I don’t know everything and if I have learned one thing about doing business on the Internet it is that the more you learn the more you don’t know. However, I have been doing business on the Internet since 1999 and I’ve managed to carve out a successful enterprise for myself with several profit streams. The largest percentage of my marketing and promotional efforts has been conducted through one simple method-Ezine Advertising.
These are the 8 important lessons I’ve learned regarding Ezine Advertising and Marketing Success:

A common mistake many advertisers make is to attempt to do too much, or rather sell too much, in one ad. Sure you have lots of great products but you can’t sell them all in a few lines-at least not individually.  Instead focus on the benefit your customer can achieve from all your products and promote that! People are much more likely to click on a link that BENEFITS them than a link that promises to sell them something.

For example, “Help your child reach their maximum potential” instead of “Try our many reading, writing, math, shapes and colors programs”

More importantly, tell the customer “what your product or service is going to do for him.”

It is important that you identify your Unique Selling Proposition before you begin your advertising program. This will determine which Ezines (or markets) you target as well as what you should include in your ad copy. Who will be interested in your product and why? What benefits does your product offer them?

Don’t go for the sale in your ad! You are at a disadvantage because you can’t list all your products’ wonderful benefits in the space allowed. Also, there is only a small percentage of any Ezine audience that is ready to buy your product at the exact moment they view your ad. Yes, maybe they should be, but most people today live in the moment and if this isn’t the time they want to buy then they aren’t going to buy, end of story.

But it doesn’t have to be the end of the story.  If you go for the soft sell approach your target consumer is much more likely to click on your link and then you’ve got the chance to go for the hard sell-again and again!

Here’s an example. I’m selling a product called the Preschool Prep Power Pack. It’s an educational CD for preschoolers. Now I could go for the hard sell in my promotion and I would make some sales but a lot of people who really might be interested won’t even look at my site and product. However, I’ve chose to go the soft sell approach. Instead of selling my product in my ads, my ads offer two FREE items. I offer a free newsletter (Preschoolers Learn More) offering tips about preparing preschoolers for kindergarten. This is my target market for my product. The folks who subscribe also receive a free ABC-123 coloring book. Why wouldn’t the parent of a preschooler subscribe, right?

But what’s in it for me as a business person? A lot! Think about it. I now have the freely offered contact information for my target market. Now I can regularly email them information about my product. I’m confident they will buy eventually because my product provides a solution to something that concerns them-or they wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place!

Another common mistake is not giving your ad campaign enough time to work.

Studies show it takes prospects an average of seven exposures to your promotion before they take the bait. Even after they have clicked through to your site visitors may need to visit your site as many as three times before they buy from you. So make sure you keep that offer in front of them. That means it may well pay to take the long-term package versus a one-shot ad.

People run through their emails rapidly and delete things they wish they hadn’t. Make their wish come true! Give them a second, third, fourth chance. The formula is–when you’re sick and tired of it, the public is just beginning to hear it.

Just because you’ve bought ad space doesn’t mean you have to utilize every pixel or character-space. Short, punchy lines that do not use up every available space are more effective.  Think about the reader scanning down the page or screen. What will catch their eye and make them stop scanning and actually read?  White space is your friend so don’t squander it. Use it to set off your important message.

Make sure you apply the same principal to your urls and e-mail addresses as well. Nothing can make an ad look more cluttered than giant web addresses with a complicated string of numbers and letters. If you have to use an address like that (perhaps for your affiliate code, for example) then it might be wise to use a redirect. There are numerous free services out there (http://snipurl.com for exmple) although perhaps it might be a good idea to use a page from your own web site with a redirect programmed in

USE YOUR HEAD

Your headline is the most important part of your ad. This is usually the line that determines whether the skimming reader will stop or skip ahead.

Some of the proven headline formulas include:

1. Ask the reader a question: “Are you worried about filing your
tax return this year?”
2. Tell the reader how to do something: “How to buy a
car without getting a lemon.”
3. Provide a testimonial: “Big Al saved me $200 last month. Thanks, Cindy Lou from Paducah, Kentucky.”
4. Make a command. Turn your most important benefit into a commanding
headline. “Stop rushing through life.” “Make more money this month.” “Feel better about yourself.”
5. Important news makes a good headline. “Max Electronics just went international!”
6. Start the clock: “Buyers who act before midnight Tuesday will save an extra $50!”
7. Give the reader something free: “Free whatsit for the first 100 visitors!”

DON’T FORGET TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO!

It sounds almost ridiculous, but simply giving clear, specific directions about what you want the reader to do can increase the response to your ads.

Click here to find out more: http://whatsit.com

Subscribe by emailing subscribe@whatsit.com

Visit http://whatsit.com today to save!

SET YOUR BUDGET

One of the most difficult things to decide for any business person is how much money to spend on promotion. There really is one simple way to determine the answer. How much is a customer worth to you? That tells you a great deal about how much you can afford to spend on advertising.

The simple formula to calculate the net worth of a visitor is: Net Profit divided by Conversion Rate.

First, what is your net profit on an average sale?  Let’s say $10 to make it easy. (Hey, I’m an English professor, I need to keep it simple!)

Then consider what your conversion rate is for visitors to become customers.  Let’s say one visitor out of 50 becomes a customer. (This makes your conversion rate 50 as you need 50 customers to make a sale)

With this example, a visitor is worth $0.50 to you. ($10 divided by 50)

So if you spend $100 on an advertising campaign that draws in 1000 visitors then you made $400 on that campaign.

SET REALISTIC GOALS

This issue is really about control. Yes, if you could control things that you would have a high sell through but that isn’t always going to happen. In fact, for most advertisers that isn’t going to happen. However, if your goal is to capture customers then you are much more likely to match your goal or even exceed it. And in the end a customer is worth a lot more to you than a sale because a customer can represent many sales over years to come-sales that were fairly easy to achieve.

As frustrating as it may be, advertising is usually about long-term versus short-term benefits.  Your ad simply serves as a lure to draw people into your site or long-term promotion. Once you’ve pulled them in then you need to sell them. So it is not really fair to judge an ad campaign on simple sales.

The success of an ad campaign should be measured by one or two elements only-first, how many people followed up on your offer (click-through rate) and second, how many of those visitors were you able to convert into customers (conversion rate).

Over time you will be able to judge where the weak link in your chain of customer creation exists and work to fix it.

Low click-through rate? Then it is probably your offer. You are not giving readers enough incentive to follow through. What is in it for them to click on your offer? Remember you are selling benefits!

Low conversion rate? Then perhaps you are not attracting the right sort of visitor. Target your incentive (the free offer, for example) to match your target audience.

Here are 3 ideas you can use for your own sites, or use as inspiration to get you thinking a little outside of the box:

– Build an Opt in Email List by Creating a Private Members Only Site or Section –

Create a private web site and have people sign up to get free, immediate access. For example, you could say, “Subscribe to our free e-zine and get free access to our private membership web site!” You can choose to have them receive a username and password every time they want to login, or you can just provide a link to the site in your welcome email.

Your private members only site can be as big or as small as you want. Some of the things you can include inside are: reports, software, articles, e books, etc. Inside the site, you can advertise your affiliate programs, as well. And you can follow-up to let them know about updates, new products they might be interested in, the latest news in your industry, etc.

– Build an Optin Email List By Giving Subscribers a Free, Tangible Gift –

Instead of offering a free e book (or a whole package of them) like most everybody else, promise to give your visitors something they can hold in their hands if they give you their contact information.

For example, you could say “Subscribe today and get our new report mailed to you via First Class.” You could print out your report on standard 8 x 11 sheets of paper, fold it up, put it inside an envelope, and mail it off.

Or you can offer a tips booklet and mail it to new subscribers. Or you can create your own CD full of information targeted toward your market and mail that. Or if you have a wholesale supply of a product of interest to your subscribers, then you can send one to each new subscriber. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Follow-up possibilities include: articles (your own or written by others), tips you pick up, news in your niche, reviews of products or other interested, related websites, etc.

– Build an Opt in Email List Through a Contest or Sweepstakes –

Hold a free contest or sweepstakes at your website where they must give their contact information, including their email address, to enter. Make the prize something that your niche market will be interested in. Otherwise, they’ll never want to enter.

If you already have an ezine up and running, you could offer free automatic entry for new subscribers. For example, you could say, “Subscribe to our free newsletter and get automatic entry into our contest.” You’ll also want to retroactively include current subscribers.

You can announce the winner(s) at the end, as well as send any new contest announcements or product announcements. Or you can make this an ongoing contest, where you give away the same thing to one (or more) lucky people every month. That way you’ll entice many subscribers to stay on your list.

You can find niche products to give away through wholesalers or dropshippers. Or you can create it yourself. One of my favorite ways to do this is create a CD-Rom with a guide or report (or sometimes several) that my niche market will find interesting.

Once again, you can follow-up with tips, articles, news, new product announcements, or just an announcement of each monthly winner(s).

Hopefully, now I’ve inspired you to take some action or encouraged ideas of your own with these tips. Any idea, the more popular it gets, requires you to think outside the box every now and then in order to be effective. Building an optin email list is no different. And with newsletters and ezines saturating the Internet day by day, you need to offer something a little different to make them want to sign up to yours. Or you’ll just end up getting left behind.

Normally, articles are submitted to websites, article banks, directories, and sometimes used with ezines as well.  There are many uses for articles, as they are one of the best ways to promote products and services online.  Although you can find many different uses for articles, one of the best is with autoresponder.  If you combine informational articles with an autoresponder, you’ll get results that you can be proud of.  Autoresponders are very popular these days – although few think to use them in combination with articles.

You can do this by setting up each one of your articles with your autoresponder.  You should ensure that each article has its own address, meaning that you’ll need to use an autoresponder that allows you to it.  Once you have an autoresponder that allows you to do this, you should make a master list of every article you have, putting the address of the autoresponder beside of the article title.  If you prefer, you can also add a description of the article to your master list.

If you have a lot of articles, keeping up with them can be a tedious task.  Those who have a lot of products, normally have hundreds of thousands of articles.  If you sell articles, you probably have more than you can count.  All over the Internet, people are looking for articles.  One great source we found for PLR articles is www.articlewholesaler.com on the web. Articles contain information, information that can solve problems or describes products.  Each and every day on the Internet, millions of people around the world search for information.  This information that they search for, is normally in the form of articles.

If you were to advertise all of articles one by one, it would take you quite a bit of time.  If you have hundreds to show, it can take you weeks – even months.  Through the use of autoresponder, you can save a lot of time.  Showing off one address with one article won’t take you long at all, as the autoresponder will do a majority of the work.  All you have to do is put the link on your website, or add it to your preset messages when you send out emails.  Autoresponders can really get your articles and information out there, all you have to do is give them a try.