your business – Page 7 – TP Javeton WebNet

Initial email marketing efforts

If you plan to do some Web marketing to promote your business endeavor, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Web marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. However, this is not true and not utilizing this type of marketing can cause your business to lose out on a great deal of new revenue.

By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of revenue and market share to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world. However, the first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating a subscriber or opt-in list. In this article we will discuss some popular options currently being used very successfully by other Web marketing professionals which we hope will help you to learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.

Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely facing the dilemma of compiling an email subscriber list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials. One common way to gain a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is not very effective at all and we do not recommend it.

Avoid for-sale lists

The problem with purchasing an email list is you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of that list would have any interest at all in your products or services. This is very important because while you want to reach as many subscribers as possible with your email marketing campaigns you also want these subscribers to be members of your overall target audience. In other words, when you purchase an email list you may be sending your email messages to some users who might be interested but this is largely coincidental and is not likely to be well received since the message was not solicited.

Internet users are very quick to delete material they believe to be spam without even opening or reading such material. In fact some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are merely suspected to be spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam and “suspected” spam. Therefore you run the risk of having your email marketing efforts result in a complete failure and an even bigger waste of time if the majority of recipients never even receive or open the message(s).

Build a list from scratch

A far better way to create an email subscription list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as other information which might be of interest to them. This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about these products and services.

Once you have a list of interested customers or potential customers you can send promotional emails or create digital newsletters for distribution to the members of your email list. These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services. This is a better method of approaching email marketing, because the information you send will be valued by your list members and may help persuade them to try your products and services. You might also want to include useful links to your website as well as other websites which may be of interest to your readers. Content you provide should also contain a portion which urges readers to take a specific action such as making a purchase, or at least, learning more about a certain product or service.

Establishing an affiliate business

There are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs available in this eCommerce marketplace, and they all claim to be the best, while many of them try to create the impression that all an individual has to do in order to make money on the Web is use their links and banners, and then wait for the money to start rolling in. That is obviously not the way affiliate marketers begin to make money; although money can, and often does, start rolling in once the groundwork is laid and fundamental steps are taken by new affiliates; so the impression is primarily a false one.

That having been said, an affiliate marketing career can only be successful if the affiliate is ready, willing and able to commit significant time, energy and resources (financial and otherwise) to building the necessary relationships and “following” that s/he can convert into return visitors, referrals and buying customers (traffic) that is the cornerstone of an affiliate marketer’s business. Establishing this cornerstone is not accomplished overnight, and is not made possible by simply placing banners/links on a website and then wait, although links and banners are part of the overall affiliate marketing scenario.

First things first

Individuals who aspire to be affiliate marketers must first determine what kind of merchants (companies that own products which affiliates market and sell) they want to work with from a product-to-website compatibility standpoint; and they must also do the necessary research on a company’s credibility, reputation and commission payout history. Once these two steps have been completed, first-time affiliates can then start thinking about links, banners, buttons, badges and such as well as how they fit in with the design and theme of their websites.

Choosing banners

With most affiliate programs, affiliates are offered a variety of banners to display on their websites; but very few of them will be effective if those banners are not compatible with a site’s content, or if their placement takes away from the sites appeal. The problems with most banners are their size in the sense that if a banner that is overly large (in pixels and kilobytes or kb), it will take a long time to implement (render) and use. Therefore, it is recommended that affiliates use banners that are no more than 15kb in size.

When you, as an affiliate, select any kind of graphical advertising, you should try and keep the theme of your website in mind; because even though graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch the eye of website visitors, they should not be so overbearing that everything else on the page is completely ignored. On the contrary, banners should be placed on website in a way that their presence is complimentary to the site’s design, format and content.

Pop-ups, pop-unders and text link ads

Many eCommerce companies that takes on the role of affiliate merchants now give their affiliates the opportunity to use pop up or pop under ads which, according to popular opinion, are not the way to go; because these types of ads have been known to annoy visitors, and therefore are normally closed before they even have the chance to load. However, if you must use one or the other of these ads, you should opt for pop-unders which only display once per visit, and usually after the visitor finishes his/her visit.

One of the most successful and popular methods of advertising among affiliates is text link ads, because they are easy on bandwidth; they don’t use a lot of space; and they can easily be implemented into most types of page layouts. Good text links provide some information as to why your visitor should investigate some of the offers being made from your website.

Email advertising

The direct promotion via email has really taken off over the last several years, although it has brought tons of spam with it, and was almost entirely responsible for the now famous Can-Spam Act of 2003; so if you plan to use email as a major part of your advertising campaign in promoting your affiliate products, make sure to stand behind what you sell, and make yourself available to answer any questions.

Keep in mind also that many email service providers, including Hotmail (by Microsoft), Yahoo! and Comcast, among others, have installed spam blockers and other software to prevent your marketing emails from getting through to their intended recipient.

Patience

If you feel confident that your website can generate great sales for certain companyies, you should contact them to negotiate an arrangement; but if they don’t seem too enthused to begin with, you should remain patient as companies are approaced every day with affiliates looking to make better deals. The reality remains that most affiliates can’t deliver what they promise, and companies are aware of this fact.

You should always keep in mind that most forms of advertising will take time no matter what methods you plan to use, so devote some time and a lot of thought before you make any type of decision. Although something might not happen overnight, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen because some things take more time to develop than others; and if you want to get the best out of your efforts, time and resources devoted to an affiliate marketing career, you’d probably be better off if you take your time and get it done the right way, whether it takes a few days or even weeks.

As a token of our appreciation the free ebook titled, Storytelling Marketing can be yours if you have any interest in the art of storytelling. All you have to do is download it here, enjoy the reading and learn how storytelling can be a powerful ally in any business or marketing pursuit!