12Copywriting Tips to Make Your Advertising More

12Copywriting Tips to Make Your Advertising More Profitable

by: Thom Reece

Year after year people make the same mistakes in directresponse copy and advertising. You can avoid the most common and costly blunders by following the following proven tips…

1. WRITE IN DIRECT RESPONSE LANGUAGE:

Use short paragraphs and short words. This article has 68% short wordsfive letters or less. Strive for at least 65%75%. Never go under 50% unless you are writing to Ph.Dกs.

Make your sentences and paragraphs flow like a breeze.

Ignore good grammar when you have a good reason.

Keep the bucket brigade going: Start paragraphs with And, But, So you see, However…

Use the freshest concepts and the most colorful language you can without disturbing the flow.

Use hot words: free, profit, new, now, secret, easy, save, guarantee, today… and the hottest word of all: YOU!

Use bullets… lots of them.

2. WRITE LOTS OF HEADLINES.

Always think up dozens of alternative headlines. Put your strongest benefits in them and test your best alternatives. When writing headlines for web sites make sure they include key search words and phrases along with the benefits.

3. DROP THE WARMUPS…

Youกll destroy your entire letter/ad by starting off, กAs a homeowner, you know how maintenace costs are climbing every day…ก. Take your first draft and try cutting out the first two to three paragraphs… youกll usually find the real กmeatก starts to appear in your copy after you have started to กwarmupก to the writing.

4. STAND OUT.

Separate yourself from the competition as clearly as you can. Discover, isolate, and dramatize all the reasons for doing business with you…today…, instead of your competitor. Build your entire package or ad around these reasons (benefits).

5. SELL BENEFITS, NOT FEATURES.

Readers don’t buy products or features of products. They buy the benefitsofuse of the product or features. Be humble enough to realize that a buyer will not give you one red cent for any product or feature until you convert the features into benefitsofuse.

6. LEARN TO GIVE.

Most advertisers and charities think of direct response strictly as a device to กgetก. Unfortunately, most readers also want to get. So, to succeed, you must adopt a กgiveก attitude… beyond what you offer in the product or service. Give them something immediately in your ad, your letter, your web page. Give them news, business tips, interesting stories, resources, freebies, special deals.

7. USE TESTIMONIALS.

They’re proof that you’re as good as you say you are, and that youกll do what you say will do. Like…

กI increased profits by $100,000 last year using your services…ก Joe Smith, President, Smith Corporation

The more specific the testimonial the more power it has. Give full attributions whenever possible. Testimonials give you believability and credibility. You can’t do successful directresponse without these two essential factors.

8. OFFER A MONEYBACK GUARANTEE.

Whatever you are selling, make sure you offer a moneyback guarantee. Itกs a critical factor in getting someone to send in their monty to someone they don’t know or maybe never heard of.

9. CREDIT CARDS, TOLL FREE NUMBERS.

Credit card purchases and tollfree ก800ก numbers can increase your response by as much as 50%. If you’re on the web make sure you opt for secure online transmission (SSL) of credit card orders… or allow other means for your customer to provide their credit information to you.

10. ASK FOR ACTION.

Itกs amazing how often otherwise good copy never gets around to asking for the order. If you don’t ask for action… you won’t get any.

11. BUDGET YOUR TIME.

Devote about one third of your writing time to the lead elements, headline, subheads, teasers, opening paragraphs.

12. KEEP CURRENT.

Directresponse is more scientific than other types of advertising. Like any fastmoving science, it has itกs discoveries daily. This is especially true of writing for the Internet/World Wide Web. Subscribe to industry trade journals such as Target Marketing, DM News, Direct, and other relevant publications.

(C) Copyright 2004 Thom Reece All Rights Reserved

About The Author

Thom Reece is the CEO of OnLine Marketing Group, a direct response marketing agency with headquarters in Hawaii. He is the creator of the Online Marketing Resource Center [ http://www.ecomprofits.com ] & the major portal for the network marketing industry MaxxMLM.com [http://www.MaxxMLM.com]. Thom can be reached by email at: [email protected].

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 04

by Thom Reece

Autoresponders: Ease Your Life

Autoresponders: Ease Your Life

by: Pavel Lenshin

What every small business operator always lacks is time. Sometimes lack of time leads to inefficiency, what in its turn, leads to business failure even if you have plenty of financial resources.

That is why there are so many programs designed to automate every business step starting from sign up process and ending with processing online payments.

Autoresponders play a special part. At the dawn of their usage they greatly assist in solving the most timeconsuming business task that is customer support. Nowadays there are other ways of how autoresponder can help with your everyday routine tasks. Below are the most common tasks where autoresponder fully reveal its potential:

Customer support;

Singup/unsubscription procedures;

Timely delivered emails;

Electronic materials on request;

Response tracking.

The usage of autoresponder as a customer support is based on the topic your customer interests in. Whether it is problems with program installation, billing or general question, it will reply with prewritten answers the same moment email was received from customer.

In very basic way autoresponder can simply notify customer/visitor that his/her inquiry was received and will be answered within 24 hours.

Subscription/unsubscription is also usually required instant notification. The majority of existed mailing scripts have an automatic notification feature, still in its basis it is the same old autoresponder.

Ezine or newsletter subscription is not the only process where autoresponder can give you a hand. They help in many cases with all sorts of email notifications of successful sale, accepted inquiry, thanking for completing the survey and many other cases.

Next way of autoresponder usage proved to earn huge income to many online entrepreneurs. Timely delivered follow up emails that are based on autoresponder are widely recognized as a musthave marketing strategy. The theory behind claims that biggest customer response is gained at 8th contact only. That is why business owners setup a follow up autoresponder sequence that, when signup for, starts emailing prewritten messages on specified time basis daily, every other day, weekly, biweekly etc, generating the biggest possible response rate on complete autopilot, without any need of owner interference.

Email courses are small variation of previous strategy. They were designed to educate interested people, work the same way as product followups do, still serving as a perfect marketing tool for generating subscribers, customers without any hassle.

Publications on request play another important role. It may be articles, reports, brochures, schemes, ebooks, audio, video files, any electronic media may be emailed in the body of the email message or as an attachment to every person immediately on their request and to an email box they considered to be the fastest to download from, presumably, ISPกs.

As strange as it may seem, autoresponder may be used for tracking response rate as well. For instance, by putting slightly different autoresponder email addresses on different webpages you can easily count how many requests came from each page, testing which webpage generates the biggest interest.

To track ezine advertisement response you will also have to setup a different autoresponders for each ezine you plan to run your advert in. At the end you will see how many people each ezine has sent you and generated the biggest income.

Dominating majority of webhosting plans, offered today on the Internet market, come with simple, usually unlimited, email autoresponders. That means they can help in 4 main cases that we have discussed above, except for timely delivered emails. That is because they imply onetime reply email, so you can setup (1) customer support emails, (2) subscription notifications to both your subscriber and yourself, (4) publications on request, (5) response tracking, but (3) timely delivered emails like email followups or courses.

In order to offer automatic, say, weekly, email courses you will have to look for:

custom autoresponder internet application (script);

3rd party autoresponder providers.

The rule of thumb is to know your needs and resources. First choice is preferable if you know what FTP and CGI mean or have someone with basic knowledge of how scripts are setup, want to install it once and forever, have time and money to make onetime investment. You can even try to find free script that in some cases may be even quicker to setup than sign up for some 3rd party service.

Autoresponder service, provided by independent Internet company, is easier for new comers as all technical stuff will be hidden, leaving simple webinterface to manage your autoresponders. For such convenience Internet companies will charge you on monthly or yearly basis, although there are free socalled adware autoresponders available.

In general you can find discounted allinone services, hosting offers or mailing lists coming with followup autoreponders and allowing you to save money.

About The Author

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur, founder of ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make your business prosper. Discounted Internet services,

FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/

FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 04, 2003

by Pavel Lenshin

Complete WebSite Optimization For Search Engines

Complete WebSite Optimization For Search Engines (Part 1)

by: Pavel Lenshin

SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out your business return on SEO is directly proportional to the results your business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although the response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and the most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your current business model and marketing campaign has already been optimized and reached high level or response rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business กin quantityก.

The reason for such attitude lies within the next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under conducting website SEO will force growing number of visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious reason is that too few people actually return to the site once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Letกs draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using childrenกs math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start to express their interest in your offer every month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, กconversionก rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped to bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100 ขdesired actionsข per month! In other words, your net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly about quality.

I haven’t intentionally mentioned about high quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably be skeptical by now for my eveningout the quality of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is simple the quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how กqualityก visitors coming from SE will be for your particular business as I don’t know your present promotion methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative. Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were taught for their whole internet business career that search engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles and other publications. Do you really think that ‘response qualityก of people coming from กDescription tagก of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO campaign, despite the unquestionable quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we, firstly, should have those webpages, otherwise there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to another obvious conclusion. The more themebased webpages you have the better SEO result you can achieve. If your online business represented by 3 webpages (main sales letter, about the author and contacts), your initial SEO ‘resourcesก are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information, that is why, content rich websites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs. If you haven’t submitted your website to SEs yet, no point to optimize the SE listing position you don’t have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is the extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know the basic rule of successful website optimization is focusing on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words, the less supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or phrase is, the more chances are for your webpage of being กnoticedก and ranked high.

Here is the problem, if you want to get a maximum for your website SE position you should be prepared not just to rewrite or edit your webpages, but to completely change the theme structure and priority of informational content!

There would undoubtedly be website sections or pages with extremely high competition that would stress the popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it กas isก, optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your กflexibilityก and how far you can go to look กprettyก from SE viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of informational preferences are common, but the rest 10% differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumersก needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete website search engine optimization, expanding your business to the new markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about กasking for high rankingก and there cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves control ranking algorithm and determine กwho is whereก. More than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week to several months, so don’t panic if your optimization efforts haven’t resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow morning.

Structure

Letกs start from drawing a scheme of your website link structure very similar to one every webdeveloper draws before designing a website. Under other equal conditions, we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more theme based webpages or even website sections you create, the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter how optimized your competitorกs single webpage is.

Each webpage of website section should represent a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your กkeywords marketก, increasing chances of high rankings. Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely to win market recognition.

For now try to have กhorizontalก as well as standard กverticalก link connections between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may help to improve the rankings of webpages connected to it as well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I would like to point to the other approach you should know about, that is suggested by some experts. Letกs call it SEoriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a website your first step implies searching for the best key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop content around these keywords. It means that your website will get highest SE ranking, but the informational richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe tition will determine what kind of content you will have at your website. As you see, according to SEoriented approach, the more competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, the less attention you should pay to developing that theme at your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to create and evaluate your current website content based on your business preferences and your nichemarket needs and then optimize those webpages according to keywords taken from your existed webpages, no matter how tough the competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes, but the primary accent should be focused on your business development and marketing needs.

As for the keywords, the basic rule is to choose the most targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons:

Phrases could describe your webpage theme usually more precisely than a word;

Phrases usually have substantially less competition in comparison with oneword.

Write down 35 the most targeted key phrases for each webpage or section we are going to optimize. Then by evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords for SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase competition or, as i said กevaluating supply/demand ratioก is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs at Overture.com or Google.comกs AdWords that have tool for discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for the most prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us to go further and start optimizing the webpages themselves.

(to be continued)

About The Author

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur and founder of the entrepreneurship portal, where you can find discounted Internet services, FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/, FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/, and finally uncover innovative strategies through FREE กNET Business Magazineก

[email protected]

This article was posted on October 31, 2003

by Pavel Lenshin

Choose The Right Business For You In Less Than 15

Choose The Right Business For You In Less Than 15 Minutes

by: Charles Kangethe

3 Characteristics Of ‘the Right Businessก Model

The business must service a large market.

Niche markets are also very profitable but require specialist products and customer service. Target niche markets when you are more confident in your business abilities.

The business must adapt and change with the market.

Be aware faddish businesses can be very difficult to operate because of the rapid rate at which market perceptions change.

Initial startup capital requirements must be minimal

Many new business owners work to tight budgets and have limited resources to startup. Ideal business models should therefore have low startup costs.

What Business Fits These Characteristics?

A (home based), direct response marketing business, dealing in Information has all these characteristics and offers unparalleled flexibility for the serious Wealth Creator.

Direct response marketing is all about the targeting of a specific market by use of mail shots.

Mail shots can be sent by post as happens in mail order or by email as happens in the online Internet world.

Letกs get specific and see how direct response marketing fulfils the characteristics of ‘the Right Businessก

Large Market

Direct Response is a multi billion dollar industry and growing.

The US leads the world in direct response marketing, principally due to the geographical spread of the country, and the almost universal acceptance of direct response marketing as a valid means of buying and selling products.

The UK is a very sophisticated direct marketers environment, where many US trends manifest themselves as a result of the close cultural, economic and political ties between the two countries.

5 Reasons Why The Business Should Deal With Information.

People like Information. They seek it everywhere. On the TV, on radio, at the cinema, in newspapers, in books and reports and increasingly on the Internet.

The need for Information seems insatiable the more a person knows about a particular subject, the more they want to know. It is also true that the less someone knows about something which is of some interest to them the more they will seek out information to expand their knowledge.

Advances in technology in computing and desktop publishing means it is now unbelievably easy and cost effective to engage in Information provision businesses.

People will pay money for access to good, useful sources of information. They have little time to do the required research themselves and will pay someone else to distil the information they require into useable forms.

There are numerous Information product types and it is more than likely you will find one or more of the following financially rewarding. Ezines, audio tapes, video tapes, CDROM, DVD, Live teleconferences, workshops and Seminars.

Adaptable Business

A direct marketing business working with Information affords you the opportunity to change with your market as quickly as it takes to produce a new Information product.

This can literally range from a few hours for new, short shelf life information products to a few days or weeks for longer lasting Information items.

In some cases the changes you need to make to your products to stay ahead of changing market trends may be as simple as title changes and a few amended paragraphs in the content.

Low StartUp Capital Requirements

Many of your good ideas go by the wayside for one simple reason. It costs too much to successfully float the idea, and then to sustain it through the early years as it becomes established.

An Online direct response information product business can be started for less than $300 per annum in the USA or £200 per annum in the UK.

At the very minimum, you will require

A domain and website on a professional hosting platform

An Autoresponder Service to send out email communications to your prospects and customers

You will also require some means for accepting payment for your Information Product.

One of the truly remarkable things about this business is that these requirements can be achieved for the low capital outlay described above.

Conclusion

Information marketing is not the only กidealก business model, and I am sure you can think of others that fit the characteristics noted at the beginning. However, Information marketing via direct response offers you the perfect Business setup to ensure a positive startup and a healthy business model.

Charles Kangethe of http://www.simplyeasier.com is a leading new wave Netpreneur and a published author from England. The กSimply Easierก brand name is your guarantee of high value, quality Marketing Products, Services and Resources.

About The Author

Charles Kangethe has been involved in direct response marketing since 1982. He now lives in Suffolk County and spends his time working on new Online Marketing campaigns, with particular focus on helping new netpreneurs at http://www.simplyeasier.com

This article was posted on January 26, 2004

by Charles Kangethe

How To Use Direct Response Card Decks To Fine Tune

How To Use Direct Response Card Decks To Fine Tune Your Marketing…

by: Thom Reece

Market research specialists have discovered a new tool which enables them to quickly identify target market cells, measure buyer acceptance, test new product or service concepts quickly and inexpensively and survey market characteristics…the Direct Response Card Deck.

For two to four cents per contact, the researcher can now gather market intelligence from both specialized vertical markets (lawyers, doctors, etc.) or broad based horizontal markets (all marketing executives across industry lines). In addition, these same markets can now be tested in such confined geographical areas as business executives in Hawaii or professionals in Minneapolis.

Not only does the marketer overcome one of the traditional problems in research…test sizes…he or she also reaps the huge advantage of accurate measurability and accountability. Since all responses can be directed right back to the research organization, market feedback is both quick and accurate.

Many firms have difficulty in obtaining statistically significant samplings through traditional channels because of budget restrictions.

Itกs not uncommon for important strategy decisions to be made on the basis of sampling as few as 2,000 names out of a universe of several million potential buyers. This is risky at best. It could lead to marketing disaster based on serious sampling error, or wrong conclusions drawn from insufficient data.

With direct response card packs, it is now possible to test or survey as many as 100,000 potential buyers for as little as $2,000 or less. For the research or direct marketing consultant this results in meaningful figures which are both statistically significant and forecastable.

Proper analysis of this larger sampling should result in strategy decisions which are more accurate, more meaningful, more valid and more profitable for the direct marketer.

The ability to order and conduct true A/B (or more) split run tests of offers, prices, etc. has important implications for the creative team.

The marketing intelligence gathered through card packs can be a valuable road map to success. Critically important data, discovered through card deck advertising, can determine the answers to such questions as:

Have we targeted to the correct audience?

Is the audience responsive to the degree necessary to maximize potential profitability?

Do we have the right combination of offer, price, copy, graphics, headlines, terms, etc.?

Are the response/profit characteristics such that they justify testing such other direct response media as direct mail, space or broadcast advertising?

Is there potential for a variation of this product/service to be marketed to a closely related audience?

What is the potential for backend profits from related item sales?

Are we barking up the wrong tree? Should we cut our losses now and thank our luck stars that we were able to discover, inexpensively, that we were wrong?

While the advantage of card decks as a market research tool outweigh the disadvantages, there are some restrictions you need to be aware of:

1. The card itself is small (about 3กx5ก) and as such restricts your ability to test such things as long copy and multiple option offers. Some decks provide larger format sizes with the ability to do foldover inserts which provide more space, but these options are at a substantial premium in price. The small space can work to your advantage because it forces you to limit your testing to those factors that have the most profound affect on response and profitability…i.e. offer and price, for example.

2. Color reproduction, if it is important to your product, is not always the best. The conventional .007 Hi Bulk paper stock normally used in card decks is not the best choice for color printing. Most deck publishers, however, offer a coated stock option and you may find it useful.

3. Response rates are,on the average, lower in card decks (1/4th of one percent to 1 percent) than they might be in a free standing direct mail package. On the surface this may appear to be a disadvantage. In fact it is not.

Your goal in market research/testing is to obtain statistically significant data across the broadest sampling possible…consistent with budgetary limits.

Card decks allow you to achieve this goal, precisely. Itกs much better to have a 1/4th of 1% response from a 100,000 name universe (250 responses) than to have a 12.5% (250 responses) from a small 2,000 name test cell. Although the total numbers are the same, the former example gives you a truer picture of market conditions and possible product/service acceptance.

In summation, we have found that direct response card decks, if used properly, can be ideal market research tools. Card decks are inexpensive to use. They give quick accurate and projectable results. They reduce the risk of sampling error, and the resulting data is both statistically significant and inherently more valid.

Thereกs only one way to know for sure…test it!

About The Author

©Copyright 2005 Thom Reece All Rights Reserved

Thom Reece is the CEO of OnLine Marketing Group, a direct response marketing agency with headquarters in Hawaii. He is the creator of the Online Marketing Resource Center [ http://www.ecomprofits.com ]. Thom can be reached by email at: thomATecomprofits.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on September 10

by Thom Reece

Make Your Mailing a Home Run, Not a Strike Out!

Make Your Mailing a Home Run, Not a Strike Out!

by: Joy Gendusa

You can use great design and copy to get a better response.

When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on the mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from the mailing, you wouldn’t send it out.

A little less obvious is that it costs almost the same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in the trash. Why?

The major part of your expenditure is in the mailing list and the postage. The printing costs are about the same for a perfect card as for a mediocre one. All right. So a good design and excellent copy is going to cost a little bit more. But only a little. You send out a postcard mailing to get a response (preferably lots of responses).

The front of the card, graphic and headline, is designed to attract the reader’s interest so that they read what you have to say. In short, to attract his or her attention.

The copy on the front and back of the card is designed to get the reader to respond, either by calling you or emailing you or visiting you or going to your web site. A response.

If your card accomplishes that, it’s done its duty.

How do you get it to do that?

Good design. Good copy. Assuming you have sent the cards to people who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell. (There’s no point sending a postcard selling raincoats to people in the Sahara Desert. They are the wrong ขpublicข).

It is more cost effective in the long run to hire a professional to do the design and copy for your promotion instead of spending all the time yourself to learn the software. A little time spent improving the design and copy of your postcards will result in much higher ROI (Return On Investment) for your postcard mailing.

About The Author

Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. In 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employs over 60 persons. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at www.postcardmania.com.

This article was posted on March 03

by Joy Gendusa

UGOTTOWORKATIT

UGOTTOWORKATIT

by: Robert J Farey

I love work, I can watch it all day.

I am not scared of work, I have been known to approach within armกs length of it on a number of occasions.

How often have you heard these remarks?

To a lot of people the word กWorkก is more than just a four letter word. It is something that takes up more than a third of their life. Something that has to be endured to provide for the family. To put food on the table and to pay the rent and taxes.

To some others work is something that they look foreword to and are not happy when something comes between them and their passion.

The first group of people are, as a general rule, people who work for wages. I was going to say that they worked for other people. That would not have been true. No matter who you work for, yourself or someone else, itกs the money at the end of the week/month that really matters.

The other group is comprised mostly of people who run their own businesses.

The sad thing about this second group is that over thirtyfive percent of the self employed fail within the first three years of starting their businesses.

IT DOESN’t HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.

Let us look at starting a business on the internet.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to start a business capable of giving a boost to their basic income. Another few hundred dollars a month is all that they ask.

There are the others who need a full time income. People who are desperate to get away from state handouts. Honest God fearing folks who are down on their luck. They would like enough money to live comfortably without having to constantly count the cost.

At the top of the list are those who insist upon nothing less than a six figure income with plenty of time to spare to travel or to pursue their hobbies.

Whichever section that you belong to, there are some things that apply to you all.

Firstly you will need the incentive to succeed.

You will also need the will to succeed.

You will then require the knowledge to succeed.

That is just the basis, but if you can relate to the above short list you are almost half way there.

Don’t think that it is going to be easy. Nothing worth while is ever easy.

You are going to have to work hard during the initial stages. Once you have it all set up and running, It will get easier.

Let us start with the basics. First decide what you want to sell. Then decide how you are going to sell it.

Do you have a product of your own to sell? Or will you be selling another personกs product on commission? Perhaps you will be offering a service.

With a little experience you may decide to develop your own product. Or maybe purchase one that you can sell and to keep all of the profits.

Whatever it is, you will need to advertise. กHowก. There are so many different ways.

All that I can do is to explain the various ways that I use.

Everyone has their own preferences. I have tried most of them and have settled upon the following:

Ezine adverts. Choose a selection of ezines that are relevant to your product or service.

You then have the choice of which type of advertก to use. If you are a bit short of cash, the free adกs will appeal to you.

Use them by all means, free adกs are better than no adกs at all. You will get a reasonable response. It will also give you good practice writing the adverts. If you can produce an advert that gets a good response in the free section, it will surely get a much better response in the paid advert section.

As soon as you can afford it, I would recommend that you start doing top sponsor adverts on the various ezines. I have found these to be one of the best ways of promoting your product.

When using ezine advertising, It is most important that you are extremely selective in the ones that you use. Just because a particular ezine does not have a big readership it does not mean that it is not worth advertising in. It is the quality of the readership that counts not the quantity.

My favorite way of advertising is writing articles for ezines. This is recognized as the most effective method of reaching hundreds of thousands of interested readers.

Your article is placed in a pool where the producers of ezines look for free content for their publications. They only take articles that they feel will be of interest to their readers.

They publish it on the condition that they also publish your byline at the bottom of the article. This byline tells the reader a little about yourself plus the all important link back to your product or service.

If you write a more general article it will be picked up by a wider range of ezine publishers. This often means that you will continue to get response for a long time after its first publication. But the readership will not be so selective.

Remember, ezine articles are published at no cost to you, and you can reach an audience of hundreds of thousands who will see your byline with its link back to you and your product.

If you can compose an article every month aimed at ezines relevant to your website, you can be assured of a steady stream of prospects who are interested in what you have to sell.

Footnote:

If you do decide to use กfree adsก whatever you do, don’t use your main email address. You are sure to get a flood of trash email.

Set up a spare email account especially to receive the replies.

IT WON’t WORK IF YOU DON’t TRY.

Give it a go. …Bob…

About The Author

Robert earns his crust by targeting the thousands of newcomers to internet trading. He aims to cut their learning curve to enable them to start earning money from the word go.

He learned the hard way. You can learn the easy way.

Checkout his website. Itกs not posh. Itกs not perfect, but it is effective. http://www.learnandearnnow.co.uk/

[email protected]

This article was posted on December 21, 2004

by Robert J Farey

Real Estate Marketing, Do You Use Direct Mail?

Real Estate Marketing, Do You Use Direct Mail?

by: Barrett Niehus

Prospecting for leads is by far the most difficult part of being a Realtor or small business professional. In fact, lead development is by far the most expensive and time consuming aspect of your job. However, you level of success in lead development will determine if you succeed or fail as a real estate agent or small business professional.
So how do you develop leads? Well top selling professionals realize that they need to touch as many people as possible without spending a fortune or taking up a lot of their time. They also realize that they must make some form of contact with a prospect as many as eight times before that contact will even consider doing business with the professional. Many of these professionals use direct mail to recruit prospects, and direct mail tools to close their deals.
The fundamentals of direct mail are very simple. At is most basic level you are sending out message with an invitation for a prospect to contact you. The key is targeting your specific audience, and making your message stand out against all of the other junk mail that you prospects receive. In addition, you must expose your prospects to the message enough times to make them consider taking action.
The first step in creating a direct mail program is to determine where you are going to focus your message. What type of client are you specifically looking for? How old are they, what are their interests, fears, income levels, etc. With this type of very specific demographic information you can customize your message to invoke them to call you. Next, determine how many people you are going to send your message to and what geography you are going to focus on. Keep in mind that a direct mail piece with more than a 1% response rate is considered exceptional, and that statistically, post cards get more attention than envelopes in peoples mail boxes. Essentially this means that if you mail 500 pieces and you get five phone calls, you are doing exceptionably well.
After you know what your customer looks like and the area in which they live, create your marketing message. It should invoke emotion and request a response. The most effective messages offer something for free such as a free home report, assessment, or giveaway such as a software program or product. Other useful messages show what has just been listed and invite prospects to กcash inก on their rising home values.
Now that you have your message designed contact a local or internet based direct mailing list seller and rent a list of prospects addresses. You will be mailing to this list more than once so make sure you get repeat mailing discounts. All of these list brokers have test addresses in the lists they sell to make sure you only mail the agreed number of times. Many of these list sellers will offer mailing services as well, and some will even provide design and printing services. Companies such as PurePoscards.com and MailersClub.com are excellent resources to get both mailing lists and design services.
Use the design services as needed and remember that statistically, an enclosed letter with blue ink and a first class stamp will get the best response. Letters and postcards follow with lower responses. Regardless of the type of mail that you are sending, it is important to realize that you are hoping for at least a 1% response to your campaign.
Mail your message to the list and see what happens. Plan on mailing at least two more times to get your desired response, but feel free to modify the message and the medium. It is just important to provide your target customer with repetition so that they become used to your message and will consider doing business with you. It is through repetition and a message that stands out that you will get your client’s attention and earn a response to your marketing.
Direct marketing is a very effective tool for realtors to grow their businesses. It can create a significant number of leads and a significant addition to your cash flow, However, direct mail must be done with proper planning and the right expectations for response. Never has a single onetime direct mailing been successful. Alternatively, real estate professionals who practice repetition in their direct mail and their marketing grow wealthy while they leave their competition behind.

About The Author

Barrett Niehus is a principal for IP Ware Real Estate Investment Software http://www.realtysoftware.org and a technical marketing specialist for Compound Solutions in Escondido, California.

This article was posted on May 11, 2004

by Barrett Niehus

Test Your Headlines for Maximum Profits

Test Your Headlines for Maximum Profits

by: George Dodge

Professional copywriters do not simply write or select one headline and then hope for the best. They create a number of different headlines; often times as many as a hundred before selecting the headline they think will perform the best.

But they don’t stop there! Professional copywriters know that their choice will often not be the choice of the public and therefore they test their headlines in the market place.

Believe it or not, even professional copywriters find that half or more of their ads, sales letters, or campaigns fail to become winners. But, by testing, they are able to cut their losses early and maximize their successes.

The method of testing most commonly used is known as split testing. With headlines, split testing involves the exposing of two different alternating headlines to prospects. This can be done both online and offline, but online is much easier and the testing process is quicker.

Here is the way headline split testing works online. Visitor A comes to your website and sees headline #1 while visitor B comes to your website and sees headline # 2. When visitor C comes to your website, headline # 1 is shown again and the alternating process continues for the length of the test.

After a number of actions have been recorded for each headline, such as clicking through to the order page, the results are compared to determine which headline resulted in the largest number of desired responses (the click through to the order page, in this example).

The larger the number of total responses recorded, the greater the accuracy of the test to determine the headline winner. Once a winner is chosen, that headline becomes the new control. A control is the current best performing item being tested, in this case, a headline.

Now that a control has been established, a new headline is tested against the control to see if the response can be improved. This process continues on until a given headline has been the control for a large number of tests.

Initially the two headlines that are being tested can be quite different. What you are looking for in the early test is what general kind of headline seems to work for the target market. Once a general kind of headline appears to be a winner over competing types of headlines, then you begin to tweak and split variations of the winning headline itself.

Letกs take a look at an example.

This headline example comes from Jimmy D. Brown, a very successful Internet marketer. The following two headlines were split tested to determine a winner.

Headline # 1: ‘the Power of Viral eBooksก

Headline # 2: กHow to Create Automated Profit Generatorsก

The Result? Headline # 2 out pulled headline # 1 by multiple times.

Now to simplify this process, letกs assume for the sake of this example that Headline # 2 proved to be the winner, not only of this test, but a number of follow on test against a number of other headlines. So, you have determined the type of headline that seems to work well for your particular target market. Now, it is time to tweak the headline by split testing variations of this particular headline.

When you split test variations of a headline, you want to only change one thing at a time. Perhaps you will change only one word in the headline, or the color of the headline, or the using of quote marks around the headline, etc. But you only test one item at a time. Each item you test is called a variable; it is the thing that varies between the headlines in the test.

Everything in the headline can make a difference in the headline response rate. Things that make a difference in response are called response modifiers. In addition to the items mentioned above, other response modifiers in a headline might include the font used, the size of the font, the capitalization of the first letters of each word, etc. Everything in your headline can and should be tested.

For an example of how a very minor change can make a difference in your headline response, take a look at these two headlines:

Headline # 1: กPut Music In Your Lifeก

Headline # 2: กPuts Music In Your Lifeก

The only difference between the headlines is the addition of the letter กsก to the first word. Again the second headline greatly out pulled the first headline. Some copywriters assume that this is because the first headline implies some work on the part of the reader, while the second headline implies that something or someone else does the work. But the reason is not important, only the results matter.

Each tweak of your headline that results in a new control improves the desired response rate of your headline leading to a maximization of profits, if your headline involves the selling of a product or service.

You can never know for sure why one headline out pulls another, but while you can guess, the reason is not important. What is important is the results, no matter what the reason.

Jim and Audri Lanford of www.netrageous.com, now www.scambusters.org, once made a change of color to a sub headline on one of their online sales pages and orders almost dropped to zero. When they changed the headline color back, their normal order rate returned. They guessed that this was because the color change may have caused the headline to look more like hype, but as noted above, the reason is not important. What are important are the results.

Are you testing your headlines? If not, you should be. Every little positive change continues to increase your profits and it all adds up in the end. While some changes may only increase your desired response by a fraction of one percent, some people have seen changes of as much as 1,500% with a single headline change while the rest of their copy remained the same.

How would you like to see either a single or cumulative improvement over time of 1,500% in your desired response rate? I thought so! Then go forth and test, test, and test some more!

About The Author

George Dodge is owner of the Headline Creator Pro Website at http://www.HeadlineCreatorPro.com where you can download software that saves you time and effort by allowing you to quickly and easily create headlines with push button ease.

This article was posted on September 12

by George Dodge

8 Tips to Increase Response in Email

8 Tips to Increase Response in Email

by: Paul J Easton

Opt in email marketing is no different than normal direct marketing in that small simple changes will increase your response and success. These tips will help with both plain text and html email:

1. Personalize กA persons name is still the sweetest soundก Having first name in both the subject of the email, and the body of the message will help your email get read and not just deleted or being mistaken for junk mail.

2. Free Offer something free: It’s an over used word on the Internet, but it still works, but it must 100% free not an item you have to pay postage and packaging for. If you do this your user who checks out your offer will feel cheated.

3. Tracking Always track any promotion, which means using tools that will allow you to track responses and conversion of visitors to sales. A good service to use is adminder:

http://www.adminder.com

Tracking also allows you to find out what information is most important to your readers

4. Talk When you write your email copy, write as if you are having a onetoone conversation with the recipient. This makes your customer feel like a real person and not a number.

5. Short but informative Provide the information in a short and clear method showing the main information using short paragraphs of 34 lines making it easy to read or skim over. Using bullet points and line space between paragraphs to highlight important points.

6. Benefits not featuresShow what the item or service can do for your customer, not what its features are.

7. Call to Action Use a sense of urgency with ease of contact with a

8. Easy to contact Use Clickable link such as http://site.com or mailto:[email protected]

This format will create a click on link in most email programs.

If you are marketing internationally you will need a format suitable for American On Line –The biggest US ISP. Something like this:

[ AOL Users Click Here ]

Always test and target to your market, response rates can be up to 20% with the right message. Trial and error will prove you right or wrong. The power of the promotion to an inhouse list is something very over looked. The list must have agreed to receive information (optin) from you or you just become junk email.

About The Author

Paul Easton is a self confessed Internet Marketing Nut and Editor of กPower Promotion Plusก –An ezine dedicated to web site promotion tools that work with 3 free gifts for subscribing Check it out here: http://www.Digitalawol.com/?source=Article

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 12, 2003

by Paul J Easton

A Typical Frustration In A HomeBased Business

A Typical Frustration In A HomeBased Business

by: Kirk Bannerman

The source of frustration addressed in his article may be all too familiar if you happen to work at an Internetbased home business which relies on personal relationships and/or teamwork.

I am often contacted by members of my business team with a tale of woe regarding a lack of response from their affiliates. It typically goes something like…กI send out lots of emails to all of them and I very rarely get any response. What am I doing wrongก.

If your particular internet business involves selling well known branded items, personal feedback is not an issue. Visitors to your website (potential customers) are primarily interested in selection, availability, and price. If it is a returning customer, then you can also throw customer service into the equation. Once the desired item is selected, your mouse does all the ‘talkingก without any human interaction involved.

However, there are many types of internetbased home businesses where feedback and interaction are quite important and getting an affiliate or business team member to communicate with you is a definite objective. Itกs not at all surprising that this can be a challenge when you stop to think that what you are trying to do is initiate a dialog between two complete strangers who have never even seen each other.

Heavily branded websites like walmart.com or amazon.com are household names and carry an implied trust with visitors. However, the vast majority of websites are not well known and are found and visited as a result of searches performed by search engines. In these instances, the visitor is probably arriving at the website for the first time and human nature often dictates a sense of fear or suspicion of the unknown which is manifested by a reluctance to respond to email messages from an unknown party.

It seems that there is no pat answer as to the best way to elicit an initial email response from a person. I have tried several approaches with varying degrees of success. Individual styles will vary, but the following four points should be kept in mind:

you need to build trust & credibility with thorough knowledge of your business and with straight forward talk about realistic expectations

don’t oversell or indulge in hype as many people are expecting this and it can be an immediate turnoff

send messages with at least one openended question that requires a response

keep the messages fairly brief, long winded messages that go on and on quite frequently will not be read

One other thing to keep in mind is that your messages may not even be reaching the intended recipient and they have no opportunity to give you a reply. At the end of your messages you might want to ask the recipient to send you a return email just saying กgot itก.

We all agree that spam is a very serious problem. These days, many email providers and ISPs have appointed themselves to be the กinformation policeก and are employing various schemes to try to recognize and block messages that constitute spam. Unfortunately, these mail filtering or blocking techniques are often very inaccurate and many messages that people actually want to receive are arbitrarily being sent off into the ozone.

I have some first hand experience with this situation. Not long ago, the ISP that my mother was using suddenly decided that she would not be allowed to receive messages from me! It took us a while to figure out what was going on, but once we did, that ISP was history as far as my mother was concerned.

In the final analysis, all you can do is give it your best shot. Some people will respond, some won’t…and the beat goes on. Remember, itกs nothing personal, just human nature at work.

About The Author

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at http://businessathome.us

This article was posted on February 17, 2004

by Kirk Bannerman

Creating Effective Optin EMail Campaigns

Creating Effective Optin EMail Campaigns

by: Lee Traupel

Itกs been said before, but important to reemphasize, email is the กkiller applicationก of the information age. According to the latest Forrester Research numbers, the permission based email industry is projected to grow from $164M (USD) in 1999 to $7.3B by 2005. Email is also rapidly moving from a textual communications process to one that is rich in multimedia content via serverbased streaming audio or video. Virtually anyone, even those with extremely low bandwidth, can now view compelling content.

Here is a condensed primer for developing an effective optin email campaign:

1. First and foremost, what is permission based or optin email and how is it distinguished from Spam? Optin or permission based email (the terms are interchangeable) means recipients have confirmed their interest in receiving email and have signed up (hence the term optin) to receive email about a subject of their interest. The recipient may also unsubscribe from the list at any time and all email messages are clearly identified as coming from a specific and approved vendor or source.

2. We do not recommend Spam (unsolicited bulk email messages) to our clients, nor have we ever developed a campaign that is not optin based. We think there is a growing backlash to Spam and many of us (author included) are inundated with it and delete it as soon as we recognize it.

3. The actual optin email content is very important, like any interactive marketing process. The subject itself needs to be succinct and informative (as this is how most people filter email), the text in the message should be concise, with paragraphs no more than 23 short sentences, customer references should be referred to in the lead paragraph to drive the rest of the message, have no more than two hyperlinks embedded in the content, and utilize a close and signature that thanks people for their time with a link (phone and email) to a ‘realก person.

4. Many marketing types don’t know whether to use HTML (rich media) or textual content. A standard rule of thumb is, if your target audience is consumers, then many prefer the HTML format, due to the snazzier graphical content; but, if you are targeting corporate or technical types, the majority of them want a message that is text only and one that leaves out any/all marketing hype just the concise facts.

5. Costs can vary dramatically depending on your target demographics or market segment. A good rule of thumb is to expect rates of $.05 (USD) to $.25 per message, depending on the size of the media buy and frequency (the number of times you are using a list), type of list demographics, vendor selection (small publisher versus comprehensive services provider such as YesMail), and market conditions in the interactive advertising market.

6. What should a good campaign generate in terms of response rates; i.e., those that clicked through from your message to a web site or called a tollfree number? These numbers will fluctuate based again upon your market segment, product or service you are selling, type of response rate you are seeking (download, ecommerce sale, review of materials via a web site, etc.). But, industry averages are from 4% up to 20%. Unfortunately these numbers are going south as more and more companies integrate optin email with interactive and offline marketing processes.

7. Message testing is also a very important component of this process. Meaning, you need to develop 13 messages (กcreativeก in marketing speak) that have different content and call to action components. Then test by utilizing 1015% of your total media buy by sending out these test messages and assessing the response rates and go to market with the message that generated the highest return. Be forewarned, this process can slow the campaign down, but testing can help you increase your response rates or back end ROI exponentially.

8. Your interactive ad agency or list partner should help you setup กlanding page(s)ก the actual page where people are taken via a hyperlink in your optin email message. This page should have content that is integrated with your optin message and act as a response mechanism by capturing sufficient information to enable you to build your own inhouse newsletter, which in turn helps to leverage downstream media costs.

9. Finally, the last and most important part of the process is setting up tracking reports that will enable you to carefully analyze the results from your optin email campaign. This is typically done by inserting 12 lines of HTML code on 35 pages of your web site (product overview, registration, or home/index pages for instance). A report can then be generated that shows the number of respondents for each page as a subset of the overall response rates from the campaign. This critical analysis process will help you understand the effectiveness of your overall campaign and will also provide valuable insight about your web site content, UI (User Interface) and navigation.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a resultsdriven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies. [email protected]

[email protected]

This article was posted on July 25, 2002

by Lee Traupel