Rockstar Internet Marketing

Spam Free Email Marketing for Maximum Success

The best way to use e-mail to develop your online business is by creating a double opt-in list using autoresponders like Aweber or GetResponse. I use Aweber and highly recommend it. Autoresponders help you to manage your email lists and can be set up to send scheduled messages to segments of your list at whatever frequency you determine. List members receive messages according to a sequential order or you can broadcast messages to the entire list independent of timing.

This is great for long-time members of your  list who might be receiving their hundredth message about updates related to your products while someone who joins your list today receives your first welcome message for newcomers. Once you’ve written a message once and loaded it into the autoresponder, the  autoresponder takes care of maintaining contact with your subscribers sending your loaded messages automatically as often as you like while you work on other aspects of your business.

I’m using an my autoresponder to send a weekly email course on Internet Marketing to those who sign up for the course. My subscribers get a weekly tips email from me every week on whatever day they joined the list.

Double opt-in list

A double opt-in list means that a subscriber requests the mailing then receives a verification email from the mailing list telling him that he must follow certain steps to verify his intentions to subscribe. Double opt-in is literally a method of getting someone to agree twice to receive future emails from you. It eliminates the potential that someone would receive unsolicited, unwanted email (SPAM) by requiring that a subscriber give his verified consent. Double opt-in is becoming the standard process for permission-based email marketing.

Be cautious when you read about double opt-in mailing lists for ads or sale offers. There are a lot of ill-intended marketers that send out spam to millions of customers regardless of whether it’s a double opt in or not. You also want to be sure that before you subscribe to any list, use care to make certain that the list owner does not plan to sell your information to other marketers who may then use it unscrupulously or continue selling and sharing your email address with others. The whole intent of double opt-in is to prevent the receipt of email that  you don’t want.

Email advertising via Email Newsletters

In an earlier post, I discussed the use of email to market your business. Now that you understand the importance of double opt-in to eliminate SPAM, I’d like to further discuss some ways to promote your business via email. Everything that we do online should help to grow our enterprise. Most autoresponder applications allow you to feature special content in each mailing delivered to your group. You can usually use the header or footer in addition to special templates that offer other formatting options. You can also include your affiliate links in the body of the message. A weekly emailed newsletter to the subscribers on your list provides the opportunity to conduct subtle advertising campaigns in conjunction with your stellar content.

The key to any opt-in list is to provide nothing less than top notch products or recommendations. This is the only reason why most people will sign up to receive your information in the first place. You can provide valuable information through email newsletters, and by constantly providing your readers with valuable information, you can build up a relationship with people who would actually like to buy some of your products.

Email newsletters are a great way to build up your business. Encourage your subscribers to share the email message with other people and include a link to join your list in the body of the letter–you are always on the look out for new list subscribers.

Other Thoughts

Email marketing can be used to improve customer relations with your clients, to increase your responsiveness with prospects, and to promote your business to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Give some thought to using email marketing to develop new methods of communicating your value whether by newsletter, email courses, free articles and resources, tips lists or other methods where a message from you is regarded as an highly-regarded, electronic treat. Never, ever send broadcasted or individual email messages to people with whom you have no relation or logical connection. SPAM will not only irritate the recipient and if complaints are made to your internet service provider (ISP) or webhost, you can find yourself quickly on the losing end of terminated service with little recourse but to start over…completely. There is one cardinal rule in internet marketing: Do not spam. Ever.

Crank Up Your Internet Marketing with These Great Tools

While establishing a business, the first thing you need to consider upon is the quality of the tools you are using. There are a number of free tools out there available online and they can be excellent ways to enhance your online business.

Some of these tools are: -

1) Alexa toolbar: It’s a free link provider evaluation tool. For business purposes, its one of the most useful tools available on the Internet. Alexa is a toolbar that opens up on any web page whenever you go online. The most useful feature of this tool is the ‘site info’ option. When you click on this button, you will be able to see all the details of the website you are on, like the traffic ranking of that site, the contact information of the owner of that site, and other websites linked to that site.

If you are looking for link partnerships or joint ventures, this information provides you with high traffic websites in your industry. You click on a button on the toolbar for viewing the other popular or similar websites that might be good linking partners for your business.

This toolbar also contains a Google search option, which can help you to directly jump into the search engine.  The toolbar can be downloaded from alexa.com.

2) Google toolbar: One of the very important things you need to consider upon while building a successful business is to research your competitors and your target market. This process can be supported by the Google toolbar.

• Google Search: Search for your keywords within billions of web pages.
• Search news: Find news and stories relevant to your website, like ezines, blogs, etc. Keep up with latest developments in your market.
• Web Directory search: Search through Google’s directory for sites
• that match your search terms. Find out how many potential competitors you have in the market.
• Search Froogle: It’s a special search engine for online shoppers. All the new products launched, their prices, the services attached to them, everything can be seen in Froogle search.

3) Netmechanic: Net Mechanic is a tool kit resource that offers a number of free trials that are great for locating potential problems with your website fixes them immediately. It can repair any sort of problem – HTML code errors, browser display problems, broken links, etc.

4) Nvu: This is a free downloadable WYSIWUG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor, which is similar to front page. WYSIWUG means that you can see what your web page will look like as you are creating it. With the help of this software, you don’t need to spend money on HTML editors or web designing software to create your own website. You can create a very professional website without any knowledge of HTML and even if you are interested to create your website on your own, Nvu provides you with excellent HTML tutorials. I often use Nvu to customize squeeze pages that I purchase with private label rights from other internet marketers.

5) Word tracker: This software helps you to easily track those keywords that are being used most in the search engines. You can also find what your competitors are up to!

6) AnyBrowser: AnyBrowser offers you every tool that you will require for your website to be viewable in any web browser. For example, Site Viewer allows you see your web pages as surfers view them on multiple browsers. AnyBrowser will provide you with all the requirements of any web browser to make sure your website looks its best no matter what browser your visitors are using.

Give at least three of these tools a trial run and determine whether or not they provide value for you as you manage and promote your website and/or weblog.

Four Keys to Effective Email Marketing

One of the most important tools that you can use in your Internet marketing is electronic mail, better known as e-mail. It helps you to communicate with your visitors or customers easily, is extremely cost effective, and it is much more responsive than snail mail.

You have a wide variety of email programs to choose from online. Most programs work with a variety of internet service providers (ISPs). Free programs like G-mail offer a host of extra features that will save time and help you to easily organize your e-mail by filtering your messages into specific mailboxes. Some programs also allow you to use your own domain for your e-mail address to make  your business look even more professional.

Writing e-mail messages sounds pretty simple, but there are important aspects that need to be managed carefully.

1) Subject line: Grabbing your reader’s attention is a very important factor. Just because the visitor is your customer or a buyer doesn’t mean that he/she will open your message. They should be intrigued to open up your mail. You must be able to steal their attention. To steal attention, the subject of your e-mail, which is the most important part of your message, should be short, to the point, and should provide a summary or a preview as to what your message is all about.

2) Format your message: You’ll need to decide which format you would like to follow for emails. Your two main choices are between HTML or plain text formatting. Although there has been a lot of controversy on this, a text message is the better option. The reason for this is that not all your readers will be capable of viewing your e-mail messages in HTML format. But even then, if you want to go for HTML messages, the best way to accommodate all your readers is to create two versions and allow them to make the choice themselves. HTML is becoming more popular and offers a richer graphics experience for your readers.

3) Line length: Some e-mail programs do not have the feature of automatic text wrap. So, even if your message looks pretty good to you, it is very possible that your e-mail recipient may receive your message as one long sentence, which looks unpleasant. So, as you start writing your e-mail message, you should keep this in mind that your line length should be limited to under 65 characters per line.

4) Linking: When you place a web address in your messages, some e-mail programs automatically create live links with web addresses starting with ‘www.’. However, some e-mail programs are able to create live links only when the web address begins with ‘http://’. Therefore, you should always include the full URL beginning with http://.  When you are including an e-mail address within your e-mail message, you should always include ‘mailto:’ directly in front the e-mail addresses. This will enable most e-mail programs to create a live e-mail link.

Try to keep your web addresses short, so that the URL doesn’t get divided into two different lines, which may cause only a part of the web address to become a live link. Your goal is to make your links easily clickable so that your messages are an interactive experience that deliver results for you and your products.

As you become increasingly comfortable with email marketing, you may want to use an autoresponder to automate your email campaigns. Autoresponders allow you to build a list of email subscribers who receive your messages based on a schedule that you design. Once your schedule is set, your autoresponder stays in touch with your subscribers 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no further  action required from you unless you choose to send special messages from time to time. My personal favorite is Aweber. It’s what I use for my free and paid email courses and all my targeted customer lists. You can try it risk-free for 30 days. You’ll find it’s the autoresponder of choice for most serious internet marketers.

Iceman Baldy is Giving Away Internet Marketing Lessons!

For a limited time, Iceman Baldy (that’s me) is allowing anyone to sign up for his Ice Cold Lessons in Internet Marketing series at no cost–that’s $47 of a 52-part email course for FREE. Jump on it now while you can, because it’s a test I’m doing related to list building and I don’t intend to lose money on this deal for long. This course is a good money maker as a complete package, so those who stay for the entire series will have a nice reference package to read and revisit over and over to get the full benefit. True to my methods, you can be certain that the course will include other goodies from time to time just thrown in for good measure. Act fast before I wake up and wonder what I was thinking.