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How Email Lists Can Lead To Larger Online Incomes

by: Stuart Pearce
Communicating with customers is the best way to persuade them to return to your web site and make a purchase. The easiest way to do this is to create an email list. With an email list, you can accomplish many things including: * Repeat sales – it is much easier to sell items to those who have already used them and are satisfied with them. * Trust and loyalty – many people are still unsure about purchasing items from the internet and only shop on select sites. Sending email and promotional alerts will persuade people to shop on your site. Once they have made a few purchases, you will have a customer for life. * Branding – branding your product using a logo or slogan will help people recognize your product easily. Including your company logo in all email sent will help spread the word and create brand awareness as people can forward your email on to others. * Newsletters – with an email list, you can send monthly newsletters that inform people about what is going on in your industry and your web site. Include sale items, new products, and other information that will entice customers to browse your site. As you can see, the benefits and possibilities you create for your company by building an email list are many. This is a resource that will continue to grow as more people visit your web site. Sign me up! The biggest obstacle when creating an email list is getting people to sign up. While you can't force people to sign up for email alerts, newsletters, and other items, you can persuade them in a variety of ways. * Landing pages – This is a page that can be used to introduce your web site. Many internet business owners use this page to expand their email lists. Simply ask for email addresses before taking visitors to your site and you will be amazed by how quickly people will sign up. You can choose to make this mandatory for entry to your web site or voluntary. Try both ways to see which is more successful. * Advertising the newsletter – By simply adding a sign-up box on the pages of your web site asking if people want to sign up for your newsletter, your email list will grow. Make sure your box is easy to find and easy to use. * Ordering pages – You can ask customers when they are placing an order if they want to receive alerts and other promotional items. Make it easy by having them click a box to sign-up. Since most companies need email addresses in case of order issues, all you need is the customer's permission to send promotional items to their email address. * Receipt confirmation pages – Ask a second time on the receipt confirmation email you send to customers. They may change their minds and want to sign-up. Always include an opt-out option so customers will be able to remove themselves from your email list at any time. Add this to the bottom or your email. Buying email lists If you are having difficulty building an email list, you can always enter into a joint venture with other internet business owners or affiliate marketers. By sharing some of the profits earned from list sharing, you will be able to reach even more people, who may turn into customers. Buying email lists outright from a list broker is another option. For a one time fee, you will have access to hundreds of potential customers. While most internet business owners build their own email lists over time, if you want to increase your sales quickly, investing in an email list may be the right decision for you. Even though there are many forms of marketing on the internet, communicating directly with customers is still the best way to make a sale. Creating an email list or purchasing one will allow you to showcase new items, persuade more people to visit your site, and increase the number of return customers, which can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
About The Author
Stuart Pearce is founder and owner of Style Product Developer Ltd. The company specialise in offering tools and resources to make the creation of a web based business easy and accessible to all. Begin your online career now, visit http://www.styleopportunities.com for details.

A Guide To Choosing The Right Hosting For Your Business

by: Dan Farrell
Don't believe for a minute that having a good web host isn't vital to your online business. If you get cheap web hosts, downtime can destroy your profits. You must do your research to find a web host carefully before making a contract with a hosting company There are many companies out there and they all have varying degrees of service. Before you make your decision in what hosting company your will use, look over these points: Reliable: Your host simply has to be reliable. You cannot afford to have downtime. You lose sales if people can't count on you. Really check out the web hosting company you want to use, reviewing their service completely before signing up. Ask what kind of servers they use and how reliable they are. If there are any testimonials look at them and see that they are authentic. Good customer support: If you have problems technically at any time, you need to know you have excellent support from your web hosting service. Monthly contract: Ensure you sign only on a monthly basis and not for 6 months or more, and that you won't be penalized for canceling at any time. Set up fee: Don't sign up if there is a set up fee. If your hosting service really appreciates your business with them, they won't charge you for set up. Backing up files: Does your new host back up files and how often? It is very important to back up files and good if your host does this as well. FTP access: This is a useful feature that some web hosts offer. This will allow you to upload your site whenever you have any changes or additions to your website. A good number of email addresses: Ensure the host you pick has enough email addresses for your business. You may need many or just a few, but your host should be able to supply you with what you need. Bandwidth (traffic) allowed: If your host has 5GB of bandwidth, this should work for you. You should know how much you will be provided with. Extra services: Look into what the price includes. Everything should be plain and laid out clearly as to what you will pay. Price: You may pay varying prices for your web host, like between $5.95-$19.95. You should research the services offered compared to the price, which can be between $5.95-$19.95. It isn't always a bad sign to only be charged a low fee. It depends what you need. Cpanel: is a useful feature, and simple to use. This will let you manage your web hosting from one place and has features like web stats and web mail. Make sure your host has a fast connection: Make sure you will have a host with a fast connection or your visitors who only have dial-up will have trouble. When your visitors only have dial up they will still have better speed if your host has fast connecting powers. This will make a lot of difference to the loading time of your site. Knowing these points will enable you to know the best web hosting company for you.
About The Author
Dan Farrell has a newsletter, Build An eBusiness On A Shoestring. To sign up with free bonuses, go to: Web Hosts (http://build-an-ebusiness-on-a-shoestring.com)

How To Find Hot Niche Markets

by: Dan Farrell
Working out what your niche market will be to start your home business is something that can elicit much excitement. This is when you can put all those great ideas you have had for your business into a plan of action. Give yourself a number of options to work over. Some will be great and some won't fit. Get more than one so you always have a back up when you start a home business. Look to 3 sources for ideas: * A hobby you love: You won't find many hobbies from which you can't build a business. And since you enjoy doing it, it won't be tedious to "go to work" every day. When you pick something for your business that you sincerely like, you will have fun at doing it. * Your experiences: In life we go though many experiences and you can use these to build a business. For example if you have raised children you can then put all your parenting experience together and start a business related to parenting. * Your talents: Everyone has one or more talents within them. Dig down and see what yours are. You can start a freelance business using your talents. Defining your niche market: 1. List out some ideas then put them in the order of what you like the best. 2. Go to the site listed here and put a key word into the overture suggestion tool box: This will bring up the amount of searches that have been done for your keyword and will represent demand. 3. If you search out that same key word on Google search engine http://google.com then you will see websites supplying that item and you will know how many competitors are out there that will be competing with you when you start a home business. 4. If you find a topic that is demanded in quantity but low in the suppliers, you will then make money. This should be your special market for which you do your niche marketing. You will make more money with a niche market as you will reduce and sometimes even eliminate competition. Go through your list of ideas until you narrow it down to about 5. Then go through them again and see which one will fit into a niche market. Establishing your USP: Once you have found the concept that fits into a specialized or niche market it is time to establish your USP, Unique, Selling, Point. This is when you will take your idea, and see how you will make your business uniquely different from your competitors. Often neglected, finding the USP is something that new business owners need to do to set their item above the competition. Online businesses are very competitive and you have to stay ahead of the game. There are two reasons you need to set yourself up as different from others: 1. Get ahead of your competitors 2. To clearly define to your potential customers why your product and service is better than your competitors. Deciding on your business model: Part of your business concept will not only be consolidating your ideas but also choosing your business model. There are a few that you can choose from: * Affiliate marketing-Getting involved with affiliate programs will target your efforts * Network marketing (MLM)- again this will target your market and idea. * Marketing-taking the product and selling it * Service- you should use your talents, which includes freelancing. You can see there are a number of things you will have to do to get your business concept into operation. But it's worth it to plan and take care in developing it. It will be your foundation, after all.
About The Author
Dan Farrell has a newsletter, Build An eBusiness On A Shoestring. To sign up with free bonuses, go to: Niche Market Ideas (http://build-an-ebusiness-on-a-shoestring.com)

A Hard Look at PPC, Click Fraud and the Alternatives

by: Bill Platt
With the creation of the Overture and Google Adwords systems, many webmasters believed they had finally hit the mother lode. It was no longer necessary for small online businesses to invest large amounts of money into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to gain high search rankings in the natural search results. Even webmasters committed to SEO campaigns began to realize its fleeting nature. Given frequent search engine algorithm changes, optimizing a website was no guarantee that in 6 months or less it wouldn't be back to square one and page twenty of the search results. PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINE (PPCSE) PLACEMENT With the advent of the PPCSE model created by Overture, and followed by Google Adwords, webmasters felt like they had finally found the level playing field that everyone talks about. Hiring a SEO company was no longer necessary to crack the top search engine results. A Page One placement could be purchased and often for far less than the cost of a SEO company's services. Webmasters discovered that they could get traffic to their website for as little as one cent per click. Pay-per-click, however, has evolved over the last 5 years and not to the benefit of most webmasters. Although five cents is currently the average starting bid price at most major search engines, many sought after keyword terms can cost as much as $30 - $50 per click. Given the increasingly competitive nature of PPC advertising and spiralling costs, many small- to medium- sized businesses today might be better served hiring a good SEO company to search optimize their websites. WHO IS CLICKING YOUR PAY-PER-CLICK LINKS? There are four types of people who click on pay-per-click ads. Knowing who these people are helps explain why experts keep telling us that 20% to 25% of all clicks on PPC listings are "fraudulent clicks". Personality Type #1: True-Blue Prospects These are the people for whom you have placed your pay-per-click ads. They see your advertisement; they like what they see; and they click your link to see if you can actually serve their needs. Personality Type #2: Accidental Clickers Every once in a while, even my finger misfires, and I click an advertisement that I did not intend on clicking. My first thought is usually, "Oh no...", and my first action is to find the back button. I didn't mean to cost that person money by clicking his advertisement... but I did. It was an accident. Now, the advertiser has to pay for my mistake. That bites. Personality Type #3: Jealous Competitors I would like to think that all of my, and your, competitors are fine, upstanding people. And most of them are. But, there are some who are not, and they click on pay-per-click links just to be spiteful or just to cost their business rivals a few dollars. Believe it or not, a good percentage of "fraudulent clicks" are believed to be clicks perpetrated by people against their competitors. Personality Type #4: True-Blue Fraudsters Not that long ago pay-per-click providers realized that there was tremendous opportunity in offering small website owners a method for cashing in on their limited traffic. Today, a webmaster can go to any number of pay-per-click services, add a small piece of code to a webpage and start serving paid advertising the same day. Webmasters thus become revenue share partners with the PPC provider, splitting revenues with the PPC provider for each click. Ethical webmasters, of course, put the needs of their advertisers first and focus on putting eyeballs on their website so that visitors can click on the advertising links. But, the word "ethical" doesn't exist in the vocabulary of some webmasters. These are the "true-blue fraudsters" who believe in making "revenue at any cost... no matter who might be hurt by their actions." They devise schemes to have their own ads clicked in order to drive up their revenue share. These webmasters, although a minority, are responsible for the vast majority of fraudulent clicks. And, they are the same people that should be taken out behind the barn, for a good old-fashioned flogging --- one lashing for each stolen dollar would be fine with me. THE UNSEEN COSTS OF THE PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH GAME If the experts are correct in estimating that 25% of all clicks are fraudulent, then you are paying out 33% more than you should have to pay to get your business. If you are converting PPCSE clicks-to-sales at a rate of $20 per transaction, then you should be aware that your actual conversion rate for non-PPCSE advertising would cost you an average of $15 per transaction. By escaping the pay-per-click search engine model, you could in effect make an additional $5 per transaction by cutting the fraud out of your marketing budget. Personally, I would rather not pay the pay-per-click mafia the $5 a transaction that they are exacting against pay-per-click advertisers. WHERE MY ADVERTISING MONEY WORKS BEST I have always gained the best bang for my buck with pay-for-placement advertising. In a nutshell, I pay a monthly, quarterly or yearly fee to have my advertising seen on various websites. Banner advertising is always an option, but text links provide better click-through rates (CTR's). At any one time, you can find links to my websites on dozens of other websites. Here are a few examples of pay-for-placement, often referred to as "paid inclusion", advertising networks: ISEDN.org Network: ( http://www.ISEDN.org ) The Independent Search Engine and Directory Network (powered by ExactSeek.com) is comprised of more than 200 specialty search engines, search directories and article directories. Through their system, you can buy quarterly or yearly top ten exposure (http://www.exactseek.com/featured_listings.html) for specific keyword phrases which are then shown through the ISEDN's 200 plus member websites. Their network claims to show paid inclusion ads 150 million times per month. Pricing starts at $4 per month per keyword phrase and goes down according to the number of keyword phrases purchased. Quarterly and yearly rates for one keyword phrase are $12 and $36, respectively. BraveNet.com Home Page Featured Advertiser Listing: http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?zone_id=8181 4 BraveNet is the number one provider of free web tools in the world and through their AdBrite sales page you can purchase a 30 day text advertisement at the bottom of the Bravenet home page for $1500 or a 3 month advertisement for $3500. According to the Bravenet Media Kit ( http://www.bravenetmedianetwork.com/mediakit.php ), their network serves 500 million page views per month. ColdFront Network: ( http://www.coldfront.net/index.php/content/view/100/50/ ) ColdFront serves the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) communities. With 150,000 unique visits and 12 million page views per month, they provide real advertising value, if your target market happens to be in this area. Paid inclusion can be purchased for $250 to $350 per month. WHO LEFT THE BARN DOOR OPEN? We put locks and deadbolts on our doors. In some localities, we put bars on our windows. We keep our valuables in safes. We keep our cars locked when we are not in them. We are a nation obsessed with protecting our valuables. And yet, when we advertise our online businesses, we seem to be willing to let PPCSE providers steal 25% of our advertising budget? It boggles the mind. Personally, I am done with PPCSE companies until they can assure me that my advertising dollars are protected from click fraud. I have always relied on my own search engine optimization skills to strengthen my natural search results. And frankly, I am pretty good at it. And, to supplement my own SEO efforts and organic search result placement sucesses, or lack thereof, paid inclusion currently offers me the best value for my money.
About The Author
Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Article Distribution Service. Through his system, you can have your Free Reprint Articles sent to thousands of publishers and webmasters looking for good quality content. If you need someone to write articles for you, Bill's writers can create interesting articles on most any topic. If you would like to talk to Bill personally about his services, you can reach him from 9:30am to 6pm CST at: (405) 780-7745.

The Net's New Information Highway

by: Esther Smith
For more years than I care to admit, I have depended on either word-of-mouth, catchy ads or Search Engine results to draw me into a new program. I have stopped reading Testimonials altogether because his or her success (real or embellished) is no guarantee of my own – and that’s just common sense. I’m all about residual or leveraged income anyway and the only road for me. I no longer agree to sell someone’s product for twenty bucks and do it over again tomorrow and the next day. For the same amount of effort, I can get a leveraged program up and running with whatever is asked of me to qualify for on-going income with no further attention on my part. This is the only way to go. And once initiated and running on auto pilot, I look for a new money-stream. The Internet changes faster than the speed of thought, and so must our searches and marketing strategies. Yesterday’s “landing pages” are today’s “splash pages”. Yesterday we heard about a great opportunity from an Ezine ad or a Free Report… today we have new sources: Forums and Blogs. Advertising and promotional posts are not allowed in most Forums. There are special Forums for posting your Bizop, but I don’t think anyone reads these any more than antiquated FFA pages. But questions and answers do not violate this rule. So I look up Forums whose members are working from home or wish they were, and tune in on what they call “Hot Topics”. I choose three or four Forums and put the websites in my favorites so I can tune in daily and sort of eavesdrop on the hot topics. Often it goes like this: Act3 is asking if anyone has heard about XYZ program; good or bad. Gemeni responds because he is a member of that program. Then others begin to ask about it. They want to know if Gemeni has been paid yet? How long did it take to return his investment? Gemeni responds with replies giving factual data. BigSpender posts her reply by saying she joined under Gemeni and I begin to read her positive comments also. Act3 joined during my second week of eavesdropping on all of this, and the three of them formed a winning team. I have given you a short version, but enough to realize that this is a perfect avenue to find a new and promising program. Take what this Forum has offered and check out Scambusters and all other due diligence that you would do for any new opportunity. With everything on go – join and begin to spread the word the same way you heard about it. When you join Forums, you choose a “username” and post your sentence or two without making it appear like a blatant ad. However, they DO allow you to put your URL at the close of your post. Go to a Forum that has a “thread” for members who are interested in working from home. Start asking if anyone knows something about XYZ company, good or bad. Wait a day or two to see if anyone posts a reply. If nothing negative comes back, or no one has heard of XYZ, then you might post a new thread giving some of the details you have acquired “from other Forums”. It might go something like this: Hi everybody – bigbill here – in my last post I asked if anyone could tell me about XYZ company and since I didn’t get any replies, I went to another Forum and posted the same question. I had several people tell me that XYZ’s cyclic target referral system has broken all the conservative boundaries of any other system. Can this be true? http://www.xyzcompany.com/osborn Notice I did include my URL, and I tried hard not to make my post sound like an advertisement or it would have been deleted by the moderator. Now, let’s look at blogging. Got a website? Got a product? Got a blog? Yes, Blog your program daily with a free blog that is RSS fed. There are no rules here. Set up a blog; set up two - or three and each day type a few paragraphs that show the benefits of your program. Be sure to RSS it and you will have no trouble getting new participants to look over your program. Play nice. 2007 Esther Smith
About The Author
Esther Smith writes and publishes Marketing Articles and is a firm believer in Leveraged Income. She invites others to view an excellent example at: http://www.diamondcashclub.com/pisces and study “the plan”. Invitation to Internet Success is her eBook, a pdf file and free to all. Download yours today. When the student is ready, the master will appear. http://thepermanentventure.com/InternetSuccess.pdf

How To Reach And Stay At The Top Of The First Page Of The Search Engines

by: Olga Fogleman
Everybody is familiar with search engines such as Google & Yahoo. Search Engines have radically changed the Internet. Radically! Over 50% of all consumer purchases of all business purchases are now pursued by searches. That’s what was said months ago and it is obviously going higher. So the majority of people Worldwide who now are on computers, the first place they go to is a Search Engine to find information, for what they are looking for. The Search Engine technology is now based and what Search Engine is trying to do as they are trying to put out in front of their searchers, the most current relative information possible. Google knows that what it can give you is exactly what you want to see and it’s relative to the current & it’s timely. And you are going to come back to Google over, over and over again. Why all those Bloggers out there for years have been making a lot of money and how they are promoting for free, and how they getting free publicity and generating MASS traffic to their sites? Because Bloggers took advantage of what Google had determined was the secret to the Internet right now. A WEB SITE THAT CHANGES A LOT GETS MORE RATING WITH A SEARCH ENGINE. So if your website is changing a lot and adjusting a lot and is current, Google will push you up on the rating. That means you are getting closer, closer and closer to the first page. And this is extremely important, particularly if you know how to what is called “games the system. What those Bloggers do – they “game the system”. And here is how they game the system: They went out and found the websites that have the absolute most change going on in a web site every single day, every single hour, every single minute, and every single second. They are powerful websites that have constant change, constant upgrading going on every minute of every day. Theses website are called “Article Hubs”. These web sites grow out of the whole change in how Search Engines work because people realized that the more websites change, the more powerful website are in searches, they realized there better be constant change. This is particularly true in Media sites & this is particularly true with Bloggers, because they began to figure out that if they have more constant change on their sites every day their Bloggs will lift on the searches. And I am going to show you one of those hugs sites. It is an extremely powerful site, 5000-7000 writers, authors, reporters & Bloggers place their articles in this site every day. Do you understand that that site is not just visited by tens of thousands of writers and author’s who have submitted articles everyday? Do you realize this site is visited by over a million unique visitors every single day? So these sites, these Article Hubs are incredibly potent. And when you put one article in one of these sites, guess what you start to do? You start to dominate keywords. And if you can get on the first page of any major keyword you have hit a Gold Mine! One article! One keyword! Traffic, traffic, traffic! There is one example “Religion and online marketing”, this article was written two years ago and guess where they are. Do you know when you put a keyword in worldwide there are over 35 millions places on the web that have this constant in here with Religion and Online Marketing? And this article is still having a first result, first page. That was written TWO YEARS AGO! He has been getting traffic every single day for almost 800 days for this article. One Article! One keyword! Traffic, Traffic, Traffic! And if you go page after page, after page you are going to see that article over and over and over … That Company continues to get traffic to this very day. That’s the power of Article Hubs. If you are looking for a home business opportunity please check this site! With this new marketing system, even beginners are successful. http://olga.YOURCHANCE2SUCCESS.COM
About The Author
Olga Fogleman I came to America from Russia 7 years ago. I have a great family: my lovely husband who is helping me on my projects and my son, who is a student at the University of Florida now. I am an accountant with a Bachelor Degree and many years of experience. I am also a successful eBay seller and Internet marketer so I quit my 9-5 job and I am enjoying my life now.