Building Your Opt-in List with eBay
One Internet Marketing wise saying is, the money is in the list. This reason is important in growing your list rapidly. In reality, your list building should be a never-ending business project, which is ongoing. Otherwise you may encounter a wearing away of your list by loosing subscribers. You can build your list in many different ways.
For instance blogging, pay per click advertising and article marketing are all good methods of building an effective marketing list. These methods are not included in this article, however. Rather this article revolves around inexpensively using eBay as the resource to tap into while building your list. Ebay has an enormous potential for attracting traffic, with nearly 8 million visitors daily while supporting 200 million registered users, by using eBay to grow your list you will be able to attract those who are interested in joining your list.
Ebay offers two different methods in which to grow your list. With the first you create and sell ebooks or small reports in the buy it now auction format. You can set a minimum price and sell multiple items at $.99 each; therefore, you are essentially giving away these particular ebooks and small reports, which provide useful information to your buyers. While creating these small reports or ebooks be sure to display links to your squeeze page of your list. When creating these reports, remember they should be informative, yet leave the reader wanting more. If done in a pleasing manner, they will sign up for your list.
When writing your small reports or ebooks, be sure to mention that the buyer can give away these documents however, they cannot alter them in any way, and this may result in more signups in the end. Remember, you are not really trying to make a great deal of money with these reports; rather you are growing your marketing list.
Since the insertion and selling fees on eBay are relatively low, this can be a very cost effective way to get sign ups to your list and if you sell enough reports or ebooks, you may turn a small profit while simultaneously growing your list. You can also use the classified ad format on eBay. Many who use eBay; often overlook this type of ad format; however, it is quite simple and economically sound when growing your list.
The set up for a classified ad is set up much like a standard auction. An ad will run for thirty days rather than three, seven and ten days. Of course, the title is subject to the search engine of eBay as are all their auctions. It is essential to optimize your ad title. HTML is welcome here, so you can paste the code for your squeeze page, which contains the opt-in subscriber form in your advertisement. A classified ad cares an insertion fee of $9.95 for 30 days.
You can choose a Pro Pack when offering your classified ad, it costs a bit more, but equals out to around a dollar a day in advertisement. Purchasing a 7 day, Pro Pack comes to around four dollars per day. Making use of the classified ad format is a wallet friendly method to use when growing your list. No doubt, there are other eBay features to use when growing a list, however, these methods are much more cost effective than buying leads or pay per click advertising, while bringing in a small profit, at least enough to cover any eBay fees you may encounter while using eBay as a tool to grow your list.
Discover Kevin Sinclair’s system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business. http://net-mlm-profits.com/
Tips For Writing International Business Articles
Writing international business articles for profit presents a different kind of challenge, no matter how many years of writing you have under your belt. Greater emphasis is placed on effective communication in international business articles that embrace all business matters from local market to international trade.
Moreover, writers face a whole new element that only comes with writing for cross-border trades that is, their articles must be flexible since not everyone speaks the same language.
The Rules
The same old rules in writing apply when you write international business articles:
* Be concise. Use short sentences as much as possible.
* Do not use long words. Instead, use shorter words that are easier to understand.
* One paragraph focuses on one idea. Short paragraphs are suggested if your international business articles are for online publishing.
* Maintain formality. Avoid slang, jargon, cliches, and other figures of speech.
* Be careful with your punctuation, spelling, and grammatical errors.
* In line with conciseness, be specific. It is helpful to use concrete examples in order to illustrate a point.
* Provide a summary.
* Check your own writing.
Be Persuasive, Effect Positive Change
Every international business article has this goal in mind: to effect positive change. To achieve this, the writer must be able to persuade the recipient of the message with information that is focused and comprehensive. Thus, writing these types of articles requires that you must have a sound understanding of the subject matter and its impact on the reader.
Articles must be so written that their main ideas are communicated early and leave no doubt as to what action the reader must take after finishing it.
Understand the Reader, Personalize
In order to better reach the targeted readers with your articles, you need to understand them first. Personalization of articles will ensure that the information they contain are highly relevant to your target. Research, therefore, comes into play, to the extent that you know them well enough to be able to tailor your international business articles to meet their specific needs.
Anticipate reaction. Use tone and language that is appropriate to your reader.
Be Logical, Arrange Ideas
Professionalism in articles is a must. And the best way to achieve a certain level of professionalism in your write-ups is to arrange your ideas in the most logical way possible. Not only will logical arrangement project professionalism, it would also play an instrumental part in how well you achieve the objectives of the international business articles.
Arrange your articles in such a way that the main point can be easily obtained. Any additional content must logically follow this main idea. Ordering ideas by importance is an effective way of achieving logical arrangement.
T J Madigan has been established in online business since 1998 and is director of a number of successful online projects one of which is http://www.articles.net.au your best source for FREE articles and information.
How To Create An HTML Newsletter
OK So you’ve decided it’s time to send an HTML newsletter to your email list but you’re not quite sure where to start? No Problem, we’ve all been there. I tried and tested many times before I created my first successful html newsletter.
Creating an HTML Newsletter is very similar to creating a webpage, with some minor twists on the old rules.
Now if you already know how to create a webpage then you won’t have any problems. But if you’re not sure, then you can always use a WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver. Or you can skip all those steps and just download a newsletter template, and add your text.
The only real difference between a newsletter and a regular webpage is how it’s designed and how its sent.
Let’s Get Started.
1) Remove everything before the open (body) tag, and everything after the close (/body) tag. Then get rid of the body tags themselves. There should be (html) tag, (head) tag, (title) tag, (metatags), and no css stylesheets. The only remaining html code will be what you originally found BETWEEN your open (body) (/body) and close body tags – Tables, images, text, links etx.
2) No more javascripts – Email providers don’t allow javascript in their email and they will disable it. So if you have any javascript within your newsletter then get rid of it.
3) No Flash, No DHTML, No Web Forms – Most if not all of time they will not work so your newsletter will be better off if you don’t include them.
4) No more ads – Actually you can have ads, but just not the popular Google Adsense Ads. Google’s Adsense uses javascript and javascript won’t work in the newsletter. You can however find link exchanges, or other advertisers that use plain links for their ads, and include those in your newsletter. These ads, banners, and text links will work just fine.
5) No More CSS – Often designers will use CSS for a webpage’s layout, but in the case of an html newsletter it would be better to use tables, instead of writing lines and lines of inline css code. You can set padding, background color, and lots of other table properties, just as you can with CSS. Remember keep it simple.
6) If you must use CSS then get inline – Since you can’t import style sheets to style and format your html content you will need to use inline CSS which includes all of the css properties in line. EX: style=”background: white; color: black;”
7) Images – When adding images on a webpage we would normally use urls such as image1.jpg, but with a newsletter you’ll have to enter the complete or the absolute url.
Tip: Make sure to set your images’ border to 0 so that it will show up seamlessly inside your newsletter.
8) The first link in the email should be a link to the online version of your html newsletter. Even if you have option for html or text newsletter, it’s a good idea to include a link to your online version at the top of the newsletter.
9) Include an unsubscribe / remove me link at the end of your email, and text for compliance with canspam laws. If you don’t have an unsubscribe button then your newsletter could be seen as spam and you don’t want your subscribers thinking they have no way to unsubscribe. If you have more then one newsletter then include a link such as Manage my subscription or a link that takes them directly to their online account. Placing this link will allow your users access to their account and allow them to manage their subscriptions. Who knows maybe they’ll subscribe to more newsletters.
10) Test, test, and retest on major email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail). You may notice that with that the new MSN Windows Live Mail Beta the text in your newsletters will be centered. Don’t rely on defaults to left align your text, use the left align button on your editor to align them when needed.
During my previous newsletter tests some of the special characters in my newsletter rendered oddly in Yahoo, so make sure to find the character codes for those special characters, and then paste them directly into your html.
For ex: this ‘ apostrophe will turn into ' This will allow the text to display properly. For more character codes scroll all the way down or google “Special Character Codes”
11) Before you send your email make sure to set the email’s content-type as HTML, so that it can display as an Html newsletter, or it will just show up as plain HTML code.
12) Get Online – Before you get started make sure to upload those pictures and your original HTML newsletter to your hosting account so that your subscribers can visit your newsletter online.
That’s it. Happy HTML emailing!
Sam runs www.FreeNewsletterTemplate.net – A Website filled with tools and information from email marketing to email list building. Try out their FREE Html Newsletter Tester before you send your next newsletter at http://www.freenewslettertemplate.net/Test_Your_Newsletter.cfm
PR5 in 12 Weeks-Diary of a Beginner
I hope the title grabbed your attention. This is a true story, but to get the sceptics from clicking off or deleting this article, I will start with some provable facts that you can verify at the click of the mouse.
The website I own with my wife is called amlaspain. It is a Spanish property portal website for real estate agents in Spain. The launch date is stated on the homepage. As our first website experiment we had planned the marketing angles, designs etc for about a year leading up to the launch, but it was only when we were ready to go with a viable database that I had time to turn my attention to SEO, (Search Engine Optimization)…that’s for the beginners who like me back then, had to find out what it meant!
The Diary comes in twelve parts. A week by week, blow by blow account if you will, of how I delved through the articles on SEO, the differing viewpoints, the pitfalls and tricks of unscrupulous webmasters who try to trick you into providing them with a one-way link to THEIR website, whilst your link back floats around in ‘no cache’ land. This is the story of how we achieved a PR5 in 12 weeks. Hopefully our insight will help you do the same.
Week 1
In The Beginning…there was a website.
I suppose I am skipping a large portion of this tale for the dramatic effect of a 12 week route to PR5. As mentioned, we had spent nearly a year with our designers molding the website into the product it became. This process, need not take as long as we took, still has a part to play in the overall scheme of things. If your website isn’t designed properly for the search engines to crawl, then my tale would have ended in woe, like so many others. Making sure your designer is SEO savvy and not just a creator of ‘technology blonde’ websites is important because it means that you don’t have to worry about the way your pages are coded and one less worry for someone beginning in this business is most definitely a benefit. (Forgive the sexist quip ‘technology blonde website’. It arose from a study of Spanish realtor’s websites. In a large number of cases these sites proved to be ‘pretty to look at’, ‘expensive to run’ but didn’t contribute!-Unfortunately my sense of humor got the better of me and the phrase was born.)
So we start with a website. I will comment further on content and search Engine philosophy as we go but as we entered week 1 these thoughts hadn’t even entered the ‘gleam in the eye’ stage.
Week 1 was a case of using the net and searching for answers. Blogs, articles, anything I could find regarding SEO and more importantly Google SEO.
Oh no I hear you cry, not another googlite..
Well, love or hate them, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that if you are attempting to make money from a website business, then 60% + of your potential client base is searching for your product or service on Google. Don’t by any means forget the rest, just concentrate on Google. Crack Google and the rest will fall into place. Well, this whole article is about cracking Google to get to a PR5, so if you have read this far I can assume you already agree with me!
So what did I actually achieve that first week.
Well I did three things that you really need to get out of the way early. I submitted my site to the major search engines and whilst doing so came across the Yahoo Directory. Its importance at the time didn’t register but it was a free submission so I did it anyway. It was later I would discover, although some will argue the point with you, that along with a submission to The Open Directory dmoz.org (also important) that these two submission are highly important on the road to your PR5.
Probably because they are manually edited directories, they take up to 12 weeks and more for your website to be added. So get it in early.
If you can afford it, Yahoo Directory will speed up the process to a week. The cost is 299 dollars.
I have to say I got impatient and in week 3 paid for the submission. Whether this was a factor in the eventual PR rank we achieved I will leave to you to decide.
Next week…
Spanish property or 3 bed villa in benidorm? Keywords and content.
Neil Ebsworth is co-founder of http://www.amlaspain.com , a Spanish property portal for the Real Estate industry in Spain.