to seriously increase your profits. 

 

There are a lot of different ways to create these products. Your main goal will be to offer a lot of value and to make a real difference in your customers lives or businesses. For example, this could a comprehensive guide with workbooks and open office hours where customers can ask questions. In the guide you walk them step-by-step through each part of the process of reaching their goal. Or maybe it’s an interactive video course that allows them to pick and choose lessons specifically on the stumbling block they are facing next. Or maybe part of it is access to your own team of people who can help them create covers, set up websites etc. Or maybe it’s yearly access to your membership site where they get help, motivation, advice, and interaction with like-minded people. Get creative. Think about what you would have wanted when you were in their position. What would have helped you get to where you are now faster. Create that and then don’t be afraid to put a premium price on the product. 

Embrace Paid Advertising To Grow Your Reach

Do you know what your only truly limited resource is? It’s time. We all end up with just twenty-four hours per day. What does that have to do with getting traffic and growing your reach? It’s simple. You have two options when it comes to reaching more people. You can spend a lot of time creating fresh content, posting on social media, reaching out to podcasters, bloggers, and vloggers. Or you can get in front of your ideal customers through paid advertising. 

 

Yes, paying advertising can seem a little daunting. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll make your money back. The good news is that it’s easier and more affordable to get started than it has ever been. You can start small with as little as a few dollars per day and scale up as you learn more about what you’re doing. 

 

A great place to start is with Facebook ads. You see them all day long. Pay attention to the ads you find yourself clicking. Maybe it’s an interesting tagline and a pretty cover for a new book. Maybe it’s a new pair of shoes, or a planner that promises to help you stay productive throughout your busy day. Think about that ad. What made it so appealing? What hooked you. 

 

Once you’ve figured this out for a few of the ads that have grabbed your attention, it’s time to give it a try yourself. Start with your best-selling product, or the lead magnet that draws in new subscribers like crazy. Why do people buy or download it? Are you solving a problem? Do you tackle a hot topic? Try to zero in on what’s making this such a big hit for you already. Then craft a Facebook ad that reflects this. 

 

Next, it’s time to do a little homework. Read through some blog posts about getting started with Facebook ads. Watch a few tutorials. Go through the one that Facebook provides and go through the steps to set up your account. Make sure you have your pixels installed (it’s a Facebook thing… those tutorials will explain), so you can track what’s working and what isn't’. Then create that first ad.

 

Create at least two more ads that are similar to the first so you can start to test. A great place to start testing is with images. Pick three different images, but leave everything else the same. Launch this first set of ads with a limited daily budget. If you want to spend just $5 per day, that’s fine. If you can swing it, go up to $10 or even $15, but keep your bids as low as possible. This will get you data faster. Let them run until you get a feel for which one performs best.

 

Keep that add and start changing something else. Maybe it’s testing an add with little text against one with slightly more text and one with a lot of text (maybe an entire article or blog posts). Maybe you test different headlines. Or different calls to action. Keep testing and tweaking until you find a profitable ad that you have a hard time improving upon. 

 

From there the sky's the limit. Invest some of your profits into running more ads. Create ads to different products and opt-in offers. Branch out into Instagram and WhatsApp ads or cross over to different social media platforms, or even Google Adwords. Keep buying ads and keep growing your reach and your profits.

Focus On List Growth And Sales

There’s so much you can do on a daily basis to grow your reach and make more sales. The list seems almost endless, doesn't it? You could be writing a new blog post, creating a series of videos, posting on various social media platforms, writing guest posts, publishing kindle or print books… the more important question you should be asking yourself is what should you do if doubling your income is your goal? The answer is much simpler and the list much shorter. 

 

You should focus on just two things. Growing your list and making sales. Does this mean you stop doing everything else you’ve always done? Not necessarily. Think of it more as a mindset shift that can help you become much more profitable. You could still write that blog post. But the goal of the post would be to either turn the reader into a subscriber, or warm them up for the offer you’re going to email them about in a couple of days. You’ll record that podcast interview, but your main goal will be to convert the podcasters audience into subscribers to your list. Do you see how this works? 

 

Why is focusing on subscribers and customers so important? Because it takes some time before someone is ready to buy from you. They have to know, like, and trust you first before they hand over their credit card, or log into their PayPal account. That’s why your number one goal when you reach a new audience should always be to get them on your list. That gives you a chance to build a relationship before you make an offer to buy. Of course, the benefit of a list doesn’t end there. You also get a chance to make offers for other products. These could be your own, or something you’re promoting as an affiliate. The end result, in either case is more money in your bank account. 

 

A list of subscribers is valuable and something you should always work on growing. The only thing more valuable is a list of customers. Customers have proven that they trust you and like you enough to hand over their hard-earned money. If you deliver a lot of value and help them solve a problem, they are more likely than anyone else to buy something else you offer or recommend. 

 

As you go about growing your business, focus first on growing your list of email subscribers, and then on converting these people into paying customers. Make that the main goal for everything you do online and you will quickly see your income grow.

Create A New Product For Your Existing Customers

Listen up, this is important. It’s one of the most powerful marketing concepts out there and something that could become a game changer for you. It’s much easier to sell ten products to one customer than it is to go out and find 10 buyers. In other words, it’s much easier to create a second product and sell it to your current customer base than it is to go out and market to new people. 

 

That’s why one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase and even double your income is to create a new product. Find out what your audience needs next. What else are they struggling with? What’s the next step they should be talking to reach their goal? Talk to your customers and do a bit of research in your niche. I’m sure you’ll come up with all sorts of fun and creative product ideas. Pick one and get to work. 

 

You’ll find that it’s much easier and quicker to create that second product than it was to work on the first. You know what you’re doing now. And guess what. It will get even easier the third and fourth time around. Plan to create a whole series of products that help your customers reach their ultimate end goal. When you start to run out of ideas on what they should be doing next, think about related topics. For example, once you’ve taught your tribe everything you know about list building, branch out into social media or copywriting. If you’re teaching them about container gardening, consider branching out into composting, or food preservation for example. 

 

Finish that product and get it up for sale. Then email your list of existing customers about it. Don’t be surprised if the majority of them will buy from that one email. That’s right, you’ll start seeing quite a few sales from that one email. Compare that to all the work, effort, and time it took to find those customers in the first place. Doesn’t that want to make you get to work on the next product? 

 

Of course, the benefits of adding a new product don’t end there. Start promoting the second product the way you did the first. Send an offer for it out to your list of leads. Mention it on social media. Link to it from existing content on your blog. Mention it in guest blog posts and podcast interviews. People who weren’t interested in your first product, end up picking up this new one, resulting in even higher profits. Try it and see for yourself.

Raise Your Prices & Rates

Are you up for a little math? I promise it won’t be hard, but it will open your eyes to the possibility of doubling your income by raising your prices and rates. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of the best ways to double your income is to charge more for what you do. When we first start to work online, we tend to undervalue our worth. We are anxious to get clients or make those important first sales. Starting out on the low end is actually not a bad idea. Without experience, testimonials, and social proof, starting with low-end products and services is a great way to get a foot in the door. But it isn’t where you want to stay. 

 

How do you know that it’s time to raise your prices? When you start to make quite a few sales. If you’re a service provider who’s constantly booked, you should be raising your prices. When you hear your customers rave about your products and share how much value they’ve gotten from them, it’s time to raise your prices. 

 

But what do you do when you’re not there yet? It may sound counterintuitive, but the reason your sales pages aren’t converting may be that you’re not charging enough. Think about it. You come across a course on running an online business that offers a ton of content for $7. What’s your first thought? It’s probably that it can’t be very good if the person is selling for so little. Your customers and clients may feel the same way. 

 

Often, we’re reluctant to raise our prices because we think we’ll lose customers. While that can happen, it also opens a lot of doors. Other people may not even consider buying what you have to offer until they see a price that they associate with high-value. Plus, when you increase your profit margin, you don’t need to sell nearly as much as you did before. 

 

Let’s dive into that math. Let’s say you have a product that you sell for $20. To keep the math simple, let’s say you sell 100 of them each month and that there’s no real cost associated with the product. With an information product like an eBook or course, there really isn’t and let’s ignore those pesky payment processor fees for this exercise. In that case, you’re making a $2,000 profit per month. 

 

Now let’s say you go crazy and double your price. You start charging $40 for your product. Because it’s such a great value and because the higher price reflects that, you find you’re making just as many sales as before. By doubling your price, you’re doubling your profit. You’re not bringing home $4,000 per month. 

 

But it doesn’t stop there. Because of the higher ticket price, an affiliate marketer becomes interested in promoting you. You set up a 50% commission and he sends an additional 100 customers your way. That’s another $2,000 in profits after you’ve paid the affiliate his or her share. 

Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. You don’t have to double your rates if that seems like a bit much. Play around with the numbers. If it doesn’t work out how you’ve hoped, you can always go back down, bundle products at a lower price, or offer a coupon. Play around with pricing and find the sweet spot for your audience and your products that nets you the biggest profits.

Collaborate With Other Players In Your Niche

Here’s an easy way to double your income. Put yourself in front of twice as many people who are interested in what you have to offer. Of course, that is easier said than done. Getting traffic and exposure is one of the hardest things to accomplish as the internet grows and expands. Sure, you could throw a lot of money at the problem and accomplish it with well placed ads, but that’s not a viable option for most of us. 

 

A great way to get in front of a new audience interested in what you have to say is to find someone else who’s doing something similar to what you’re doing. In other words, find other players in your niche, or closely related niches and start to collaborate. For example, let’s say you’re selling a guide on growing tomatoes. Go find a few bloggers and marketers who are also in the gardening niche. This could be someone who blogs about organic gardening, or someone who sells container gardening kits, or books on how to grow all the vegetables you need in your backyard. You won’t be competing directly, but instead complementing each other. Your audience will be interested in additional organic gardening tips, and they may want to purchase a container kit that makes it easier to grow those tomatoes. Do you see how this could work? 

 

Approach the other players in your niche and see how you can work together. A great place to start is to offer to share something of theirs with your readers first. If the person sells a product, ask if you can interview them, or see if they have a special coupon you can share with your readers. If they have an affiliate program, you can even profit from sharing this with your readers. 

 

Next, ask if they would be interested in sharing you with their own audience. This is always your end goal, but you have to make it worth their while. Depending on your business model, there are several different ways to accomplish this. If you have a paid product, and an affiliate program, it makes it easy. You can also offer to create unique content for the other person’s audience. 

 

No matter what you decide to do, make it as easy as possible and do whatever you have to do to get your fellow blogger or info product creator to email his or her list for you. Mentions on social media and blog posts are great, but your ultimate goal should always be to get them to mail for you. When they do, your next goal is to get these people on your own list and to turn them into paying customers.

Track What’s Working And Use The 80/20 Rule

One of the best ways to double your income is to figure out what’s working and doing more of that. 

 

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? The problem is that you first have to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The best way to do that is to track everything. From there you look at your data and make a plan for what you should and shouldn’t be doing going forward. 

 

Your first step will be to decide what you want to track. This will be a little different for everyone depending on your business and what you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. A good place to start is to look at income and expenses, products or different sources of income, and of course where you spend most of your time. 

 

Let’s say you start to track where your income is coming from. If possible, go back and look at the last six to twelve months of financial data. Did you make money selling your own products? Did you get large affiliate commission checks? Did you sell advertising on your websites? 

 

Next you want to look at expenses related to that income. You’ll have some fixed expenses like hosting your website for example, that you should ignore for the purpose of this exercise. Look at cost directly related to each source of income. For example, in order to launch your products, you may hire a graphic designer, a VA, and pay for your shopping cart software. You may also be paying commissions to affiliates promoting your products. Subtract those costs from the income you’ve made to get a good feel for your actual profits. Other sources of income will have little to no expenses. Once you’ve adjusted your income figures to reflect the profit you’ve made, you can start to compare. 

 

Last but not least, look at the amount of time you’re spending to generate the income. It may take you a full month of working twelve-hour days to launch a new big course. On the other hand, you may be able to put together a short eBook or fresh membership content in a day or two by leveraging content you’ve already written or buying pre-written content. Look at the time it takes for each type of product and compare this to the amount of money you expect to make from the launch and going forward. This will help you decide what’s the most profitable way to spend your time. 

 

With all the information at your fingertips, it will be easy to decide what you should be doing more off, what you should be doing less off, and what you should stop doing. Focus most of your time and energy on the most profitable products and income sources. Work on it for a good six months and look at how much your profits went up. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one strategy alone allows you to double your income.

How to Make Some Good Side Money with Content Marketing

One of the best ways you can leverage the financial power of content marketing is not actually in the act of crafting content to market something you offer. 

 

Rather, it’s all about content marketing a good or service offered by other people and then sitting back while readers click on affiliate links and Google Ads. 

 

That said, here are a few of the most lucrative topics to write about—and how much associated Google ads will pay you per user click in 2018.

 

Insurance: $57 CPC. Insurance is the statistically the most lucrative. Car insurance, homeowner’s insurance, business insurance…everybody needs insurance for something. 

 

Gas & Electricity: $54 CPC. This topic is strangely also a gold mine. You could write reviews of different suppliers, and helpful articles on how to save on your bills. 

 

Mortgages: $47 CPC. A home is the largest purchase most people will ever make, so banks and lenders are willing to spend some big bucks to beat out the competition. 

 

Attorneys: $47. There are plenty of ambulance-chasers out there today, and lawyers are coming out of the woodwork left and right. Capitalize on the legal craze by writing articles about topics like hiring a lawyer, small claims court, etc.

 

Loans: $44 CPC. Whether it’s to pay off credit cards, to buy a car, or go to school, lots of people need loans. Write articles about this topic and perhaps direct people toward their options.

 

Donations: $42 CPC. From starving kids in Africa to a local recreation centre, there are plenty of causes that need fundraising, and fundraisers shell out the bucks to advertise. Write articles about this topic, such as the power of giving.

 

Conference Call: $42 CPC. This is something that all businesses need, and if you know anything about business expenditures, you know that companies toss money around more frequently than private individuals. Review different systems and write articles about phone etiquette.

 

Degree: $40 CPC. Everybody (and their grandmother) is going back to school these days, and usually online. Capitalize on education and write some degree-related blogs. 

 

Credit: $38 CPC. Americans (and increasingly everyone else) love spending with plastic. Write reviews of the best cards, or articles on how to build credit.

 

Final word: The content marketing you’re doing for these businesses doesn’t have to be free. After you’ve built some traction on your site, you may as well start selling your content to the businesses you’re writing about… it will prove to be an additional source of revenue, and if their Google ads are any indicator, they’re willing to spend.

Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors. 

 

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it. 

 

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts. 

 

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically. 

 

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently. 

 

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

 

The Importance of a Sitemap

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs. 

 

1) Navigation purposes

 

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease. 

 

2) Conveying your site's theme

 

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time. 

 

3) Site optimization purposes

 

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. 

 

4) Organization and relevance

 

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance. 

 

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

 

Building Your List with Give Away Ventures

With the awareness of the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a couple of years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

 

This method is more recognized as a “starting a Give Away venture”.

 

In a real sense, a Give Away event is much like a big time version of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

 

Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product he is already selling (if he is kind enough to offer into the event).

 

The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

 

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then endorse the Give Away event to their own mailing lists.

 

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

 

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

 

You can easily get notified about a Give Away event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers often or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Using Free Reports to Build Your List

Aside from pre-selling your products and affiliated offers, the other purpose of your free viral report should be to build your mailing list.

 

This is because if you are unable to pre-sell, let alone sell, the products and services featured in your free report, the last-ditch effort should be to collect leads. In short, if you cannot convert the reader into a ready buyer, you should then attempt to convert him or her into your subscriber.

 

In that manner, you can still follow up with your reader on future offers and have a chance at converting him or her into your customer, preferably lifetime.

 

You can do so by offering a lifetime update to your report or a unique notification list your reader will be interested in subscribing to, which leads to having him or her subscribed to your mailing list.

 

One of the few success factors in viral marketing of your free report is quality. If your readers find your information worth sharing, and you encourage them to do so by giving them the right to give your report away for free, you will be able to have your name, status and links within the report passed around without any effort on your part – simply because others are willing to do so for you!

Weakness in Safe List

How would you like to send your commercial emails to people you do not know, but are expecting to receive such mail from you? Wait a minute. That does not sound right. How can this be?

 

It is simple, if you know what is really going on. Everybody who is on these lists, also known as safe lists, knows that they will be receiving emails from other members. This is possible because that is one of the conditions of their “safe list” membership.

 

And those who join these lists are willing to agree to this condition because they themselves would want to send out their own commercial emails to the others on the list.

 

The result: everyone is sending emails to each other but no one is reading them!

 

It gets worse when some savvy members sign up for the membership using a free or less-frequently-used account to store the useless emails they will never bother to open and read.

 

Having said that, it is always wiser to start your own mailing list and build it with opt-in subscribers, no matter how tempting safe lists can be or how many members there are in a safe list.

 

Refrain from Buying Bulk Mails

I am sure that you have definitely come across advertisements that read: “1,000,000 email addresses for $29.99”. And these bulk mail companies can even offer you these names in a CD at your doorstep.

 

Sure, having 1,000,000 subscribers is the best thing that could ever happen to any Internet Marketer and often sounds too good to be true. But very often, it always sounds too good to be true.

 

What many beginning marketers do not really know is that these bulk companies harvest the email addresses using robots and other wares on the Internet. That is how the 1,000,000 email addresses come about, whatever the amount is.

 

Now, the really awful part is that if you purchase the so-called 1,000,000 names even at a low price, not only is it a waste of money, you are risking being accused of spamming. It is no longer a surprise how you often receive spam mails on Viagra, OEM Software and things you do not even need in your inbox.

 

That is so possible, because of the 1,000,000 names, no one knows you or even ask to be subscribed to your mailing list.

 

On top of that, not all 1,000,000 email addresses are really in use because a portion of them can either be own by the same owners (one owner can own more than 1 email accounts) or are obsolete.

 

When you read such ads again, tell yourself that it is a waste of money.

Building Your List with Paid eZine Advertising

Some Internet Marketers can get clueless when it comes to unleashing the full potential of paid eZine advertising. One of the most common dilemmas is that whether should the Internet Marketer advertise the product or service he is selling directly to the subscribers of the eZine he is paying advertising for?

 

This can be a wise method, but with ifs and buts. For one, the advertisement must be compelling and attention grabbing. Secondly, there is no telling if the eZine’s subscribers constantly practice a buying habit until you put some money to find out.

 

Investing even a small sum of money can be risky to a number of Internet Marketers who are on tight budgets. But in spite of the risk factors, eZine advertising can still be rewarding, if done right.

 

Thus the solution: the marketer would be wiser if he or she uses eZine advertising to build his or her mailing list. It makes sense, anyway. Since some eZines display more than one sponsored advertisement, you can grab the subscriber’s attention by giving a free or risk-free product or offer through your ad.

 

When the subscriber clicks on your ad, he or she can opt into your mailing list in exchange for the free offer, which can be a free report or even a trial service.

 

While you are not making a hard sell through your advertisement just yet, building your list by getting other eZine’s subscribers subscribed to your eZine allows you to follow up with them in the future, as and when you have new offers.

 

Building Your List with Articles

You can build your list simply by writing articles, whether you have thought of it or not.

 

Quite simply, you write and submit your articles on your topic of expertise or business nature to popular article directories where eZine publishers and readers are looking for the information you provide.

 

Leveraging your viral marketing efforts on article writing can be rewarding, if done right. In the real sense, you are actually proving your worth and demonstrating your expertise about your business through the articles you write.

 

So, how can this method in effect build your mailing list? The answer: the resource box you attach to your articles. In your resource box (also known as bio box), you include a brief detail about yourself and your business site together with its URL.

 

It is strongly suggested that your resource box URL links to your mailing list’s landing page where you can get your visitor’s name and email address, which will in turn help you build your mailing list at no cost.

 

If your articles are found worth sharing, eZine publishers will republish your articles together with your resource box for their readers and subscribers. The wonderful result: viral marketing without effort on your part!

 

You can start by writing and submitting your articles to trusted article submitter sites such as http://www.articlemarketer.com/ and begin your article marketing journey today.